Wrong on so many levels:

The National Automotive Council (NAC) is collaborating with the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO) to fine-tune the concept for a made-in-Nigeria car…

“Once the bill is passed and the budget proposal before the National Assembly is passed, we will come up with the concept of the made-in-Nigeria car with a road show,” [Aminu Jalal, the Director General of the Council] said.

The automobile needs of Nigeria can only be met when all the stakeholders in the industry work towards meeting international standard, Mr. Jalal said, adding that the agency’s main focus is to encourage local manufacture of auto components. The council is equally wooing Nigerians in the Diaspora, who have indicated interest in investing in the manufacturing of auto components and ancillaries.

Unlike other emerging economies, Nigeria is yet to witness a revolution in its automobile industrial sector. As at today, the dream to have a made-in-Nigeria car has remained exactly that – a dream.

Apparently, “the absence of local source of raw materials” has delayed progress to date. From the look of early designs, this obstacle has been solved through judicious use of Lego. Presumably, the full power of the UN system will now be thrown behind the project.

While researching my upcoming book on the world’s poorest countries last week, I came across David Keen’s ‘Conflict and Collusion in Sierra Leone,’ an analysis of the causes of the world’s poorest country’s vicious 1990s civil war. What struck me most was the similarity between what I read of the conditions in Sierra Leone before war erupted and what I heard on a recent trip to Nigeria of the conditions prevailing there.

The parallels are remarkable. Burgeoning youth population? Check. Intense competition for services and economic opportunities? Check. Collapsed education system that fails the young? Check. Dependence on a single valuable natural resource? Check (diamonds in Sierra Leone, oil in Nigeria). Neglect of other economic activities like agriculture? Check. Catastrophic lack of jobs? Check.

The result of all these fundamental problems in Nigeria, as in Sierra Leone, is a youth population that cannot establish itself. Denied employment, young people cannot leave their parents’ homes, marry, or start families. Their reliance on the older generation deprives them of the latter’s respect. Their resentment of their elders, who benefited from a better education, faced weaker competition for jobs, and have control over the country’s economy, is acute. The corruption and decadence of those in power and their lack of interest in young people’s demands further fan the flames (both David Keen writing on Sierra Leone and several Nigerians I spoke to said that wealth, no matter how dishonestly acquired, had become society’s’ overriding goal – as a young woman in Lagos lamented, “nobody asks how you got rich”).

In Sierra Leone, young people eventually took out their frustrations with extreme violence. Among their main targets were village chiefs and other figures of authority. When the Revolutionary United Front invaded Freetown in January 1999, its young rebel soldiers sought out and dealt out horrific punishments to journalists and writers who had criticised them and shown them disrespect. Many young Nigerians also bemoan the lack of respect they receive from the older generation, who dominate the country’s institutions.

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The BBC reports that the weekend’s violence in the city of Bauchi has spread to other parts of northern Nigeria, including the sleepy northeastern town of Maiduguri and Wudil, a town near Kano.  A BBC reporter counted over 100 bodies in Bauchi.

Blame has been placed on a militant Islamist group called Boko Haram, an organisation made up mostly of former university students who are opposed to the westernisation of education. Apparently (although nothing is clear), some of the group’s leaders were arrested, so their cadets took to the streets with guns to secure their release.

Most of northern Nigeria is under sharia law. On a trip there earlier this month for the Next Generation Nigeria project, I met sharia leaders in Kano, the north’s biggest city. They told me that resistance to western education had historic roots, as it was seen as an attempt by southern Christians, who had been educated by the British colonisers, to spread their religion to the Muslim north.

Only in recent years has this resistance weakened, and many parents are now very keen for their children to attend western schools. Trouble is, there aren’t enough places for the burgeoning numbers of children, so in many areas Islamic schools remain the only option. State governments are encouraging these schools to teach secular subjects like English and maths as well as Kuranic studies and Arabic.

The religious leaders I spoke to were generally fine with this, but it seems not all their peers are of the same opinion. Mohammed Yusuf, the leader of Boko Haram, has said western education is forbidden, and recruited students to advance his arguments. Given how bad Nigeria’s schools and universities are, and how slim graduates’ prospects of getting a decent job when they leave, the recruitment drive probably isn’t difficult.

