Is Nigeria turning into a failed state?
By Masahudu Ankiilu Kunateh, Ghanadot

Accra, July 29, Ghanadot - Nigeria, the most populous country in West Africa has been in the news for some weeks. This is due to a protracted religious conflict between Muslims and Christians in the northern part of the country.

Today, Aljezeera Television and other international media organizations report that Nigerian troops are hunting for the remnants of Boko Haram, an Islamist group that went on a killing spree in the country's north.

The continuing offensive on Wednesday came after the army shelled a mosque and the home of Mohammed Yusuf, said to be the group's leader, in Maiduguri, the capital of northern Borno state.

"We are not sure whether he has been killed in the shelling or has managed to escape," a police officer said of Yusuf.

Boko Haram opposes western-style education and has said it wants to lead an armed insurrection and rid society of "immorality" and "infidelity".

About 140 people have been killed in three days of violence in Nigeria's Muslim-dominated north.

Umaru Yar'Adua, Nigeria's president, has vowed that the group will be hunted down and punished.

He said that the military operation currently under way would "contain them once and for all".

They will be dealt with squarely and forthwith," he said.

Before leaving on a trip to Brazil on Tuesday, Yar'Adua said that the situation was "under control".

But fresh fighting broke out in Maiduguri following the assault on the home of Yusuf.

Dozens of people took shelter from the bombardment in a local police station.

"It is the first time in my life that I hear this kind of mortar shelling," said one man, who had taken cover there, along with his wife and three daughters.

"I thought they targeted my house."

Boko Haram, which means "Western education is prohibited" in the local Hausa dialect, has called for the enforcement of sharia or Islamic law, across Africa's most populous nation.

But Nii Akuetteh, the founder of the Democracy and Conflict Research Institute, an African think-tank, told foreign media that, while religious clashes had occurred in the past in Nigeria, the recent clashes appeared to have little political motivation.

"Previously when you had religion rear its head in politics [in Nigeria] you had a clash between Christians mainly in the south and Muslims in the north.

"I think that one you have to talk of the political implications of that, but the most recent, frankly, it seems to me is nothing but religious extremism and violence."

Nigeria's 140 million people are nearly evenly divided between Christians, who dominate the south, and the primarily northern-based Muslims.

Islamic law was implemented in 12 northern states after Nigeria returned to civilian rule in 1999 following years of military rule.

Akuetteh also said that poverty, which has sparked conflict elsewhere in Nigeria, mainly in the oil-rich Niger delta, was not a contributing factor.

"I think religious politicisation of religion in Nigeria is separate and apart from the poverty that is there.

"I would look more to religious prejudice and extremists wanting to inject religion into politics rather than poverty per se."

The clashes began on Sunday in nearby Bauchi state, with fighters attacking police stations, before spilling over into Yobe. Officials said that 55 people were killed in both states.

Residents said fighters armed with machetes, knives, bows and arrows and home-made explosives, attacked police buildings and anyone resembling a police officer or government official in the city.

But most of the casualties appear to have been in Maiduguri, the northeastern city known as the birthplace and stronghold of the group.

The current conflicts in Nigeria compel people to describe the country as failed state. Also most of the indices of states proclaimed Nigeria as matter of urgency to join the league of failed nations club, headed by Zimbabwe.

This year’s Brookings Institution’s Index of state weakness ranks Nigeria 28 out of 141 developing countries. The report was co-authored by Susan Rice, President Obama’s top diplomat at the United Nations (UN).

The index places the self-styled “giant of Africa” in the honoured company of Somalia, Afghanistan and the Democratic of Congo.

Looking on the bright side, Nigeria gladly sits on the cusp for countries termed as “critically weak” as against the merely “weak states”.

However, if the Brookings Institution takes a kind view of Nigeria, the American Fund for Peace, a research body thinks otherwise.

In its 2008 index of failed states, Nigeria is only two short rungs away from being in the same category as Somalia and Zimbabwe.

Ironically, Nigeria has to look up the ladder at Sierra Leone and Liberia, two countries she shared no expense of life, limb and hard currency to bring out of civil wars to restore to democracy.

A Nigerian journalist based Ghana, told the Ghanadot that to speak of Nigeria as a failed state is, in a sense, to put the cart before the horse.

However, other Nigerians maintained that the country is plagued by corruption so endemic and monumental that is hard to state it from state policy.

Indeed, Nigeria, self-accolades, “Destination to Africa” lacks the capability or discipline to prevent threats to public safety and national integrity.

Furthermore, most institutions in Nigeria are feeble as a child and can not work. These forces the citizens to take the laws into their hands and do whatever that please them.

To add up, the inflammable Niger Delta, for long the booty of successive bands of political pirates and now also a seething swamp of untamable angst, points clearly to the dangerous frayed social fabric of a Nigeria that can become a failed state.

Ghanadot

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