Africa
Page 28
LIBYA
A major battleground during World War II, Libya became independent in 1951 under Idris el-Senussi as one of the world’s poorest countries. The discovery of oil in great quantities at the end of the 1950s transformed its prospects and during the 1960s Libya enjoyed an oil boom that would change both the economy and the political standing of the country. In 1961 the government decreed that Libya should take a 50 per cent share of all oil profits. When he came to power Idris faced the daunting task of coalescing into one the three different provinces of Tripolitania, Cyrenaica and Fezzan. He was a shrewd statesman who had led the opposition to the Italians, but in 1951 Libya had few trained personnel to operate a modern state. Idris, who turned out to be an enlightened autocrat – he created a vigilant police force – disapproved of political parties. In February 1962 87 people were imprisoned for ‘forming in Libya cells of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party and carrying on subversive activities aimed at overthrowing the political, economic and social system’.
During the 1950s, before the discovery of oil, Libya turned to the West for financial support, offering base facilities in return. An agreement with Britain in 1953 and another with the United States in 1954 made available to them base facilities for financial subventions for the budget and development assistance. Libya signed a friendship pact with France in 1955 and a trade and financial agreement with Italy in 1957. This overt dependence upon the West was to change following the discovery of oil in 1959. The problems that came with rapidly increasing oil wealth led the King to appoint a new cabinet in 1963 under Dr Mohieddin Fekini who, as Prime Minister, first made Libya into a unitary state on 27 April 1963. In May of that year Libya closed its ports to the shipping of South Africa and Portugal because of their racial policies. Pacts entered into with Morocco in 1962 and Algeria in 1963 marked a move away from close ties with the West. In 1964 a new Prime Minister, Mahmud Muntasser, said he did not intend to renew the base agreements with Britain and the United States but would terminate them by negotiation. At the same time as he announced this policy the Chamber of Deputies passed a resolution to the effect that if negotiations were unsuccessful it would pass legislation to abrogate the treaties anyway. In response Britain withdrew the bulk of its forces in 1966 and the Americans indicated they would do the same. The 1967 Six Day War greatly heightened tensions throughout the region and the political attitude in Libya changed from one of moderation to one of virulent anti-Westernism. The British and US embassies were attacked, and Jewish minorities were persecuted so that many Jews left for Italy or Malta. Libyan and Algerian troops were moved to Egypt but the war was over before they could be deployed. On 16 June the Prime Minister requested the United States and Britain to liquidate their bases and withdraw their forces from Libya as soon as possible. On 28 October, after dismissing two prime ministers in quick succession, the King appointed Abdul Hamid Bakhush who initiated a policy of rapid modernization, including the purchase of up-to-date military equipment from Britain. In the aftermath of the war Libya agreed to make annual payments of £30 million to Egypt and Jordan to help them recover from the effects of the war. Oil output in 1967 came to 627,137,968 barrels, equivalent to 1.7 million b/d and by 1968 Libya had become the second-largest oil producer of the Arab world. In August 1968 a final agreement was reached for the evacuation of the British and American bases. Meanwhile, fresh oil discoveries led the government to devise a new policy to control oil concessions through the state-run oil company, the National Libyan Petroleum Corporation.
On 1 September 1969, when King Idris was undergoing medical treatment in Turkey, the Free Officers Movement that Gaddafi had founded as a student at the Benghazi military college mounted a bloodless coup to oust the old King. On 13 September Gaddafi became Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council to inaugurate a new era in Libya.