If Yusuf’s campaign is successful, it will be a blow to northern Nigeria’s development prospects. Although Islamic schools may do a good job of inculcating values and morality, for the vast majority of their alumni what they teach is of no value at all to their careers.  I asked a sharia leader how Arabic and Kuranic studies help students find jobs, and he replied that they could work as teachers in such schools or as imams. This would be fine if everybody could become an imam or a teacher, I said, but then there wouldn’t be any congregation or students. He smiled patiently, and said that the rest would work in the fields or hawking in the street.  In the north, as in the country as a whole, too many leaders benefit from the status quo to concern themselves with progress.

Despite being oil rich, Nigeria is desperately energy poor. Per capita electricity consumption is half that of nearby Ghana and even this limited supply is shockingly unreliable.

When the power shuts down – which it does all the time – people sit in the dark or, if they’re lucky, fire up generators that cost the country $140 billion to fuel (add a chunk more for capital and maintenance costs).

On Twitter, there’s an online demonstration going on at the moment against this crazy situation – with huge numbers of tweets using the #lightupnigeria hashtag. “I know a Doctor that once operated in moonlight because the generator refused to come on!” Olunfunmike writes, “Let’s make a change.”

Please join them – and spread the word. (Cool photo – courtesy plastiqq. Find me on Twitter.)

Update:  There’s a newish Facebook group too.

Update II: NEPA – Nigeria’s National Electric Power Authority – needs $3.4bn investment over the next five years. At present, however, it’s operating at a huge loss, in part because it only manages to get customers to pay for 60% of the electricity they use (as one customer puts it, “NEPA doesn’t give me light, but at the end of the month a bill would arrive and they would expect me to pay? I don’t think so.”)

President Obsaanjo has pleaded with the company to at least warn customers of impending power cuts (load shedding) before they happen, but many Nigerians believe that’s all he’s doing  - pleading for change.

Last year, a Parliamentary investigative panel claimed that $16bn has been spent on the power system, without delivering much increase in supply.

The House of Representatives investigation alleged that Mr Obasanjo’s government had paid millions of dollars to 34 “non-existent companies”. The committee visited the sites where power stations were meant to be built. It found no work had been done at some sites after several years.

Defending his record, Mr Obasanjo said his government had inherited 18 years of neglect in the power generation industry, and had done well to more than double power supply. Gas pipeline vandalism had hampered power generation. One damaged pipeline took two years to repair, he said. To “the uninitiated” it would seem like no work had been done on the power stations, but the reality was that millions of dollars had been “invested”, he said.

But he said the investigation into the power sector may actually hamper improvement, and jeopardise Nigeria’s development. Private partners were being chased away by the probe because they feared being “criminalised”.

Update III: There’s a logo now.

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The last two weeks have seen a storm of insurgent activity in Nigeria: Shell’s onshore output has been halved to around 140,000 barrels a day, Chevron has lost about the same again (taking the aggregate output lost to over to a fifth of Nigeria’s total) – and for the first time Lagos has been attacked.  According to Africasia.com,

Fighters from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) attacked the facility, the first strike in Nigeria’s economic nerve centre since the oil insurgency was launched in 2006. Rescuers said five people were burnt beyond recognition in the blast.

“The militants went into open shooting with the naval officers guarding the facility but they were overpowered. They used dynamite to destroy the manifold,” said Geofrey Boukoru, a member of the emergency rescue team.

The militants arrived in four speed boats, exchanging fire sporadically with the navy for about three hours before hurling dynamite into the facility, said a senior official from the Pipelines and Products Marketing Company, an affiliate of the state-run petroleum corporation.

The Lagos attack took place just before the federal government’s planned amnesty release of Henry Okah, the head of MEND – a release that, in the event, still went ahead despite the attack.  MEND has since said in a statement that it “considers this release as a step towards genuine peace and prosperity if Nigeria is open to frank talks and deals sincerely with the root issues once and for all” – although as Abubakar Momoh of Lagos State University observes to AlJazeera, “What the government has done in the case of Okah is like treating the symptom and not curing the disease … there are issues that drove the militants to the trenches. Until those issues are resolved in a fair and just manner, there will never be peace in the Niger Delta.”

