9UNP1198SD_Adam_Paddock

- I'm Kari Borne. I'm from the Office of Continuing Education at UW Whitewater, and today's speaker is Dr. Adam Paddock. He's an assistant professor at UW Whitewater where he teaches courses in African history and 20th century world history. He received his master's degree and PhD in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012. He is the recipient of a FLAS Fellowship from the University of Florida and a two-time recipient of the Lumumba Research Fellowship for African History where he used to travel to Nigeria several times to complete his dissertation research. Adam's research focuses on the southern areas of Nigeria from the late 1800's up to the 1970's with a focus on children's history. He co-authored one book titled The Women's War of 1929: A History of Anti-Colonial Resistance in Eastern Nigeria, and he has co-edited two books and written several articles. His current research is on Boy Scouts in Nigeria and child socialization up to the 1970's. 

Dr. Paddock's lecture is titled "Trapped Between Colonial Legacies and Dysfunctional Leaders: Democratic Successes and Challenges in Nigeria." Welcome, Dr. Adam Paddock. 
[APPLAUSE]

- Thank you, Kari, for inviting me and thank everyone for showing up.

I'm happy to be here. I'm excited, and hopefully I'll have some things to share with you that you'll find interesting and enlightening. But while this is, of course, about democracy today, I can't start with the present because no good historian, right, would start with the present. So I have a few things I want to talk a little bit about Nigeria's history. 

Things that in particular bear some important effect on some of the issues today. But before I get there, just as a point of interest, sometimes people don't realize how diverse and how large Africa is. So right off the bat I would like to just, I have some images and we can just look at these and get a sense of some of the complex issues that are going to be related to this topic. I think my math is right. If I've made an error, I hope you'll forgive me because I am an historian, not a mathematician. But the United States' area is about 3.79 million square miles, and the Sahara Desert along is 3.62 million square miles. So I think it's a good way to just give us a sense of the sheer size of Africa as a continent.

And here's just a fairly modern new country map. And right here is Nigeria. So I'll be focused pretty much on Nigeria today. 

So you can kind of see it there. And just to give you a sense of the size of Nigeria, it is 356,000 square miles, which, to compare that, the state of Texas is 268,000 square miles. So it's a little bit larger than the state of Texas. Okay?

In terms of population, Nigeria currently, the 2013 estimate was a population of about 177 million people. Okay? So that's significantly, a significant number of people when you consider the size. A little bit larger than Texas, but 177 million people. And to further emphasize this, Nigeria has 12 to 13 cities, by the time next census takes place, it might be 14 or 15 cities, with over a million people. To compare, the US has nine cities with over a million people. 

So it gives you a sense that this is not that large of a country really, but a highly populated country with a lot of people who live in cities. And Lagos, you can see it on a map here, down here near the coast, it's the largest city in Nigeria with 21 million people as of the current estimate for the population.

And here's just a blowup of Nigeria so we can get a nice picture. And here is a street in Lagos, Nigeria. I spent most of my time in Lagos when I traveled to Nigeria. This photo, though, I did not take myself. And then don't worry about all the names and details of this map, but what it is is each different color on this map corresponds to a different language group. Nigeria is also one of the most diverse countries in Africa in terms of its language diversity. There is many people who have tried to count the number of different languages in Nigeria. Some estimates are around 300 different languages from different language families. 

Some numbers have gone as high as 521 different languages. Although, I question, I'm not sure how accurate that high number is. The importance of this, and I think it bears a lot on some of the issues I'm going to talk about it, is that some of these languages, they're not dialects. Some of these languages are as different from one another as Chinese is from English. Just to give you a sense of the diversity, the cultural and ethnic diversity within the country.

So, what can I say about Nigeria's history of importance? Well, I think the main thing to sum up is that when the British, the Brits were the country that colonized Nigeria beginning in the late 1800's up until about World War I before they finally had control of most of the this area of Africa, and I'll start this out by saying that British conquest in Nigeria is never easy. It rarely occurred quickly. Some African groups, some ethnic groups held out quite a long time, sometimes five, six years, fighting the British before the British took control. The other important thing to note about this story that bears a lot of importance to today is that the process was always violent. 

