The country is home not only to famous oil reserves (35 billion barrels as of 2017) but also to two of Africa’s three wealthiest men (entrepreneurs Aliko Dangote and Mike Adenuga). For anyone who has spent time in the tonier parts of Lagos, Nigeria’s 21-million-person megacity, or encountered wealthy Nigerians abroad, it is not hard to believe that this rapidly growing country of 180 million citizens is an increasingly profitable market for luxury goods.
In recent years, Nigeria’s wealthy reputation has become one of its most visible exports. Everything from a 2016 documentary called Lagos to London: Britain’s New Super-Rich to a recent “Kleptocracy Tour” of London highlighting suspiciously expensive real estate owned by Nigerian politicians paints an admittedly not particularly flattering picture of a nation in ascendance. And, indeed, at least some Nigerians see this extravagance as an opportunity. Since 2009, when Nigeria’s Ministry of Information launched a notorious “rebranding” campaign designed to change the country’s international image, the government’s goal has been to repackage it as an up-and-coming power, deflecting attention away from the corruption and poverty that remain major problems in the lives of ordinary citizens.
This new Nigerian image—a country that dominates international music and film charts, hosts powerhouse media and fashion industries, and is a hub of investment and financing for technological innovation—is true, and it reflects improvements in the lives of many Nigerians. But it also obscures other, harder realities. Nigeria is the only large country in the world that has seen an increase in the number of people living in extreme poverty since 1990, and, although it returned to civilian rule in 1999, the promise of (as many Nigerians put it) a “democratic dividend” paid off to ordinary, working-class people in the form of better government and greater attention to issues of social justice has not arrived.
What does this inequality look like? Lagos’s glamour hides massive slums such as Makoko, where hundreds of thousands live in ramshackle houses built on stilts in the city’s lagoon. And the country’s inadequate infrastructure means that even middle-class Nigerians struggle to obtain services such as electricity and safe, affordable transportation, while the poor lack necessities such as clean water and health care. In the Niger Delta, home to the country’s oil reserves, activists and militants have fought a decades-long battle with the federal government, demanding their “fair share” of the resources that have brought the country billions while polluting their air and ground. And in the country’s Muslim-majority north, there is a long history of religious scholars and activists using the language of Islam to challenge corruption, poor governance, and a lack of social justice.
The idea that the Nigerian story is a “tale of two countries” is not new. Chinua Achebe used it in his 1987 novel Anthills of the Savannah, which depicts a fictional West African country called Kangan (a loose stand-in for Nigeria) deeply divided between its capital’s wealth and cosmopolitanism and the poverty and neglect of its interior. But many Nigerians (and a fair number of outsiders) see the most important division between Nigerians as civilizational, pitting an increasingly prosperous majority-Christian “south” against a “backward” Muslim-majority north. The two halves of what we call Nigeria today—brought together by colonial fiat in 1914—do have important and durable differences in terms of culture and language, in how they were governed by their colonial rulers, and (to some extent) in their levels of prosperity today. These differences are real, and they have played a significant role in shaping the country’s legacy of ethnic and religious conflict.
But are they inevitable and unresolvable? Many Nigerians still agree with the legendary politician Obafemi Awolowo, who wrote that Nigeria was a country without a nation, a “mere geographic expression.” For his part, Achebe, in his final book in 2012, There Was a Country, revealed that he had come to see the country’s pained history of violence and civil war in civilizational terms, describing his own ethnic group (the Igbo) as naturally open to cultural change and progress, while Muslims from the Hausa and Fulani ethnic groups (collectively the majority in northern Nigeria) are “hindered by a wary religion” and their desire for domination.3
But if there are really two Nigerias, these simplistic and reductive accounts do not do either of them justice. For one, they mask the many ways in which Nigeria’s economic, political, and social interconnectedness transcends religious and ethnic differences. For another, in Nigeria, corruption and its benefits know no particular ethnic or religious boundaries, a fact that has often made it harder, rather than easier, to build coalitions to address the country’s biggest challenges. And, finally, they fail to recognize just how much the citizens of any country, whatever their differences, share a common fate. Sooner or later, a crisis for some Nigerians becomes a crisis for all.
The Stolen Girls
Unofficially, Boko Haram became a “crisis for all” on the night of April 14, 2014, in the sleepy town of Chibok, roughly 120 kilometers south of Maiduguri. There, members of Boko Haram stormed the compound of a girls’ secondary school, reportedly looking for building supplies. What they found instead were hundreds of young women who had recently returned from a break to take their final examinations. Despite rumors of an impending attack, government forces had been slow to provide additional security, so when the assailants arrived they encountered almost no resistance. In all, they kidnapped 276 students that night, girls who aspired to become doctors and nurses, teachers and scientists. Although “the Chibok girls,” as they would come to be known, were hardly Boko Haram’s first victims, their fate quickly became a symbol at home and abroad of the struggles and violence faced by many ordinary Nigerians living in the shadow of their country’s prosperity.
This kidnapping was only the most recent tragedy in a community that had suffered more than its share. The town takes its name from the local hills where its residents once fled to escape from slave raiders sent by powerful local kingdoms, who roamed the region until the late nineteenth century. More recently, as a Christian-majority enclave of roughly sixty thousand citizens in a state home to nearly six million, Chibok’s residents have often faced inattention or even marginalization from local authorities. Not that there was much to go around: Borno State and its neighbors in the northeastern region suffer from some of the highest rates of poverty, illiteracy, and child and maternal health risks in all of Nigeria.
Soon after the attack, there was a surge in international interest in Boko Haram, accompanied by new efforts to explain the group’s motives, goals, and place in the world of global terrorism. Much of it depicted the group’s actions first and foremost as an attack on girls and their access to education. American celebrities such Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, and (perhaps most famously) Michelle Obama promoted the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag, originally begun on Twitter by Nigerians, as a vehicle for drawing attention to the female victims of religious extremism around the world. Another similar narrative emphasized the role of poverty and a lack of education in driving extremist violence in places like northeastern Nigeria. After all, what better evidence of the link between poverty, ignorance, and violence than a group of radical extremists in one of the poorest parts of the world who declared “Western education” forbidden by God and kidnapped girls who attempted to access it?
Unfortunately, this outrage did little to stem the tide of violence. At best, stories like the Chibok kidnapping can lead to globally organized movements that lobby governments and international agencies. At worst, sensationalist international media coverage actively detracts from the work of local organizers, whose appeals are drowned out by the megaphone of what the Nigerian American writer Teju Cole has referred to as the “White-Savior Industrial Complex.” However well-intentioned, this global activism has had very little real on-the-ground impact on either Boko Haram or Nigerian policy toward the conflict. And while Boko Haram’s victims have certainly drawn less attention internationally than those of attacks in cities such as Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, and Istanbul (to name only a few), it is not a lack of press coverage that allowed the group to kill more than twelve thousand civilians and displace 2.6 million from their homes and communities from 2010 to 2017.
