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BROKENATION, unlike any work before it, unravels, with economic facts and realities, how various layers of entrapment and paradoxical cycles and a forced legal and fiscal structure help sustain the Nigerian state. It is a revealing dose of reality to understanding Nigeria, and the state of contemporary, post-colonial Africa.
The narrative of 21st century, ‘post colonial’ Africa should be dominated by Nigeria, which has a quarter of the continent’s population, and, even in its severely troubled state, its largest economy.
However, the Nigerian State is clearly not a model or desirable example for any nation that will achieve positive outcomes for its indigenous peoples and citizens. Created by foreigners on a quest to plunder and subjugate the indigenous countries and resources, it is sadly sustained by a collaborating military, which was used to create the country in the first place, and a fragmented and ultimately destructive political, traditional and lately religious ruling class which shown little interest in understanding the game into which it has been drawn. A game in which its battered and long-suffering indigenous people are nothing but expendable and disposable pawns.
Little wonder that Nigeria is often in the news for war and terrorism, from the Nigeria-Biafra civil war of the late 60’s, one of the deadliest wars since the 2nd World War, to the increasingly bold displacement and cleansing attacks by three of the world’s most dangerous terrorist groups (Boko-Haram, Herdsmen and the curiously named Bandits) that operate with various degrees of freedom within its borders.
Nigeria also generates interest for its supporting role in OPEC, the oil cartel that has become a global economic force over the last half century, especially in times of high oil prices.
Those oil revenues, the indigenous but foreign created military, the plundering foreign interests of the creators and enforcers of the Nigerian state (masked as colonialism and puritan religion at various times), and the inherently conflicting interests that combine to form a clueless outlook from the indigenous leaders, have become layers of bondage and entrapment of the indigenous peoples and countries in the Nigerian state. Little wonder that over half of indigenous young adults want to escape from Nigeria. Most people will flee from bondage, if given the opportunity.
The Nigerian Military is unique due to the fact that it was formed by invading foreign plunderers to subjugate the indegenious countries. It also included a significant number of ‘wanderers’ that had been displaced by a previous set of invading foreigners of Hausaland, the largest indegeneous country in the Nigerian State. Oddly, the Nigerian Army still bears the insignia of the invading foreign militia that subjugated the Hausa Country that straddles the Berlin created English owned Nigeria and the French owned Niger, and it (the Military) has been used to forcefully keep different natural and indegenious countries in the Nigerian State.
It has not been one-way traffic though, as men of the Military have, at various times, tried to break up the Nigerian State, and have also been the primary force in splintering it into various ‘federating’ units as its drifts along in its precarious history, pretending to mask the unitary structure it must maintain to survive, to the detriment and great harm of the indegenous countries and peoples trapped within its borders.
The 2nd volume of BrokeNation continues with its unique insight into Africa’s most populous and most problematic state. It highlights the creation of the Nigerian state as an unwilling collaboration of two sets of foreign invaders (which raises the possibility that the pioneer indigineous recruits of the Military may have viewed themselves as a liberating force), and how the objectives of the foreigners and the nature of the collaboration has changed over time; from plundering for resources in the early colonial era, to the assurance of millions of troops in case of a third World War, following India’s Independence after WW2.