Even once the British had control of Nigeria, an historian wrote a book just a couple years ago that won one of the highest awards a book can earn on Africa history, made this argument that the process of colonial rule in Nigeria was always violent, from beginning to end. Even after the British had control of the colony, local resistances and protests led to consistent issues of violence and violent conflict. Now, that's pretty important to think about because some people, when they talk about problems in African countries today, a country like Nigeria, one of the things that people question is how come they didn't learn more from the British? How come they weren't more effective, once they had independence, to institute ideas of democratic government? Why did some of these attempts at democracy fail? And one thing to note is that while Britain at this time was democracy, right? They had a parliamentary government. They had elected rulers. Africans were never participants in that process. So even though Britain itself is a democracy at this time when they're ruling Nigeria, they do not rule Nigeria like a democracy. 

They rule Nigeria, really, like a dictatorship. Africans never have a say in any government. They can't pick the rulers that administer the government over them. These are all selected by the British government. I think that's very important to keep in mind because Nigerians, up until independence, never really had many opportunities in terms of participating in a democratic system. So we have to keep that in mind.

Now, when the British conquered Nigeria, they conquered it with the assumption that all Africans were tribes and they all had chiefs. And what they tried to do was force local chiefs to be a part of their government administration. So the idea was it would be cheaper if they could get African rulers to help them and keeping the peace and controlling them, that it would be somehow cheaper for them, they wouldn't have to pay as many administrators. Now, this ran into a serious problem in eastern Nigeria because in eastern Nigeria they never had any chiefs. 

And the British were always confused by this. It really wasn't until 1929 or the 1930's that they really began to figure this out. Because in eastern Nigeria, the people govern themselves with elected councils or councils of elders, community representatives. Those members of the community that had the most experience would form a council, and they would discuss and make community decisions for the towns or villages, the areas that apply. So when the British come in there, the come in with guns blazing to conquer these people, never even realizing they had some sort of democratic ideal. And what they did was the British insisted that these people select chiefs because their idea of using local chiefs to administer governments, they needed to identify some chiefs. So here come the British with their guns, they've already shot up some villages, they come around again another time and they say to these villagers, or these people living in these towns, bring out your chief, we want to talk to him. Now, you have to understand from the people's perspective, they're wondering, well, what are they going to do with these people? They're trying to find out who the leaders of our community are so they can either imprison them or kill them. Who knows, right, what they're going to do. 

And so what these people did, and their ethnic group was Igbo, what they decided to do is many of them, they would discuss, the elders would discuss, what are we going to do? Who are we going to hand to the British? They've got these guns, the Gatling gun, Maxim gun, machine gun, we don't want to resist them anymore. They killed enough people. So what are we going to do? And so what they decide to do is to pick somebody from the community to send out to the British that didn't really matter too much what happened to them. There's one pick where the British arrived at a very opportune time because the local people had just arrested and caught a murderer. The man had murdered somebody in the local community. And so the British say ah-ha, or, excuse me, the Igbo say, ah-ha, here is a great strategy. We'll send out the murderer, give the murderer, the criminal, to the British and we'll solve our problem. 

We won't have to deal with punishing them. The British will do it for us. So they send out the person that committed the murder to the British. And this is an extreme case in terms of the murderer, but by and large, the Igbo communities would send out dysfunctional members of the community, those who are troublemakers, those who didn't follow the rules. And, lo and behold, I bet you can guess what the British did. They made them into the chiefs, what they called the warrant chiefs, and set them at the head to govern these communities for them. So a huge, really, disaster, and so, in many cases, these rulers were never accepted, these administrators were never accepted by the local people. They were the ones who caused problems, not the ones who should be given political power.