Like the rest of the continent, the countries of North Africa had all been colonized by the European powers, but unlike the countries to their south their first loyalties were to the Arab world of the Middle East. Arab unity, the confrontation with Israel and Islam were always their priorities and though they played their part in the formation of the OAU and in encouraging the general solidarity of African countries in relation to the great powers there was always a sense, however well disguised, that they were only part committed to the new independent Africa that was emerging. This split personality, half Arab, half African, was understandable but it did mean that extra care was needed to foster Arab-African relations and this necessity continued down to the end of the century. Nasser was the outstanding exception, one of the most impressive figures of the decade. Although Nasser ‘temporarily gained personal leadership in the region, Egypt was never strong enough to dominate the Middle East nor to prevent the interference of the great powers. He could never find a formula to accommodate the Palestinians or the Israelis’. Many judgements have been passed on Nasser but at the height of his powers in the first half of the 1960s he stood head and shoulders above his peers in the Arab world. One judgement of his home achievements is as follows: ‘At home he did achieve some social and economic success. He modernized his country, built the Aswan High Dam and improved agricultural productivity. He created a fairer society and transferred some land to the fellahin, but his centralized, nationalized, socialist economy was a recipe for failure and did not survive much beyond his lifetime.’7 A more upbeat assessment of his achievements acknowledges a far wider impact upon his country, the Arab world and Africa:
Gamal Abdul Nasser was a remarkable man. Future ages will look upon him as one of the two or three key figures of the middle years of the twentieth century. For all the diplomatic and military failures of his later years, which cost some of Egypt’s hard-won independence by placing it heavily in debt to the Soviet Union, Nasser’s influence on the Middle East and much of the Third World was profound. Radical young army officers as far away as Latin America have been called ‘Nasserists’ as the best way of describing what they stand for.
He achieved for Egypt some of the attributes of a great power though his greatest achievements were at home:
… the body of pragmatic social and economic policies which became known as Arab Socialism. The dismantling of the powers of the old bourgeois and feudal classes, land reform, big strides in industrialization, the building of the High Dam and above all the instillation into the Egyptians of the feeling that development could be a national enterprise, were the real legacies of the Nasserist revolution, and certainly there was no part of the Arab world that was too remote to be influenced by them.8
His death in 1970 marked the end of an Arab era of resurgence.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Nigerian Civil War
The state of Nigeria was an artificial creation of British imperialism and its near disintegration during the latter half of the 1960s bore out the doubts that Macmillan expressed on his visit in January 1960 during his tour of Africa. From the moment of independence, indeed in the run-up to it, there had been fierce pulls away from the centre by the three regions of the North, the West and the East with the two smaller southern regions fearing domination by the North. Each region had a population greater in size than those of most other African countries. When Britain extended its power over what later became Nigeria it created separate colonies, which were only amalgamated to form a single Nigeria by Lord Lugard in 1914. Thereafter, the British colonial administrators fostered strong regional governments and, if anything, encouraged a sense of rivalry between the component parts of its colony while maintaining a balance from the centre. In 1914 there was no historical basis for Nigerian unity except British imperial convenience. At independence, therefore, the new Nigeria was based upon three largely autonomous regions whose interests tended to pull against any central authority and both before and after the British had departed there was intense rivalry as to which group or combination should control the centre. A further complication resulted from the fact that about two million of the Ibo people from the E
astern Region were dispersed in other parts of Nigeria, many of them holding jobs in the more conservative Islamic North where their presence was often resented. This structure, with its inbuilt tensions, that the new state inherited at independence produced increasingly divisive strains in the years 1960–66. Efforts to balance the claims and counter-claims of the three regions failed to satisfy the aspirations of any one of them and the federal political system began to fall apart.
The complexities of Nigeria’s history need to be understood in order to explain what occurred after independence. For centuries, until modern times, the North, the great majority of whose people were Muslims, had looked overland across the Sahara for its inspiration. In the South, the forests had isolated and fragmented the tribes and though there developed a clear North-South division, there were also many other divisions including the Yoruba kingdoms in the West, the Benin kingdom in the mid-West and the Ibos of the East who were less hierarchical and more democratic than any of the others. Then came the Europeans: at first on the coast as traders and slavers, then as imperialists who extended their influence into the interior by trade. It is one of the great ironies of West Africa’s colonial history that while the French have been accused of ‘balkanizing’ their vast territories of West and Equatorial Africa prior to independence so as to ensure their continuing post-independence influence, the British in Nigeria were accused of the opposite – the creation of a huge artificial state whose three main ethnic groups ought to have had individual countries of their own.
