The brutality of the Nigerian government
Nigeria is a case study in what has come to be called the “resource curse.” Valuable raw materials are discovered in a country lacking robust institutional safeguards, and corruption follows.
SARS is one of the most brutal police forces in the world, and the people of Nigeria have repeatedly risen in rebellion in an effort to abolish SARS. The “End SARS” riots of 2020 were especially violent, and the violence of the SARS response was the kind of thing you only expect in the most brutal kind of dictatorship:
(Abuja) – Nigerian security forces have responded to overwhelmingly peaceful protests against police brutality with more violence and abuse.
Nationwide protests began on October 8, 2020, calling on the authorities to abolish an abusive police unit called the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). In response, the police have shot tear gas, water cannons, and live rounds at protesters, killing at least four people and wounding many others. Armed thugs have also disrupted protests and attacked protesters.
“People exercising their right to protest and calling for an end to police brutality are themselves being brutalized and harassed by those who should protect them,” said Anietie Ewang, Nigeria researcher at Human Rights Watch. “This underscores the importance of the protesters’ demands and the culture of impunity across the policing system, which is in dire need of reform.”
The government initially promised that SARS would be abolished, but a year later it was still there. Rape, torture, murder and massive amounts of theft — for awhile it was easy to find videos on Twitter in which you could see SARS police would accost citizens on the street, demand money, and then murder the people, whether they had money or not.
One year after peaceful #EndSARS protests ended in a brutal crackdown by Nigerian security forces in Abuja, Lagos and other parts of the country, no one has been brought to justice for the torture, violence, and killings of peaceful protesters, while reports of human rights violations by the police continue, Amnesty International said today.
An investigation by the organization found that Nigerian army and police killed at least 12 people on 20 October 2020 at Lekki toll gate and Alausa in Lagos. Amnesty International was able to establish that pro-government supporters instigated violence at many of the demonstrations, providing cover for the police to use lethal force against peaceful protesters. The organization also found that detained protesters were tortured and refused or denied immediate access to lawyers.
A year on, despite the gravity of these human rights violations, not a single member of the security forces has been prosecuted while judicial panels of inquiry set up to investigate abuses by officers have made little progress.
It’s worth noting that the divergence of interests between the ruler and ruled is now at least as wide as when Nigeria was under the boot heel of European imperial rule. This should make clear how much the international context has undermined any traditional notions of nationhood or self-rule. Nigeria is now independent, it broke free of Britain in 1960, but that independence has not brought the broad prosperity that the people had long assumed it would. In a globalized world, there is no freedom from the international context. Even a powerful nation such as Britain is trapped by circumstance — though it might want to get away from Europe, and pass a law to end it’s relationship with Europe, yet it will find that now and for at least the next 50 million years, that island will be sitting off the shores of Europe, and therefore will be affected by anything happening in Europe. While it is normal, as Doris Lessing said, for humans to rebel against their circumstances, those circumstances are still there, waiting to be dealt with. Mere nationhood doesn’t free a nation from circumstance. Poor nations, in particular, are shaped by the international context, and in the case of Nigeria, the outside money leads to epic corruption.
In my essay “Liberal democracy (not capitalism) is the only way to corral money to its best social purposes” I looked at the example of ancient Rome, and how it gave up on internal taxation and came to depend on the money that its generals could bring in from conquest, and how this torrent of outside money proved fatal to democracy in Rome. This can also be said of the modern “resource curse” that befalls a nation that has an abundance of oil — the torrent of outside money is fatal to responsive government.
In a true republic citizens pay taxes and then demand accountability regarding how the tax money is spent, and the government is forced to respond to those who put up the money that allows it to exist. But in a poor nation, the citizens have no money, so when oil is discovered, the government finds it can pay for everything using the oil money, but then the government realizes it does not need the people, does not need to listen to them, and can treat them as brutally as it likes. And this is the sad case of Nigeria.
I offer here a long excerpt from an excellent book from Sarah Chayes.
Thieves of State
Why Corruption Threatens Global Security
By Sarah Chayes, 2015
Page 122–123
Venality hardly stops at the police in Nigeria.
The first tipping point on the road to acute, systemic corruption, says former Global Fund for Peace president Pauline Baker, who lived there for decades, came in the 1980s. That was when the oil boom began. “There was military rule, meaning no accountability, and then free money from oil.”