Now, because this system wasn't democratic, the other thing to note is that while the British are a democracy themselves in terms of the way its governed, not only is it a dictatorship, but there is inherent corruption in the system. The reason is because, of course, the British have this vested interest in trying to keep these chiefs happy, greasing the fingers so to speak, give them these benefits to make sure they help them maintain control. 

And so there's some inherent corruption here. Oftentimes, those who become chiefs are not those who are respected in the communities all throughout colonial rule, but they're often those who assist the British. Those who do favors for them, help them, they get favors in return.

Now, I want to say just a couple things about the economy because we can't really talk about contemporary Nigeria without also thinking about current economic situations. And the way the British ran the economy in Nigeria was a couple strategies. The first one they used was forced labor. Almost all the roads and railroads built in Nigeria under colonial rule were done so with forced labor. So they go to these warrant chiefs or other chiefs and tell them we want to build a railroad, supply us with a hundred laborers. And these people were not paid. And, of course, Nigerians hated forced labor, and what happened afterward they hated just as much, which was taxation. 

Oftentimes, once many of the roads and railroads were built and the British had no need of forced labor, and instead they want to introduce taxes to help pay for the administration. Nigerians, historically and today, hate the concept of taxes, and that is also important. What we have here on this map is very instructive in terms of the importance of how the British and other colonial governments built railroads. So you don't have to worry about the writing, but if you look at the colors, this purplish black here, where railroads were completed in West Africa by 1960, the gray is ones they were considering building and never did. The important part about this is these colored areas you see correspond to different cash crops. Like, for example, the green being brown nuts or peanuts. And what you'll learn by this is when these colonial governments, like the British, built railroads, they were building them in order to connect to

crops that they wanted to sell, buy and sell and make money on their international market. That's important because the railroads weren't necessarily built to benefit Africans. They were built to benefit this economic system, this strategy of extracting raw materials and resources from Africa for profits. 

Okay?

And I think I can sum that up by saying a famous quote that Africans produced what they did not consume, and they consumed what they did not produce. The whole strategy was to extract resources from Africa to sell on the international market and then sell back to them finished goods. So, if we talk about poverty, I don't think there isn't poverty in Nigeria today, but, really, the experience of poverty in general in Africa is not an historical experience, but it is much a created one because people were forced in many ways, in many cases, to produce these crops for export, like cocoa or chocolate, which they did not eat, or brown nuts, which really was not a main staple of their diet but rather was for peanuts and other things on the international market. So the problem is this sense of poverty is historically created to a certain extent because they're actually, instead of making crops they will consume themselves, they're in this position of making crops that are going to be sold externally and they have to buy stuff that's imported. It creates and imbalance there. And the way in which the British and other countries enforced this was by taxation. Africans had to participate in this system in order to get European currency to pay the taxes. So rather than using the forced labor, they then create this institution system, this process of taxation and how they're going to get European currency in order to pay these bills.

So, that's a little bit of historical overview. 

Now I want to talk about two things. One, what are some of the problems, some of the challenges facing Nigeria today and Nigeria's democracy and how they perhaps connect to some of these issues. Then, of course, the success because actually I think there's quite a few successes, even in this last week, that I can talk about. So, first of all, in terms of self-determination, in terms of setting up their own independent country with their own sense of ideals, Nigeria and most African countries in some ways start out behind because being a colony of the British, the British force cultural changes. In many ways, by forcing cultural changes, it creates a certain sense of conflict within society, if that makes sense. You look at successful democracies like the United States and Britain itself and you see that they were able to have their own cultural values and develop these ideas of democracy within the context of their own culture. African countries did not have the benefit. They have external ideals forced upon them without them being able to sort out those issues for themselves.

Another issue is that once Nigeria got independence, it's usually what we call the honeymoon period. They gain independence, everybody is happy, everybody is getting along, like, "Yes, we've accomplished this." 

