Between Resource Plenty and State Failure

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject Politics - Region: Africa, grade: 2,0, University of Cologne (Institut für Afrikanistik), course: Konfliktherd Nigeria, language: English, abstract: Mineral wealth and concomitant phenomena of violence state weakness and corruption have been widely brought into contact by numerous scholars, as a considerable number of empirical cases seem to give evidence to this. Particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa the examples of Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo and Angola - just to mention some of the most striking ones - led to various hypotheses about the influence of resource plenty on governance issues. Due to several specific characteristics, the case of Nigeria is different to many others. First of all, the Federal Republic of Nigeria turned out to be Africa's most populous state with about 140 million citizens. In addition the social situation is rather unique, as Nigeria consists of more than 250 ethnic groups. The more than 500 spoken languages spoken in the country further illustrate the socio-cultural diversity. Nevertheless the three major communities include more than two thirds of the country's total population. On the socio-economic dimension a key feature is the overwhelming importance of oil as almost single export good and major contributor of the country's GDP. The strong dependence on oil has been challenging Nigeria's economy considerably and can be seen as a major reason for socio-economic disparities throughout the country, not to forget that it has been the origin for its '(political) Dutch disease'. Contrarily to other so-called 'crisis-states' the main issues threatening statehood and stability in Nigeria can be rather seen as domestic problems. Transnational issues like the relations with Cameroon do not have the same structuring quality as in other states. Although Nigeria improved in TI's CPI of 2008 the country still faces 'institutionalized' clientelism and rent-seeking at almost each political and social level as poor performance in 'group grievance', 'delegitimization of the state' or 'factionalized elites' may illustrate. Secondly manifold forms of institutional and informal violence are destabilizing the socio-political architecture. Various attempts to counter those phenomena have been ineffective or implemented insufficiently, sometimes not at all. The result is a current situation of disorder, human insecurity, economic inequality fed by a prosperous environment for individual enrichment provided by a state which is rather effective in facilitating illicit political and economic behaviours, be they plundering of public goods, drug or weapon trade or other.