When Nigeria became independent on 1 October 1960, the stage-managed grandeur of the state occasion and the resultant euphoria briefly acted to mask the inherent contradictions that the new government had to face. Earlier that year Macmillan had remarked on the arbitrary imposed frontiers, which he described as ‘criminal’ in the way they divided tribal territories, and his political antennae sensed a looming regional-federal crisis. He was not alone in his forebodings about the stresses that Nigeria would face once independence had become an accomplished fact. At least the discovery of oil in the late 1950s gave rise to hopes of rapid economic developments although oil could create as many problems as it solved: ‘Shell alone is estimated to have invested a greater sum in Nigeria than the total manufacturing investment in that country. By 1964 the company claimed to have sunk £130 million in its Nigerian industry.’1 Since most of the oil was found in the East, in what would become Biafra during the civil war, it was to play a significant role in that war, persuading the Ibos that they could create a viable state of their own, and ensuring that the Federal Government would make every effort to obtain control of the oilfields as quickly as possible once hostilities were under way. By 6 September 1968 most of the oil-producing areas of Biafra had been taken by the Federal forces so that Biafra thereafter did not even have oil as a bargaining counter.
CIVIL GOVERNMENT 1960–66
In 1960 the three leading politicians were the Ibo Nnamdi Azikiwe, the Yoruba Chief Obafemi Awolowo and the Hausa Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. As politicians prior to independence they had each demonstrated remarkable political talents yet between them they failed Nigeria in the post-independence years. Balewa as the Federal Prime Minister did his best to achieve a balance between the regions but he was never strong enough to hold the country together. Two other powerful political figures were the northern hereditary ruler, Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, who was a champion of Northern rights and never thought in terms of a greater Nigeria, and Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, the Federal Minister of Finance. Given its background, what would best have suited Nigeria at independence would have been an authoritarian, radical regime capable of overriding the regional concerns of most other politicians. Unfortunately, the only real radicalism produced in Nigeria had been against the British and once they had departed politics descended into an argument about how the national ‘cake’ should be shared and the cake was in any case severely limited. A federal system ought to be used to unite a range of people who have in common more than the differences that separate them. Unfortunately in Nigeria, it appeared to work the other way round: ‘When self-government came, it came separately, at different times to the North and the South. Independence was possible only because the federal system enabled the various peoples to keep each other at arm’s length. Above all, the system was intended to provide a guarantee that no one tribe could easily dominate the rest.’2 Underlying political tensions were the problem, peculiar to all Africa at that time, of rising expectations that the government could provide jobs for all its citizens. ‘The government is the only substantial employer; and the output of school-leavers continually outstrips the number of new jobs available. This makes politics ruthless. Office means a livelihood not only for a politician but for his “extended” family and, beyond that, his village, town and tribe. In office, politicians will do almost all they can to stay there; out of office, they will do almost anything to get in.’3
Nigeria’s problems were in no sense unique. Every African country that came to independence in the 1960s faced rising expectations that were stymied by limited resources, the need for development on all fronts that was held back by the absence of anything like an adequately trained professional or technical class, and the need to attract investment funds. What placed Nigeria on a different plane to most other African countries was the size of the population: it simply had more people to educate, train and employ than anyone else. At the end of World War II illiteracy was almost total. In 1955 the Western Region became the first African government to introduce universal free primary education and by 1960 three million children were in 17,000 schools. At the same time the North, with half Nigeria’s total population, had hardly begun an educational programme and in 1959 its primary school population was only 250,000. At that time the Northern Region had an estimated 25 million population, the Western Region seven million, the Eastern Region 12 million and the Mid-West two million.