And they're ready to set out with all their effort to correct all of these problems that they felt and experienced as part of colonial experience, like having almost no education or very small public education. What they find is that while these early leaders had these grand plans, for many Africans, for many Nigerians, this happened too little, too slowly. And, in some cases, they were too hard on them. And if I go back to this as an example, you can kind of imagine, just the railroads as an example, that you can't just change this overnight. You can't just change the economy and say, okay, we're not going to do any of the cash crops anymore and tomorrow we're going to start producing something else, our own food. It takes time to make those changes. You can't just uproot the railroads that they built, right, and just make all new ones overnight. It's expensive. And so, in some ways, these early independence leaders and heads of state were dealing with these structural issues, these things that were already set in place, and they were trying to figure out how to move forward even though these types of issues weren't what they wanted, if that makes sense, or weren't what was in their best interest. And what happened after this honeymoon period, of course, people start to be upset. 

Things are moving too slow, and that's when we begin to see coups and other political problems in Nigeria because almost all these independence leaders were highly educated. They were all educated in the United States and Britain, had PhDs. But the problem is once things aren't changing quick enough, they're like wait a second, these people were educated abroad, right? They must be just helping out these foreign countries still even though we have independence. And so the sense of not moving fast enough in many ways set these leaders up for failures.

So, where does that leave us now? Well, current issues.

In terms of the economy, one issue has to do with transnational companies in the way which business and the finances of the government operate, in my opinion. This is my opinion. I'm not a political scientist. 

Maybe a political scientist will come later in this talk and refute what I'm saying. From my perspective, one of the issues is transnational companies. And this is important because the question is, how does the Nigerian government, how does the Nigerian government get its funds to manage questions of state? Because Nigerians hate taxes, a large amount of the Nigerian economy business operates without any government control, without any government taxes. So if they're not getting most of the money from taxes, then how do they get their money? And this is a huge disconnect, I think, between how the government runs and our ideas of democracy.

Now, one way they get money is by imports. They can tax stuff that's imported to the country to sell, but they're not taxing people's income. Instead, they're getting a significant amount of their money from oil and transnational companies that they're doing business with who are buying oil, like Royal Dutch Shell . And, in fact, Nigeria is the world's 11th largest oil producer, ahead of Venezuela. 

And so this is very interesting. So you have a large amount of money that the government uses to run itself not coming from its own citizens but from external companies that are paying to mine. Of course, you can imagine some of the issues that can arise in that is these international companies have their own agenda to make money, and in some ways they're trying to manipulate governments to their own advantage rather than what is best for, perhaps, the citizens.

And with that also comes a significant amount of unemployment. And the unemployment is partly connected to this past because the British never had any intent to build factories in Africa. They didn't want to build factories in Britain, or, excuse me, in Nigeria because they wanted raw materials for their factories in Great Britain. So when Nigeria gets independence, one of the big challenges is they have no industrial capacity. The British government didn't allow it. And so what we have today is still an attempt to recover that, to try and make up for that and change this type of situation. And currently there is still a high level of unemployment in Nigeria, for especially young men and young women who even have a university education. 

Many of them looking to migrate out of Nigeria. For example, nurses, doctors, so on and so forth. And many of them end up in the United States because they can find better jobs here. The other thing I would note is the colonial system cultivated a sense of corruption within the government, and that's why I mentioned that story of the warrant chiefs because, in some ways, the legacy of how to do business in Nigeria is not one of the democratic process but sort of this inherent type of corruption that began with the British system. And so you still hear people complain today that people get positions in government because they're friends of somebody and these kinds of things, and I think we have to bear two responsibilities here. One is on the legacy in Nigeria, the colonial legacy, but, also, we can't absolve the current leaders either perpetuating this. But it seems to be a recurring issue on different levels. And the final thing, well, two things I'll further mention. One, the biggest other major problem I think that's a challenge to democracy in Nigeria today is gender inequality. The rate of gender violence is much higher than one would like, and women are often marginalized and their opportunities limited in terms of business and job opportunities. 

