Nigeria’s Horrors and Hopes

It’s easy to argue that Nigeria’s squandered the opportunities that come with having Africa’s biggest population and oil reserves. Under successive governments, it’s become a byword for corruption and inefficiency. Religious and ethnic tensions have festered. This year the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, estimated that Nigeria had overtaken India as the nation with the largest number of people in extreme poverty: 87 million. The last few years have been anything but easy. The crash in oil prices in 2014 sparked an economic and currency crisis. Boko Haram’s Islamist insurgency may have been contained to the northeastern state of Borno, but its fighters have still killed hundreds of people there this year. Meeting the needs of the country’s population of almost 200 million will only get tougher if, as the United Nations expects, the number doubles by mid-century.

President Muhammadu Buhari, 75, took office in 2015 on a wave of optimism fueled by the country’s first-ever peaceful transition of power to an opposition candidate. Hopes were raised that he could curb corruption and diversify an economy dependent on oil and gas for 90 percent of exports. His popularity waned as joblessness and inflation soared after the drop in oil prices. Investors blamed Buhari for exacerbating Nigeria’s recession and deterring investment by imposing capital controls. He also leaned on the central bank not to weaken the currency, the naira, which it was eventually forced to do. His health has been an issue, too, after he left the country repeatedly for months at a time for medical checks. But Buhari, a Muslim, remains popular among Nigeria’s masses, thanks largely to his reputation for piousness, and will likely be hard to beat when he runs for a second term in elections scheduled for February. The opposition’s ranks have swelled thanks to defections of lawmakers from the ruling All Progressives Congress party who accuse Buhari’s administration of mismanaging the economy and using an anti-corruption campaign as a pretext for clamping down on political dissent. Critics also condemn his handling of another flashpoint: As the Sahara desert advances southward, herders seeking grazing land are moving into central and southern Nigeria, leading to clashes with farming communities that killed about 1,300 people in the first six months of 2018.