The easy task had been persuading the British to leave. ‘It was only when they had held power themselves for some time that the Nigerian political class began to appreciate how scarce were the resources that a government in a poor country could mobilize, and how few in numbers and how thinly spread through the country was the administrative service that had once (under the British) looked so all pervasive. But before they had made those shattering discoveries Nigerian politicians had over-committed their resources and personnel. They had also opened Pandora’s box of aspirations with welfare schemes that whetted people’s hopes at least as much as they fulfilled their expectations.’4 At least Nigeria did not face race problems of the kind that afflicted Southern Africa: there was no segregation and Nigerians were to be found on the boards of expatriate companies while half the managerial staff of big expatriate companies were Nigerian by the early 1960s. Corruption, however, was a different matter and resentment against politicians who became rich overnight was certainly a contributory cause of the widespread jubilation at the overthrow of the Federal Government at the beginning of 1966. Another problem concerned the continuation at independence of colonial salary scales for civil servants: these created a glaring differential between the new ruling elite and the mass of the people whose per capita income averaged £30. When the collapse came in 1966, ‘The peoples of Nigeria had never before been jointly disenchanted by the same government. While the people of other countries might have resented colonialism together, the peoples of Nigeria had not even shared a joint feeling of anti-colonialism together. The North especially had been too suspicious of the South, and too cautious in her assessment of independence, even to get worked up into a strong feeling of nationalism.’5
Although Nigeria attracted much goodwill at independence this was insufficient to ensure an adequate inflow of development capital on the scale required to create employment for all the new school-leavers. The country’s rate of economic growth, it soon became clear, would depend, at least in part, upon events both political and economic in Britain, the European Econ
omic Community and the United States, and to some extent the Soviet Union as well, and stabilizing commodity prices – a policy much advocated at the time – was no substitute for expanding markets. Given liberal trading policies abroad and political stability at home, there was then no reason to believe that Nigeria would not emerge from the 1960s with a stronger and better-balanced economy, but the proviso was essential. In 1961 Chief Festus Okotie-Eboh, the Minister of Finance, led an economic mission to visit 23 countries. In London he said he wanted to increase the flow of capital between Nigeria and the countries he was visiting. Nigeria faced three major economic problems: how to increase exports to pay for the ever-rising flood of imports; how to attract overseas investment for industry, to meet balance of payments and provide employment for the swelling numbers of school-leavers; and how to attract financial and other assistance for government development plans.
The proposed 1962–68 National Development Plan aimed to spend £600 million on Federal and Regional projects. Optimistically, Hella Pick wrote in the Guardian: ‘The various governments have always drawn up separate development programmes, and although there has been some co-operation through the National Economic Development Council these plans have covered differing periods, and very frequently there has been intense competition between the regions for the limited resources available. Now, however, a miracle has occurred: for the first time there will be a national plan, incorporating both regional and Federal plans.’7 The Federal Government was to spend nearly £60 million on road development and give top priority to improving communications with Niger and Chad to the north, its practical way of advancing towards closer regional union. The Plan, with increased allocations to bring it to £676 million, was launched at the end of 1962 and the aim was to raise £300 million for public expenditure and £200 million for private investment from outside, with the United States, Britain, West Germany, Canada, Israel and Japan each making pledges of financial or technical assistance, Czechoslovakia offering credits and Russia scholarships, as well as further assistance from various UN bodies. All this aid did not cover the targets set by Lagos. A survey in 1963 revealed that there were 5,000 Nigerians at the upper levels of government working alongside 2,500 expatriates; there were also 600 senior Nigerian engineers, 1,000 accountants and auditors, 425 registered doctors and dentists although senior staff in the universities were mainly expatriate.8 On the eve of the first coup in January 1966 the expatriate community consisted of about 40,000 British and a further 20,000 French, German, Dutch, Italian, Greek, Lebanese, Swiss and American expatriates, representing the rapidly growing international aid community and mainly in commercial and technical posts.