Then, finally, the last one I would mention is pollution. You can imagine a country a little bit larger than Texas with 177 million people, so there's a significant amount of air pollution. It's funny, whenever I, I shouldn't tell this story, but whenever I arrive in Nigeria and I exit the plane, one of the first things I notice is I sniff the smell and I'm like, man, it smells like when I was a kid riding in the early 1980's as a toddler in my dad's car and I'm smelling pollution in the city. I kind of go back to that experience in upstate New York because you can definitely tell when you land in a city like Lagos with 21 million people, the air pollution is actually quite obvious to me because here I don't smell it so much. When you go back there, it's one of the first things that hits me. And with that is this funny cartoon where they have problems with electrical power. There's often cycling brownouts in Nigeria. The people in Nigeria often blame it on the government for messing things up. And this is actually a cartoon that my wife sent me that was popular, circulating in Nigeria last year. So we've got fish and a fish bowl with a cat, and he says, "So, you want to talk?" 

And, of course, down here it says, "Ha!Ha! I trust NEPA." NEPA is the acronym for Nigerian Energy Production Association. So the cat is threatening to plug this electrode into the wall, and the fish is like I'm not worried about it. I'm trusting that they won't have power on. Right? Now, in this case, I want to actually absolve the Nigerian government a little bit in this area. While they have a problem with electric power, you also have to realize we're talking about a significant population boom in the last two decades. We're talking close to 20% population increase. So we have this huge booming population. 

These are young people, right? What do they want? They want to watch movies, they got their laptops, they've got their iPads, they've got their smartphones. Everybody wants to use more and more electrical power with this booming population, and it's something I don't think Nigeria was ready for. And it's a very interesting problem because this is the one thing that makes everybody mad in Nigeria. So, no simple solution to that. So that's some of the problems and some of the challenges. Let me mention a few of the successes.

By the way, in terms of electric, the Nigerian government is currently moving to privatize the electric power. I have my suspicion as to whether that's going to work out well or not. 

I have a feeling that the price is going to go up too much and it's going to place a large number of the populous unable to pay these bills, but we'll see what happens. So in terms of improvements, Nigeria is making some significant strides and plans to improve their infrastructure. So this is sort of like the colonial map of how some of these railroads would go. And you can tell, Abuja is the capital and there's even any railroad going to the capital. Okay? Because it wasn't important. Some significant cities like Lagos aren't connected to other important cities with railroads. But here is a plan of improvement and modernization where the Nigerian government is trying to correct that. They want to put in some high speed trains to help facilitate movement throughout the country in a way that makes sense to Africans. Where people want to go rather than the old colonial system. 

We'll see as to whether they're successful or not with changing that. Now, while there's been a lot of past struggles and problems with dictatorships in Nigeria, they have now gone several times with a peaceful transition from one democratic ruler to another. Now, some people question how fair and free these elections were, but even if there's some corruption involved, it's still better than the military coups. So I think that that is one success. Perhaps there's some more improvement to make in that regard, but we can at least say, well, they're going from one democracy, one democratic ruler to another without some military takeover. And I think that part of that is because I don't think Nigerians will accept another coup. I don't know if it's possible I was discussing this with a friend of mine from Lagos just a couple weeks ago from Lagos, and he kind of agreed with me so I'm going to go with this, that with modern technology of smartphones the way to organize movements, and Facebook, social media, given Nigeria's population is so large, I think military coups, or least I'm hoping, are a thing of the past. That, really, there's only one way to go and hopefully it's forward. Because, really, Nigerians, by and large, they are expecting democracy. They expect it at this point.

Now, the other thing is both perhaps a challenge and a benefit, is this concept of ethnic diversity, all the languages and different ethnic groups. In the past, some people have said that this is a problem that creates division within the country, and that is partly true because there was a civil war in the 1960's and the Hausa people in the north and the Igbo people in the east, they still, they don't really like each other that much. They have some significant differences. There was a lot of events which brought on genocide during that civil war. So there is some of that, but, at the same time, we have to say they're doing pretty good to have over 300 different languages and ethnic groups and still have some sort of functioning democracy. So I think that's something to give them credit for, I think, that in spite of these challenges, we can see some progress.