As David noted back in November last year, counter-insurgency expert John Robb has called Henry Okah ”one of the most important people alive today, a brilliant innovator in warfare”. Here’s Robb’s account of how Okah did it. (more…)

Royal Dutch Shell - Flickr User Lee Otis

After 13 years, Royal Dutch Shell has agreed to pay $15.5 million compensation to settle a court case over its alleged part in the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni leaders in the Niger Delta. Much of the backstory can be found here.

Now I’m no judge (not yet, anyway), but $15 million doesn’t seem a lot for a firm with 2008 revenues of $458 billion. Michael Goldhaber, who does know something about law, describes the sum as ‘nuisance value’ from Shell’s point of view.

Yet the fact that Shell settled the day before the trial was due to begin is indicative of the firm’s distaste for either the publicity that court proceedings would create, or the culpability that might be uncovered. (more…)

Check out Stratfor’s funky interactive graphic of power politics in the Niger Delta.

It has a graph showing the relationships between all the big players in the region. They all seem to hate each other. Maybe someone should do something like this for the Brown government…

The Nigerian city Jos, the capital of the Plateau State, is the scene of some of the worst sectarian violence in recent years. Up to 300 people were killed after a disputed local election on Friday which has divided the town on social and religious fault lines. Police have imposed a 24-hour curfew and the army is patrolling the streets.

Update, 30/11, 12.40 pm (David): The death toll appears to have risen further:

Residents delivered more bodies to the main mosque in the central Nigerian city of Jos on Sunday, bringing the death toll from two days of clashes between Muslim and Christian gangs to around 400 people.

Rival ethnic and religious mobs have burned homes, shops, mosques and churches in fighting triggered by a disputed local election in a city at the crossroads of Nigeria’s Muslim north and Christian south. It is the country’s worst unrest for years.

Murtala Sani Hashim, who has been registering the dead as they are brought to the city’s main mosque, told Reuters he had listed 367 bodies and more were arriving. Ten corpses wrapped in blankets, two of them infants, lay behind him. A doctor at one of the city’s main hospitals said he had received 25 corpses and 154 injured since the unrest began. “Gunshot wounds, machete injuries, those are the two main types,” Dr Aboi Madaki, director of clinical services at Jos University Teaching Hospital, told Reuters.

The overall toll was expected to be higher, with some victims already buried and others taken to other clinics. The violence appeared to die down on Sunday. Soldiers patrolled on foot and in jeeps to enforce a 24-hour curfew imposed on the worst-hit areas. People who ventured out walked with their hands in the air to show they were unarmed. “They are still picking up dead bodies outside. Some areas were not reachable until now,” said Al Mansur, a 53-year-old farmer who said all the homes around his had been razed.

Overturned and burnt-out vehicles littered the streets while several churches, a block of houses and an Islamic school in one neighbourhood were gutted by fire. The Red Cross said around 7,000 people had fled their homes and were sheltering in government buildings, an army barracks and religious centres. A senior police official said five neighbourhoods had been hit by unrest and 523 people detained.

Update, 30/11, 4.58 pm (Alex):

For some of the backstory on violence and civil conflict in Plateau State, this 2004 article on OCHA’s IRIN website is worth a look.  While the rest of the world’s attention was focused on New York in early September 2001, the city of Jos was consumed by a week of bloodletting in which 1,000 people died. But as the article notes, that was just the beginning: over the following 32 months, 53,787 people died in retaliatory violence between Plateau state’s Christians (who are mainly indigenous farmers) and Muslims (mainly traders and livestock herders).

