Al-Qaeda in Africa (merged thread)

[tequila]

I remember Robert Kaplan of the Atlantic Monthly predicting anarchy in West Africa back in 1994...see article http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...-anarchy/4670/ What we may be seeing is a second wave of the anarchy with the same, unsolved poverty issues driving it.

I like how Kaplan also foresees the coming breakup of Canada in the cited article as well, complete with the absorption by the U.S. of its English-speaking portions.

Kaplan's hobbyhorse has always been the artificial nature of the nation-state in comparison to supposedly bedrock culture or religion - failing to note that cultures and religions are also artificial, malleable human constructs.

[KingJaja]

Thanks for this great article. I agree with what he wrote because I lived through it. In 1994, we were recovering from the aftermath of violence precipitated by the annulment of the 1993 presidential election. The Yoruba ethnic group took to the streets and rose in opposition to the dominant Hausa-Fulani. That era led to the rise of ethnic militias like the Odua People's Congress - (you might hear about them in future).

In 1995 Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged and the Niger Delta militancy really took off. I remember quite vividly a conversation in a taxi from Port Harcourt to Enugu in 1998. The anger was palpable and the consensus was that Nigeria was finished as a nation.

I was in Lagos in the late nineties and I witnessed a breakdown of law and order on an almost daily basis. I woke up to see the mangled remains of lynched robbery suspects and I also saw actual lynching taking place many times. The state began to break down and ethnic militia like the Odua People's Congress in the South West and the Bakassi Boys in the South East were called in to maintain law and order. Their methods were less than orthodox, but they had widespread support in the slums of Lagos, Onitsha and Aba.

All across West Africa and the Sahel, the state is being desperately weakened. West Africans structure their lives in such a way as to be independent of the state. For example, a study by the University of Newcastle showed that a whopping 75% of all children attending schools in Lagos, attend private schools. Nothing illustrates state failure as starkly as that statistic.

If the government cannot provide public goods, someone else will. And Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and Salafists are well placed to exploit these gaps.

Aid money from the West usually pours into government establishments, but governments are increasingly weak and incompetent. So the money is usually wasted.

I particularly like this, it illustrates the difficulty of dealing with groups like AQIM.

The fiction that the impoverished city of Algiers, on the Mediterranean, controls Tamanrasset, deep in the Algerian Sahara, cannot obtain forever. Whatever the outcome of the peace process, Israel is destined to be a Jewish ethnic fortress amid a vast and volatile realm of Islam. In that realm, the violent youth culture of the Gaza shantytowns may be indicative of the coming era.