I'll give you a modern picture of Lagos just so you have an idea and bigger view of the city.

Along with this new technology and demand for smartphones, this has also revolutionized life in Nigeria in some ways because wireless technology has really changed the way people live. In the US, we don't really consider that too much because we have landlines, we have land connected Internet. The problem with Nigeria is it was so expensive to put in those lines, right? 

To dig up the ground and put in these permanent lines is an expensive process. Wireless technology has allowed Africans, and Nigerians in particular in this case, to skip that. They can skip it. They don't have to deal with the high cost of putting in landlines. They just put up cell towers, and their access their Internet and their phone calls through the cellular wireless technology. So, in some ways, it allows them to skip that expensive intermediary step of development. In fact, as of 2013, the estimate was that there were over 120 million active cell lines in Nigeria. So the ratio of population to cell lines is not that different than the United States.

In terms of economy, I'm almost done and then we can ask questions, in terms of economy, I would say that, just my own experience, I've never seen the level of entrepreneurship anyplace else that I've ever been than I've seen in Nigeria. In fact, I was also talking to a friend of mine from Nigeria and we were laughing about this because I said when you meet somebody, you don't ask them what is their business. 

You ask them, "What are your businesses?" Usually a man might have one or two of his own businesses, and his wife may have her own business. Some of them run their own private schools and so on and so forth. And often the women and men, when they're successful, they have their own separate business activities that they pursue on their own accord. And so, in fact, Nigeria, last year, just past South Africa to have the largest economy in Africa. So they currently have the largest economy in Africa in terms of GDP or how they calculate the wealth of a country. And they do this, they have achieved this, one, with their problems with electricity. There is almost often few or no night entertainment.

Night entertainment is sporadic because if the power goes out, you can't watch a movie. So there's a huge time period, a segment of the economy that they can't even effectively participate in, and despite that, they're still the largest economy in Africa. 

And also, much of the independent businesses, because they don't charge income taxes, much of this is without easy access to actually calculate So the economy, the value of the economy in Nigeria could be even much larger than we know because now all of these business activities aren't carefully tracked. And now I'll mention two things and I'm done that were in the news last week. Many of you, if you've watched the news or read some newspapers, you've probably heard about two stories related to Nigeria this last year. Either Boko Haram, who, if you remember, was a radical group that kidnapped a couple hundred girls from a school in northern Nigeria. You may have heard about that. The other one you would have heard about was Ebola, which is currently in Sierra Leone and Liberia and there was a few cases in Nigeria. What I can say very happily is that it looks like Nigeria has solved both of those problems, or are very close to solving them. In terms of the Ebola, only eight cases were reported in Nigeria, and they were in Nigeria because of somebody who traveled there from Liberia. It was just last week that the government announced they'd been tracking over 500 people to which those individuals could have come in contact with, and they passed the 21 days of quarantine without seeing any new symptoms in the country. And it's very interesting because PBS was the only news station that picked up this story. 

But the World Health Organization actually praised Nigeria for handling this crisis just as good or better than any other western nation. That they effectively quarantined and prevented any sort of outbreak. Hopefully nothing new emerges in the coming weeks, but currently it looks like they were very successful in that regard. And in terms of Boko Haram, it was just this last week that the government announced that they believe they've captured about 260 of these individuals. The main leader of the movement is reported dead, and the guy who tried to take over for him is reported having been captured. So hopefully in the coming weeks that will also have been resolved. So I think that regardless of some of these challenges, I would sum it up to say that regardless of some of these challenges and some of these issues, I think there's also a significant amount of successes that we can point to in terms of Nigeria being able to move forward in several areas of being very functioning and healthy and perhaps optimistic democracy. Thank you so much. 
[APPLAUSE]