Nigeria struggles for unity as 40th birthday nears

PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria (Reuters) -- A faded 1957 group photograph sits oddly on the carefully arranged coffee table in Chief Harold Dappa-Biriye's retirement home in this southeastern Nigerian oil city.

Picking up the black and white photo, Dappa-Biriye studies the group of African and European dignitaries seated round a horseshoe-shaped table in a conference hall.

"It's the 1957 London Lancaster House constitutional conference on Nigeria before our independence in 1960," he said.

"I am sure you don't recognize me in the picture," added Dappa-Biriye, who turned 80 on September 26. "The British gave us an opportunity to go there, but I looked them in the face and told them their regional structure of Nigeria was wrong."

Britain, he said, left Nigeria with one central government and three regions, each dominated by an ethnic group but including many minorities with hardly any voice.

"I opposed the concept of concentrating power in the hands of three big ethnic groups at the expense of minorities," Dappa-Biriye explained. He attended the conference as leader of the Niger Delta Congress, a minority group in Nigeria's then Eastern Region.

As Nigeria marks its 40th birthday on October 1, ethnic and regional rivalries that pushed Africa's most populous nation to civil war in the late 1960s remain as much a central concern as they were at the Lancaster House talks.

Most Nigerians agree that such rivalries, as well as deeply ingrained corruption and decades of dictatorial rule by soldiers accountable to no one, have kept their resource-rich country in poverty after 40 years of nationhood.

The latest World Bank world development report says about 70 percent of Nigerians still live on less than $1 a day although the country is the world's sixth largest oil exporter.

Standards of living and the state of social and essential services are inferior to those of 20 years ago. A foreign debt of about $30 billion hangs over Nigeria's more than 110 million people, with no sign of a breakthrough in efforts to win relief from creditors.

"If there is anything to thank the Lord for, it is for keeping the nation together after all the tortuous days it has passed through since independence in 1960," Information Minister Jerry Gana told the congregation at a church service to mark the anniversary.

Many Nigerians are not so sure given the widening ethnic and regional tensions reminiscent of events leading up to the civil war over breakaway Biafra. More than a million people died in the conflict in which eastern Ibos sought to leave the Nigerian federation along with its richest oil fields and scores of coerced minority groups.

Since May 1999 more than 1,000 people have died in ethnic or communal bloodletting across Nigeria following the end of 15 years of repressive military rule.

"Throughout the history of this country and inclusive of the initial years of the civil war, there has never been such massive loss of lives as there has been under the Obasanjo administration," leftist northern politician Junaidu Muhammed said in a newspaper interview this week.

President Olusegun Obasanjo, the first elected southern head of state since independence, today faces a near revolt of the northern establishment who have dominated power in Nigeria for most of the time since independence.

Politicians from the largely Muslim north are openly plotting strategy to recapture power at the next presidential poll in 2003 after ceding it voluntarily. The north fielded no presidential candidate in 1999 as a gesture of willingness to rotate power among the main geopolitical regions.

Obasanjo, a former military ruler, is a Christian Yoruba, one of the three main groups in Nigeria. Ibos form the majority in the east while Hausa-Fulanis hold sway in the north, and, historically, at central government level.

Northern politicians like Muhammed now accuse Obasanjo of favoring his fellow Yorubas who rejected him at the polls.

Muhammed gave a hardly veiled threat of the use of violence to bring down Obasanjo, if necessary.

"If he allows us to play the game constitutionally and legally we will do so," Muhammed told the National Interest weekly. "We will confront him peacefully and prevail, if not, we may have to use other means than peaceful means."

The president's supporters in turn accuse so-called vested interests of seeking to oust Obasanjo because of his high profile campaign against corruption.

They link the growing popularity of Islamic sharia law in the north to alleged plans to destabilize Obasanjo's government. Clashes between Muslims and Christians over sharia have killed hundreds of people in the north this year and spilled into other regions.

Obasanjo has found no easy solution to the sharia crisis and has rejected calls for a constitutional court ruling on its legality in a country that is officially a secular state.

"To me it is sharia that threatens the corporate existence of this country more than any other issue," said Gordon Bozimo, a businessman based in Port Harcourt.

Obasanjo's refusal to go to court over sharia was "the greatest act of cowardice by any government," he said.

Bozimo told Reuters he supported plans by the governors of oil-producing states to take control of oil resources from the federal government -- a development they link to Obasanjo's apparent inaction over sharia.

"The only way you can end Nigeria's total dependence on oil is resource control by the producing states," he said. "Non-oil producing states will be forced to develop their resources. Right now the federal government itself is lazy because it has too much oil money under its control."

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