Africa's Ailing Giant: Chaos Reigns in Nigeria

Africa is not in fashion these days. Most Western governments pay it scant attention, and even though crises there periodically make it into world headlines, the continent invariably sinks back into oblivion. Although Western opinion has vacillated since the end of the Cold War between Afro-pessimism and Afro-optimism -- neither of which reflect reality very well -- the region has received neither the sustained analysis nor the political and economic commitment that other developing regions, from Asia to eastern Europe to Latin America, have enjoyed. Marginalized as the eternally dark continent, Africa has languished under Western ignorance and prejudice and Africans' own deep sense of helplessness.

The Clinton administration has made an uneven effort to change that. Despite the president's extensive tour of the continent in 1998 and his belated success in getting a watered-down trade liberalization bill through Congress earlier this year, his pleas to pay attention to Africa have fallen mostly on deaf ears. When the administration went so far as to declare aids a national security issue, three former State Department chiefs of Africa policy publicly disagreed.

Africans have hardly helped matters. The "new breed" of leaders heralded by Washington just a few short years ago as the stewards of an "African Renaissance" (Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea, and Paul Kagame of Rwanda) are today all embroiled in or have just emerged from senseless wars that stretched from the Red Sea to the Atlantic. This has given Westerners yet another excuse to throw up their hands and, as Clinton said on his recent tour, wonder, "What is to be done about Africa?"

The question is a vital one, for Africa does matter -- whether or not one believes that aids is a national security issue. Drugs and disease do not respect increasingly porous national borders and impoverished and alienated youths make willing converts to religious extremism or terrorism. Peace and stability in Africa is therefore very much in the West's own interest. Each new massacre in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, or elsewhere further weakens America's claim to lead the post-Cold War world. As numerous observers have recently argued, American power is at an all-time relative high, but its ability to lead is increasingly being questioned. Nowhere will the strength of its claim to moral leadership be more keenly judged than in its response to Africa.

Who better to detail American and European failings on the continent -- and the threats they pose to international stability -- than Karl Maier? A Yankee journalist long employed by British newspapers and the author of two respected books on Africa (Angola: Promises and Lies and Into the House of the Ancestors: Inside the New Africa, which details the rebirth of African civil society in the post-Cold War era), Maier has brought keen observation and a strong sense of narrative to the story of Nigeria's misery and resilience. In This House Has Fallen: Midnight in Nigeria, he has written a book that, like Nigeria itself, is at turns terrifying and uplifting. He relates familiar statistics on the country's angry, impoverished masses and raises the specter of a future Nigerian civil war, a horror that would dwarf the barbarous upheaval in Sierra Leone. In so doing, Maier makes it clear that the stakes are great -- not just for Nigeria, but for the continent.

JUDGMENT DAYS

Nigerians called it "a coup from heaven" when, a year ago, Olusegun Obasanjo was installed as the country's democratically chosen president after almost 15 years of corrupt military rule. Nigeria and the world had breathed a collective sigh of relief that the despotic years of Sani Abacha, who died of a heart attack in June 1998, had ended in a peaceful transition.

Now Obasanjo, already famous for being Nigeria's only military dictator to ever hand over power to an elected civilian, has the chance to guide his country from the depths of underdevelopment to sound economic ground. But first he will have to tame the endemic corruption that extends from the statehouse at Aso Rock to every corner of Nigerian society. Simultaneously, he will have to navigate Nigeria's treacherous and often bloody ethnic, religious, and regional rivalries.

Since gaining independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria has been buffeted by most of the ill winds known to humanity. Civil war, corruption, plague, starvation, natural disaster, greed, envy, sloth, ignorance, pestilence, and prejudice are all familiar visitors to the giant of Africa -- home to one of every six or seven of the continent's inhabitants (Nigeria's exact population is unknown).

It would hardly be surprising, then, if the release of Maier's new book were greeted with a resigned shrug from the public. But that would be unfortunate. The author does a laudable job of graphically illustrating the past and present divisions and missteps that have made Nigeria what it is today and threaten to unmake it tomorrow. Through interviews and brutally frank reportage, Maier shows that Nigeria could go either way under Obasanjo: down the path of real reform toward peace and prosperity, or in circles, maintaining the status quo and thereby risking civil war and violent disintegration.