Nigeria 'on the brink of disaster'
July 14, 2004 Edition 1
Abeokuta: Oil exporter Nigeria is heading for a violent implosion that would dwarf the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region, Nobel literature laureate Wole Soyinka said yesterday.
A wave of mass killings in May this year was just a precursor to the Balkanisation of the nation, he said, as rival ethnic and religious groups vie for dominance.
"I consider that Nigeria is on the brink of a massive implosion that will make what's happening in the Sudan child's play," Soyinka said at his home 80km north of Lagos.
"We know there are movements for secession in this country. We know that everybody is preparing for the contingency of breaking up.
"International organisations are also studying the situation," said Africa's first winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, who will turn 70 next week.
More than 1 000 people were killed in tit-for-tat fighting in central and northern Nigeria in May.
Heavily armed militia frequently clash in the Niger delta, and a political dispute in central Benue state has killed 150 this year alone.
Analysts say Nigeria's death toll from violence of at least 10 000 since democracy returned in 1999, puts the world's seventh largest oil exporter on a par with conflicts in Colombia and Chechnya.
But, the complexity of Nigeria's wars, each with a unique set of ethnic, religious and political undertones, made them more difficult to understand than the "massive, unidirectional violence" in Sudan, Soyinka said of the crisis in Darfur, where more than a million black Africans have been driven from their homes by Arab militias.
The United Nations has called the situation in Darfur the world's worst humanitarian crisis. - Reuters