International Crisis Group give more of the background in their 2006 briefing on governance in Nigeria:

The constitution enshrines a “federal character” principle, a type of quota which seeks to balance the apportionment of political positions, jobs and other government benefits evenly among Nigeria’s many peoples but is distorted by a second principle, that of indigeneity, which makes the right to such benefits dependent upon where an individual’s parents and grandparents were born. The result is widespread discrimination against non-indigenes in the 36 states and sharp inter-communal conflict. In Plateau State, for example, recurrent clashes since 2001 between “indigene” and “settler” communities competing over political appointments and government services have left thousands dead and many more thousands displaced…

Update, 30/11, 16.58 pm (David): One interesting wrinkle – Henry Okah, the man John Robb has dubbed “one of the most important people alive today, a brilliant innovator in warfare”, is currently on trial in Jos. After repeated delays, the secret hearing is due to resume on Thursday…

Poor old Karachi. Pakistan’s economy is yet again on the slide – with an IMF bailout threatening more hard times ahead (3 million job losses predicted). Mumbai’s attackers are said to have come from Pakistan’s business and media capital. And now… more riots.

For the latest, follow #Karachi on Twitter, where the topic is trending heavily. Media reports are scanty – but four people are reported dead, many more injured… This is not likely to be associated to the Mumbai attacks (see background), but it sure won’t help!

Update - Grim, grim reports of much worse riots in Nigeria too…

Fantastic:

This morning, at the airport in Brussels, I was chatting with a retired Scottish aid worker.  He told about his friend who got on a flight in Lagos to find it completely full…plus one.  One person was standing in the aisle with no seat.  The flight attendants went through and checked that everyone had a boarding pass, which they did.  (Apparently someone had a forged pass; welcome to Lagos.)  The staff then made an announcement that everyone was going to de-plane and that they were going to check everyone’s boarding pass carefully. 

As soon as the first person stepped off the plane, the staff slammed and locked the airplane door, despite the person’s cries and banging on the door.  Problem solved.

Via Chris Blattman.

How many malaria cases does Nigeria have every year? And how many deaths? You would think the obvious place to find out would be the World Health Organisation’s website, which has a whole section dedicated to the Roll Back Malaria Program. What you are met with when you get there, however, is a blizzard of different numbers. The Nigeria Country Profile in the 2005 World Malaria Report says there were 2.6 million reported malaria cases in 2003, a similar figure to the previous three years (in a country where malaria is endemic you’d expect incidence to remain roughly similar year on year). Sounds OK so far then. Despite nearly half of those infected being aged under 5, however (and therefore, you would think, weak and at high risk of death from such a dangerous disease), there were only 5,343 reported malaria deaths in 2003.

Perhaps Nigerian children are unusually robust, and therefore better equipped than kids in other countries to fend off a disease that (reportedly) kills hundreds of thousands of their peers each year worldwide. Alas, probably not, or at least not according to data posted elsewhere on the WHO site. The “country info” on Nigeria claims that there were 5.3 million reported malaria cases in Nigeria in 2007 – double the number four years earlier, and 10,000 reported deaths. OK, maybe an extra battalion or two of foreign mosquitoes has been called in by their fully sated Nigerian cousins to join in the bloodfest, or maybe reporting has improved or become more sensitive (not the same thing) over the past four years.

But then, on the same page, we are told that malaria accounts for “approximately 300,000 annual deaths.” So not the 10,000 “reported” deaths a few inches down the page, nor the 5,000 reported in the country profile, but 300,000. You might think the difference lies in the low figures being “reported” and the high ones extrapolated, but on closer inspection, the 5.2m cases in 2007 are described as “probable and confirmed”, and the 2.6m in 2003 “probable or clinically diagnosed.” Can’t tell the difference? Nor me.

Even if it is extrapolated, WHO has guessed that 10,000 reported deaths means 300,000 actual deaths – a thirtyfold difference. But if you do the same multiplication for the number of cases, you’d get 159 million cases – more than one bout of malaria per Nigerian per year, and nearly 50 million more even than the government (which is seeking aid to fight the disease so has an interest in inflating the numbers) claims on the World Bank website. It’s also almost triple the estimate of annual malaria cases in – wait for it – WHO’s latest country profile, released in 2008, which puts the number of cases at 57m and the number of deaths at, er, 225,000.

After all this, needless to say, I am no nearer to answering my two initial questions.

