Nigeria 2015: analysis of election issues and future prospects

The people of Nigeria

Population, ethnicity and language

Recent estimates put Nigeria’s population at around 177 million.²⁰⁷ The 2006 census produced a figure of 140 million.²⁰⁸ It is Africa’s most populous country and the eighth most populous country in the world.

It is a youthful country; about 62.5% of the population is 24 or under.²⁰⁹ It is a country that is rapidly urbanising; about 50% of the population now lives in towns or cities. The south of Nigeria is much more heavily populated than the north. Lagos, the country’s economic capital, has a population of over 11 million and has been described as one of the world’s ‘mega-cities’.²¹⁰

Nigeria is also Africa’s most ethnically diverse country. There are at least 250 ethnic groups. Most are small in number. The largest groups are: Hausa-Fulani at an estimated 29% of the population, Yoruba at 21%, Igbo (also described as Ibo) at 18%, Ijaw at 10%, Kanuri at 4%, Ibibio at 3.5%, and Tiv at 2.5%. There are over 500 indigenous languages. English is the official language.²¹¹

Violence and insecurity

Daily life for many ordinary Nigerians over the last 50 years has been characterised by violence and insecurity. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the 1967-1970 civil war, when Igbo political leaders declared the creation of the independent state of Biafra in the east of the country. The Nigerian army ultimately defeated the Biafran army, forcibly reuniting the country.

In significant parts of the country since then, there has been increasingly intense competition between groups for scarce resources such as water and land. Tensions have also tended to be particularly high where levels of inward migration are significant. In the multi-ethnic, religiously diverse states at the intersection of the ‘Middle Belt’ and the north of the country, conflict between ‘settlers’ and ‘indigenes’ has triggered violence.²¹²

Many Nigerians have, at particular points in the past, felt themselves to be politically and economically marginalised. Today, it is the people of the north who make this claim. Previously, the Igbo and the people of the Niger Delta have done so.

Public and private realms

The people of Nigeria live in a country where the distinction between “the public and the private realms” is often neither clear nor well-established. Public power and resources have tended to be viewed as the “patrimony” of “personal and narrow group interests”.²¹³

Public/private is just one of several distinctions which might seem natural to Westerners but which many ordinary Nigerians would view as highly blurred.

Other blurred distinctions are those between formal/informal and visible/invisible. Indeed, many ordinary Nigerians are likely to believe that greater power and influence is to be found in the informal and invisible realms.

With regard to formal/informal, many ordinary Nigerians distinguish between official institutions such as the government, where power is ostensibly exercised, and elite networks – often operating ‘behind the scenes’ – where power is in practice mainly to be found.

With regard to visible/invisible, many ordinary Nigerians distinguish between the observable physical world, in which people live and function on a day-to-day basis, and the spiritual world, which is widely viewed as underpinning and shaping it.²¹⁴

Religion

The vast majority of the people of Nigeria are highly religious. The two main religions are Islam and Christianity. Muslims constitute about 50% of the population and Christians about 40%.²¹⁵ Christianity is believed to be growing more quickly than Islam.

Marshall says that “Nigeria has been the site of Pentecostalism’s greatest explosion on the African continent”, with adherents now numbering “tens of millions”. She describes Pentecostalism as the “single most important sociocultural force in southern Nigeria today”.²¹⁶

An estimated 10% of Nigerians are animists – that is, they adhere to indigenous belief systems. But a lot of Muslims and Christians also accommodate animist beliefs in their lives. Many Muslims and some Christians (despite the official disapproval of church leaders) practice polygamy.²¹⁷

The north of the country is usually characterised as predominantly Muslim and the south as predominantly Christian. This is an over-simplification. It is estimated that 40% of northerners are now Christian.²¹⁸ Many Muslims live in the south of the country. Nonetheless, large numbers of Nigerians do seem to view religious and regional (not to mention ethnic) identities as overlapping significantly.

Rising fundamentalisms

The impact and role of religion in Nigerian society has been going through significant changes in recent decades. According to Ruth Marshall, in recent decades both Islam and Christianity have seen the rise of fundamentalist “political spiritualities”.²¹⁹

Marshall argues that these reflect new responses to the everyday struggles for survival and dignity of ordinary Nigerians in a context of mounting social and political crisis; however, because they are “mutually exclusive”, they deepen socio-political cleavages and act as a spur to rising levels of violence.²²⁰

At the same time, there are many examples of peaceful co-existence (including inter-faith marriages). In the south-west of the country, peaceful coexistence has been described as the norm.²²¹.

The impact of Islamic terrorist groups – most notably, Boko Haram – in northern Nigeria has been extensively charted in the Western media, although the longer-term historical origins of radical Islam more widely tend to be overlooked.²²²

Originating in northern universities in the 1980s and influenced by Salafist beliefs originating in the Arabian Gulf, militant Islamists have challenged the majority Sufi tradition promoted by traditional elites in northern Nigeria, who they believe have failed to defend Islam or the political power of the north.²²³

In 2000, 12 states within Nigeria fully or partially adopted Shari’a law for criminal offences, although implementation in practice has varied significantly.²²⁴ Yet, Campbell claims that Sufism is still the majority tradition in the north.²²⁵

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