Black World Column
August/September 1998

Nigeria-'things fall apart - again

by Lou Turner

There seems to be no end to the mounting contradictions that feed the chaos called "Nigeria." Things fall apart...and fall apart some more. In the tangle of its political wreckage there is, strangely, a pattern that, simple or not, gives us some indication of where this largest Black nation in the world is headed.

On June 8, Nigeria's military dictator, Gen. Sani Abacha, died under circumstances most mysterious. Four years of violent repression of every sector of Nigerian society, even in his own northern Hausa stronghold; fours years of fending off international sanctions; four years of being an international pariah that the West and Africa none the less couldn't kick the (petroleum) habit of doing business with; and almost a year of grooming himself, as so many of Nigeria's military dictators have in the past, as a "respectable civilian candidate" for the presidency-after all this, Sani Abacha drops dead.

After liquidating his political opponents by means both brutal and subtle, the liquidator is liquidated. (It is rumored that he was poisoned while in the company of three women. However, everyone from his wife, whose son and ex-husband had been killed by Abacha, to Abacha's own northern Kano-Kaduna military mafia, who had grown alarmed at the growing revolt among the Yorubas and Ibos brought on by what Wole Soyinka called Abacha's "machinery of terror," to his enemies in the military, who had grown anxious that his paranoia over coup plots had made them his next targets-all were on board Nigeria's Orient Express when Sani Abacha suffered "a sudden heart attack.")

One month later, on July 7, Moshood Abiola, the country's most prominent politician suffered a heart attack the day before it was rumored he was to be released following four years of confinement by the Abacha regime. Abiola, who was also one of the country's wealthiest men, and certainly couldn't be called a democrat in the proletarian sense of the word, had been arrested after the 1993 elections, in which he was thought to have been the front-runner, were annulled by another military dictator, Gen. Babangida. Abacha overthrew Babangida in a coup in 1994, and arrested Abiola upon his return from Britain, having fled there at the time of the annulment.

The circumstances of Abiola's death remain as shadowy as those surrounding Abacha's (un)timely demise. If Abacha's were a mix of personal revenge and the REAL POLITIK of military thugs anxious to stave off a revolution, the motives behind Abiola's death seem, in brutally hypocritcal terms, to be in the interest of "democracy."

To arrive at a "democratic" transition satisfactory to northern military hegemony, U.S. corporate and foreign policy interests (which are one and the same), and so as not to provoke a revolt on the part of the Nigerian masses, a broader conspiracy than the palace coup that liquidated Abacha was needed to ease Abiola from the scene. For these ruling class interests it isn't human rights and the conditions of life and labor of the most populous Black nation in the world that is at stake. On the contrary, at stake is that one vital statistic that has determined Nigeria's place in the world since it gained independence in 1960-OIL.

Nigeria earns $10 billion in oil revenues a year, a good share of which is siphoned off by the military and the ruling class; U.S. exports to Nigeria reached $816 million last year, while U.S. imports from Nigeria were over $6 billion; direct U.S. investment in Nigeria is over $980 million; the major U.S. multinational corporations in Nigeria are Shell, Mobil, Phillips, and Chevron. And yet, while a corporation like Shell has since 1958 taken over 900 million barrels of oil from the tiny delta state of Ogoniland, estimated at $300 billion, the Ogoni people don't have piped water or electricity; their ground water is polluted by the more than 100 oil wells, two refineries and one fertilizer plant that occupy their 12 X 14 square mile state. Along with a severe shortage of schools, unemployment is rife since Shell recruits its labor from other parts of the country.

Stabilizing Nigeria for the purpose of protecting these interests is, of course, the real subtext underlying all the "transition to democracy" rhetoric. Bill Clinton gave the green light to Abacha back in March during his Africa trip when he counter his administration's policy, articulated by Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice, and declared that the U.S. would accept Abacha's staying in power as a "civilian" president. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Clinton's international trump card, made a surprise trip to Nigeria to bolster the efforts of Abacha's predecessor, Gen. Abdulsalam Abubakar, to pressure Abiola to abandon his mandate from the 1993 election as a condition of his release from detention. Likewise, former Ambassador to Nigeria and CIA/State Department envoy to El Salvador during its darkest days, Thomas Pickering was with Abiola pushing the same line when the Nigerian politician fell fatally ill.

There is, in short, no word said in the name of helping Nigeria make a "peaceful transition to democracy" by the likes of these global gamesmen of the capitalist class that isn't aimed at installing a regime that will continue business as usual. The question now is WHO will the ruling class pluck from the chaos it has created to unite around? What former military dictator, who may have done a little prison time under Abacha, does the Nigerian neo-colonial state intend to anoint its "democratic" hopeful for president to once again make Nigeria ungovernable and fit to assume its place in the global capitalist order?

The one name that has consistently come up at every critical point in the tangled unfolding of events of the last two month is Gen. Olesegun Obasanjo, the former military ruler from 1976 to 1979, who was released by Abubakar on June 16, the same day that Abubakar tried, unsuccessfully, to convince Abiola not to claim his 1993 electoral mandate. Obasanjo is acceptable to the north and to Abiola's southwest Yoruba constituency, and his light-weight prison experience is the kind of stuff from which "democratic" credentials are made by U.S. foreign policy makers and by that most stealthy stalking horse for U.S. foreign policy, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO CONTENTS PAGE

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE TO NEWS AND LETTERS