Update: It’s not just on malaria that the data are shaky, of course. David railed at even worse incompetence by UNAIDS a year ago.

Never mind feral cities, Nigeria has feral universities. From the Economist:

A young man whispers a confession: as a university student, he killed six or seven of his peers. He cannot be sure of the number, since his shots were fired in gun battles. He intimidated professors, burned their cars, and helped kidnap—briefly—their children to force them to give good marks to certain students. He did it all as a member of a campus cult. When he renounced his membership, he got death threats and moved to another city, where he lives today.

Read the whole thing before it disappears behind some kind of subscription wall…

At a seminar held yesterday as part of IPPR’s Commission on National Security, we got onto a discussion of how far aid donors still need to go in sorting out their approach on conflict prevention. The problem isn’t with the specialist departments that deal with conflict within donor agencies – which are often excellent (e.g. the CHASE department in DFID) - but rather with long-term systemic issue areas that just aren’t mainstreamed properly throughout donors’ work.  For me, four spring to mind.

First, governance.  I’ve written about this at length before on GD, and I still think the same now.  When European donors think governance, they think about techie work in the executive branch: public financial management, anti-corruption commissions, that sort of thing.  What they overlook is the politics: elections, what happens in the smoke-filled rooms of the ruling party, the process of bargaining between states and citizens.  And it’s here that conflict risk – or risk reduction – is often to be found.

Second, resilience.  Many donors have great work underway on specific areas of resilience – like peacebuilding, adaptation to climate change or disaster risk reduction.  But donors often fail to identify the syngergies between these different kinds of resilience work – as International Alert did in their report on climate adaptation and peacebuilding last year.  How about a more joined-up approach across the board that focuses really hard on identifying the sources of resilience in different developing countries, and then working to build them up?  After all, about the only thing that’s clear about the next couple of decades is that they’ll be increasingly turbulent.  You wouldn’t know it from looking at donors’ country programmes.

Third, scarcity.  Disputes over land in Kenya; water as a threat multiplier in Darfur; riots over food and energy prices in more than 30 countries this year alone; the looming shadow of climate change.  Scarcity issues are set to become one of the principal obstacles to achieving the MDGs, and a major source of increased conflict risk.  Helping partner countries to manage competing claims to scarce resources – at all levels from local to global – should be a core competence in donors’ policy and programme work alike.  Is it?  Nope.

Fourth, counter-insurgency and fourth generation warfare.  Whether you’re looking at the Taliban in Afghanistan, MEND in Nigeria, drug lords in Mexico or organised crime in the Balkans, there are plenty of participants in the ‘global bazaar of violence’ who are interested in hollowing out weak states – not the same as causing them to collapse, as Daniel and I were discussing earlier this week – so as to give them the space and legitimacy to operate as they want.  Alas, it’s the military coming up with the really innovative approaches on this – not aid donors.

As should already be clear, these aren’t so much new agendas for aid donors, as cross-cutting ones: involving joining up the dots between current areas of work, being willing to take more risks, and realising that being an effective donor in the 21st century is as much about influence and the quality of your people as it’s about cash.

They also involve forging a lot of new, more coherent relationships: with new donors (like the Gates Foundation); with new country players (like China); and – perhaps most of all – with other parts of government (c.f. DFID and the the Foreign Office). 

But here’s a key point: it’s crucial that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

I always hesitate when I hear people in the UK calling for DFID to be merged back into the Foreign Office, or for the International Development Act to be revised or scrapped.  True, there are [numerous] times when DFID needs to interpret its poverty reduction mission with a bit more verve and imagination.  But remember why it was necessary in the first place to make DFID independent and to create the Act to protect it. 

We do need a more substantive conversation about joining up the dots on aid and foreign policy – both in Britain and internationally – in order to get better at conflict prevention.  But before we can start it, there need to be some upfront guarantees of no sliding back to aid being a tool for pursuing narrow, short-term national interests.

Last week, I gave a talk at the Defence Academy on the new public diplomacy, focusing in particular on its implications for Afghanistan.

The full text is after the jump or read it as a pdf.

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