Nigeria is a case study in what has come to be called the “resource curse.” Valuable raw materials are discovered in a country lacking robust institutional safeguards, and the “rents” these resources produce rupture any contract between rulers and ruled. Quality of life changes negligibly, or even negatively, for regular people, despite the bonanza. At roughly two and a half million barrels of crude per day, Nigeria is the world’s thirteenth–largest producer and the largest in Africa. (The United States imports some 40 percent of the country’s production.) But Nigerians’ life expectancy, educational achievement, and average income, taken together, is about the same as that of their resource–poor neighbors.
Official oil revenues are split between the federal government on the one hand, and the thirty–six state and more than seven hundred local government executives on the other. This downward distribution of national revenue contrasts with Afghanistan’s system, in which provincial governors receive almost no share of the national budget, but get carte balance to extract resources at their own level however they want.
Not all of Nigeria’s oil revenues make it into the official budget, though. On September 25, 2013, Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi wrote to President Goodluck Jonathan with “serious concerns” about the national oil company’s failure “to repatriate significant proportions of the proceeds of crude oil shipments.” In a carefully documented memo early the next year, Sanusi quantified that failure: over nineteen months, approximately $20 billion unaccounted for. “More than $5b. went for a kerosene subsidy, but there’s no allocation for that,” he charged to me later that year. “There are swaps of crude for refined product, but Nigeria is cheated in the swap.” On February 20, the wisely respected official was sacked.
This leakage of national wealth is typical, attests the MacArthur Foundation’s Kile Shettima. “There are always shortfalls in the federation accounts. It’s a permanent fight between the Finance Ministry and the Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation – where the real issue is. It’s a big cartel feeding off the backs of the people.”
In the view of a Western official in the capital, Abuja, Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan “has not been as clever as his predecessors. He and his circle have been taking too much oil money before it gets into the budget.” Another high–ranking Western diplomat remarks sardonically that the oil minister, Diezani Alison–Madueke, is “just doing her job – providing Jonathan with money.” An official at a different embassy, who monitors the oil producing south, dubs her “Jonathan’s ATM.”
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Indeed, such majors as Shell and Italy’s ENI began temporarily shutting down pipelines in 2013, wherever significant siphoning was detected. “The scale of these activities has reached unprecedented levels,” wrote Shell Nigeria chairman Mutiu Sunmonu in a company report, calling the theft “a parallel industry.”
Nigeria does not convert its own crude into consumer products, moreover. The country’s four refineries languish in disrepair. The government imports fuel from abroad and sells it at a subsidized rate – another opportunity for corrupt scams.
Given the unique opening that oil, like other types of mineral wealth, provides for centralizing production and capturing the resulting wealth, it is perhaps unsurprising that other segments of the Nigerian economy have been allowed to wither.
In a country where rains lash much of the territory for half the year and seeds need merely to be scattered to grow – the envy of a parched place like Afghanistan – the diversity and productivity of Nigeria’s agriculture have plummeted since the 1960s. At that time, it was an agricultural exporter; now it imports basic foodstuffs, its overall productivity barely higher than what it was a half century ago. And according to the Nigerian government’s own figures, public investment has been “exceptionally low,” even by African standards. Underinvestment in transportation infrastructure and power generation has also damaged the food industry.
Innovators in a sector that still absorbs most of the country’s manpower crave the least sign of official encouragement. The eyes of a taxi driver are in the capital, Abuja, who had graduated college in agriculture, lit up as he described the business he dreamed of founding: a closed–system farm, where he would produce high–quality meat for Abuja’s upscale hotels and restaurants, by planting soy for oil and feeding the nourishing stalks to the cattle. He had a plan all mapped out but could not obtain a loan at less than a crippling 26 percent interest rate.
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The result of this oil “monoculture” is a winner–take–all economy, in which unemployment and penury rise steadily, while political office guarantees a space at the Nigerian version of Tunisia’s feeding–trough state. The official salary of a senator tops one million U.S. dollars per year. With such fabulous sums in play, Nigerian politics has become a blood sport.
For in the view of most Nigerians and country experts, the second tipping point on Nigeria’s path to kleptocracy was – ironically – its conversion to civilian rule in 1999.
Competition can be gruesome. Just to be designated a political candidate costs money – some $10 million for a recent election for state governor, estimate local observers of Nigeria’s political economy. “Godfathers,” often former officials who amassed a corrupt fortune when in power, sponsor a client to run for office by covering the fee, on the expectation of rich dividends after a successful campaign.