Nigeria's Concern

State-building and the modernity challenge

The President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, has designated Nigeria a "country of particular concern" due to his assertion that Christians are being persecuted and killed for their faith in Nigeria. In his latest speech on the issue, he was visibly angry, agitated, and orange. He has threatened sanctions and military action, and according to the latest report by The NewYork Times, actual military plans are being drawn up. Frankly, a lot has been written and said since this episode frayed in the last few days. However, Feyi and Fola Fagbule (his co-author of their lovely book Formation: The Making of Nigeria from Jihad to Amalgamation) wrote a piece for The Telegraph that invites me to make a further comment.

The central argument made by Feyi and Fola is that the failure of the Nigerian state to provide justice for victims of abuses and criminality, especially violent ones, is at the root of the country's persistent struggles for peace and order. Importantly, they first provided some needed context of the current crisis, which has drawn America's ire, with one of its many tragic episodes from ten years ago:

In the early hours of Sunday, March 15 2015, a village in Nigeria’s middle belt state of Benue became the scene of unspeakable violence. The assault began at 4am, when most villagers were asleep. By dawn, dozens of men, women and children lay dead.

The perpetrators of this atrocity in Egba were Fulani herdsmen – the latest actors in an attritional conflict between itinerant cattle herders and settled farming communities, locked in bitter struggle over dwindling natural resources.

The timing was striking. The massacre occurred just two weeks before Nigeria’s presidential election, pitting Muhammadu Buhari – a Muslim northerner of Fulani extraction – against incumbent Goodluck Jonathan, a southern Christian. Buhari would win not only the presidency but also Benue state, where the attack had occurred mere days before voters went to the polls.

There is something sobering about this sequence. The attack features in the statistics now circulating globally as evidence of a genocide against Christians in northern and central Nigeria – a narrative that has captured the attention of Donald Trump, the US president. It has led him to designate Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern (CPC) and threaten military intervention. One can see why: the victims were almost certainly Christian, the perpetrators Muslim.

….. The decision of the majority in Benue, a largely Christian state, to vote overwhelmingly for a Muslim Fulani president just weeks after the slaughter can best be understood in this context – a desperate cry for help from people who want justice above all else.

This is a good corrective that can help us understand the recent history of how we got here. One of the major issues that helped Muhammadu Buhari become president in 2015 was the promise to deal with the rampant insecurity that plagued the country under his predecessor. Barely two months after he was sworn in as president, and on his first visit to the United States, Buhari was asked a routine question about security after giving a talk at the U.S Institute of Peace, to which he gave a characteristically incoherent answer, which vaguely asserted that those who did not vote for him cannot expect equal treatment. Thus began an ignoble start to an administration that was elected to deal with a crippling emergency. To Buhari's credit, most Nigerians got equal treatment of his varied dosage of poverty, misery, and death. The attacks became more frequent and brazen, the killings multiplied, and the theatre of disorder broadened. For eight years, Buhari did the only thing he does best - making things worse.

But my point here is not to lay all the blame on Buhari. The failure of the Nigerian state to impose a peaceful and just order in its territory is fully grounded in history. As Feyi and Fola wrote;

Many parts of Nigeria have remained in a permanent emergency for generations – communities existing in cycles of insecurity and injustice with roots in centuries of pre-colonial slave raiding, jihadist empire building and colonial conquest.

This permanent emergency has left its mark, chief among them is the extreme distrust for “others”: farmers versus herders, indigenes versus settlers, Christians versus Muslims.

Weak state capacity, widespread corruption, unemployment, poor infrastructure, changing weather patterns and inadequate human capital investment – have all combined with broader regional insecurity to produce the grim figures that are drawing the attention of American politicians.

My slight quibble with Feyi and Fola's argument in this piece is on religion. To be clear, they are right to focus on justice as the bigger failure of statehood and governance. This differs from the conventional dismissal of religion as a factor on the sole basis of demographic balance. The media, analysts, and foreign diplomats discuss Nigeria's population as roughly split in half (with outdated or without evidence) into Christians and Muslims. Even further, this is often described as a geographic fact, with each religion populating equal halves of the country, and thus balancing each other out. Based on this supposed political-religious balance, explicitly religious motivation for violence is often ruled out a priori. Perhaps the absence of an overwhelming religious majority does help defray another dangerous dimension in Nigeria's long history of violence. But it is also true that the only visible way the Nigerian state has attempted state-building in the last 65 years is by aggressively bidding up religious competition. Theocratic legitimacy and religious intolerance are the identity of the Nigerian state.

Many historians have discussed the contradictions of "indirect rule" under British colonial governance. One of the most consequential results of this legacy is not just an incoherent bureaucracy, but a society where rules and legitimacy (recognised and accepted authority) are frequently at odds. The collapse of the First Republic after independence, and the horrid civil war that followed showed that managing the nation's ethnic diversity will not not be easy. This left religion, perhaps unintentionally, as the most efficient way for the state to express its will, and the elites to impose their rule. The state did not invest in capacity to solve social problems like cooperation, trust, trade, taxation, and justice. Rather the elite were content with financing their rule with resource rent, and delegated these problems to religious authority.

In their book Persecution and Toleration: The Long Road to Religious Freedom, Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama articulated the political economy of religious rule, and the logic of religious intolerance. Weak states can rely on religion to maintain social order. Rulers and clerics form coalitions that enforces uniformity. Religious intolerance becomes rational because diversity can undermine legitimacy. This mechanism does need one dominant religion to work. In Nigeria, despite theological divisions between the two dominant religions, cooperation is quite common across the society. But this is not based on impersonal rules-based exchanges or the acceptance of a common humanity, rather it is on shared norm and language of interfaith cooperation. This is similar to the "confessional state" equilibrium in Middle Ages Europe after the Protestant schism threatened the previous religious order, as described by Johnson and Koyama. Religious minorities and dissenters are viewed as a threat to social order, andd the logic of intolerance is established. We can easily infer this from the functioning of the current Nigerian state and society. The real outcasts are not criminals, fraudsters, bandits, abusers, traffickers, and others who regularly flout the weak legal order. The people who recieve the harshest social sanctions are those whose choices, lifestyles, and beliefs do not conform to the prescribed doctrines of the two dominant religions. In Nigeria, blasphemy trumps corruption - despite the far greater consequences of the latter.

It is important to be clear on two things. The problem of religious order is not an ontological commentary on the beliefs and tenets of any religion, and the individuals who subscribe to them. Secondly, the rise and spread of Islam and Christianity in Nigeria have long histories that is separate from the Nigerian state. The problem of religious order simply explains how a weak state (and elites) without incentives to invest in a capable legal order, can coopt two popular belief systems to legitimise its rule. As I said on the latest podcast episode, one of the great tragedies of Nigeria's Fourth Republic is that political spared very little thought for the kind of nation Nigeria should build, and the structure best suited for it. The post-democratisation constitutional order was immediately tested by subnational demand for Sharia law, and the state simply retreated back into its comfortable cocoon of religious legitimacy.

Nigeria should not continue on its current path. As Johnson and Koyama argued, it was not moral enlightenment that brought impersonal legal order to Europe, but internal fiscal pressures, and external military threats. Nigeria also finds itself at a similar crossroads. The challenge to become a modern state is real and urgent. Establishing a rule of law that is fair and just to all, protecting the rights of minorities everywhere in our territory, bringing prosperity to all our people, building world class human capital and infrastructure are all modern problems that can only be solved by a capable state. How will we respond?