The architect Frank Lloyd Wright once observed that if you put America on its side, Los Angeles would be the place where everything loose would fall out.
(Los Angeles is a place I’ve never been to, and I expect neither have you. But the idea of Los Angles seems so vivid through American movie and television culture that we all can feel we get the joke.)
Reflecting on my experiences as an observer of Nigeria’s 2003 elections, I am left wondering if the Niger Delta - somewhere I have been - might be the place where all the loose parts of 21st Africa would fall out if you shook it hard enough.
Everything good, bad and dislocated about the continent has been slowly gathering along the ledge at the bottom of West Africa that stretches from Togo and Benin to Cameroon.
There is huge wealth there, not only in terms of its oil and gas deposits, but more importantly the vast agricultural potential of some of the most fertile farmland anywhere in the world. (Nigeria’s Delta region is where the alluvial silt at the end of the Niger River gathers, so it’s incredibly rich in nitrates.) Much of this land is doing little more at present than gathering dust and a sheeny veneer of spilt oil.
The most striking thing about the Delta to me, as an outsider, is the frustration people feel at their lack of control over their land and their future.
Friends I made there seemed to spend their lives in limbo. Waiting to graduate from university (they would dutifully show up for classes but their tutors wouldn’t, because no one had paid them.) Waiting for a small loan to set up a market stall, to start a dress making business or to buy a new car to use as a taxi. Waiting for an oil company or a local politician to award some “clean up” contract, that would create a few jobs for a couple of months.
Other things people might immediately associate with Africa have also aggregated there: poverty, squalor, guns, gangs and corruption.
The energy concentrated in petroleum equates directly with a concentration of money and power in the hands of a small number of people. The guns and the gangs are in turn a direct product of the monopolisation of power by an unaccountable elite. A disaster has been waiting to happen in the Niger Delta for decades.
Given the outside world’s supine response, despite years of forewarning, you could easily mistake the Niger Delta for Zimbabwe. Or Darfur. Or any of the oil dictatorships in the region like Angola or Equatorial Guinea. (The ever-reliable ‘Onion’ saw it coming years ago, of course, in its usual wickedly acute way.)
It seems to me that Nigeria is different from these other failed, or failing - or at any rate fragile - states in one important respect: in 2003 I could sense a real determination for democracy to work, and a real possibility that it could.
Cynicism and acceptance of dictatorships, big and small, had not yet set in, and the optimism that many people felt after the end of the Abacha period was still evident. I saw rigged ballots and young men in gang colours armed with AK47s stealing boxes full of election materials. I also saw hundreds of people lined up to vote in small rural communities. They wanted an election and they took part in one. The results were faked, but the election was real.
This determination for public institutions in Nigeria to be made accountable to the people is still alive even if faith in democracy has dwindled. Importantly, it is alive where money and power are most concentrated: in the oil-producing states.
The harassment of the campaigner Anyakwee Nsirimovu – who has been active in pressing for greater transparency in the Rivers State budget - and the denunciation of Human Rights Watch’s ‘Chop Fine’ report by the State government, are signs of the current political elite’s sense of their vulnerability to pressure.
Democracy and the anti-corruption drive may have been co-opted for political ends, but they are also concepts that are alive in the hearts and minds of voters and taxpayers. That makes them real even if the current process is contrived.
