Princeton N. Lyman, Former
U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria and South Africa,
speaks on the panel
"The Nigerian State and U.S. Strategic Interests" at the
Achebe Colloquium at Brown
University on December 11, 2009.
TRANSCRIPT OF SPEECH (TAKEN
DIRECTLY FROM THE VIDEO SPEECH)
Thank you very much Prof.
Keller and thanks to the organizers of this conference. It is such a privilege
to be here in a conference in honor of Prof. Achebe, an inspiration and teacher
to all of us.
I have a long connection to
Nigeria. Not only was I Ambassador there, I have travelled to and from Nigeria
for a number of years and have a deep and abiding vital emotional attachment to
the Nigerian people, their magnificence, their courage, artistic brilliance,
their irony, sense of humor in the face of challenges etc.
And I hope that we keep
that in mind when I say some things that I think are counter to what we
normally say about Nigeria. And I say that with all due respect to Eric Silla
who is doing a magnificent work at State Department and to our good friend from
the legislature, because I have a feeling that we both Nigerians and Americans
may be doing Nigeria and Nigerians no favor by stressing Nigeria's strategic
importance.
I know all the arguments:
it is a major oil producer, it is the most populous country in Africa, it has
made major contributions to Africa in peacekeeping, and of course negatively if
Nigeria were to fall apart the ripple effects would be tremendous, etc.. But I
wonder if all this emphasis on Nigeria's importance creates a tendency of
inflate Nigeria's opinion of its own invulnerability.
Among much of the elite
today, I have the feeling that there is a belief that Nigeria is too big to
fail, too important to be ignored, and that Nigerians can go on ignoring some
of the most fundamental challenges they have many of which we have talked
about: disgraceful lack of infrastructure, the growing problems of
unemployment, the failure to deal with the underlying problems in the
Niger-Delta, the failure to consolidate democracy and somehow feel will remain
important to everybody because of all those reasons that are strategically
important.
And I am not sure that that
is helpful.
Let me sort of deconstruct
those elements of Nigeria's importance, and ask
whether they are as relevant
as they have been.
We often hear that one in
five Africans is a Nigerian. What does it mean? Do
we ever say one in five
Asians is a Chinese? Chinese power comes not just
for the fact that it has a
lot of people but it has harnessed the entrepreneurial talent and economic
capacity and all the other talents of China to make her a major economic force
and political force.
What does it mean that one
in five Africans is Nigeria? It does not mean anything to a Namibian or a South
African. It is a kind of conceit. What makes it important is what is happening
to the people of Nigerian. Are their talents being tapped? Are they becoming an
economic force? Is all that potential being used?
And the answer is "Not
really."
And oil, yes, Nigeria is a
major oil producer, but Brazil is now launching a 10-year program that is going
to make it one of the major oil producers in the world. And every other country
in Africa is now beginning to produce oil.
And Angola is rivalling
Nigeria in oil production, and the United States has
just discovered a huge gas
reserve which is going to replace some of our
dependence on imported
energy.
So if you look ahead ten
years, is Nigeria really going to be that relevant as a major oil producer, or
just another of another of the many oil producers while the world moves on to
alternative sources of energy and other sources of supply.
And what about its
influence, its contributions to the continent? As our representative from the
parliament talked about, there is a great history of those contributions. But
that is history.
Is Nigeria really playing a
major role today in the crisis in Niger on its border, or in Guinea, or in
Darfur, or after many many promises making any contributions to Somalia?
The answer is no, Nigeria
is today NOT making a major impact, on its region,
or on the African Union or
on the big problems of Africa that it was making before.
What about its economic
influence?
Well, as we have talked about
earlier, there is a de-industrialization going on in Nigeria a lack of
infrastructure, a lack of power means that with imported goods under
globalization, Nigerian factories are closing, more and more people are
becoming unemployed. and Nigeria is becoming a kind of society that imports and
exports and lives off the oil, which does not make it a significant economic
entity.
Now, of course, on the
negative side, the collapse of Nigeria would be enormous, but is that a point
to make Nigeria strategically important?
Years ago, I worked for an
Assistant Secretary of State who had the longest
tenure in that job in the
1980s and I remember in one meeting a minister from a country not very friendly
to the United States came in and was berating the Assistant Secretary on all
the evils of the United States and all its dire plots and in things in Africa
and was going on and on and finally the Assistant Secretary cut him off and
said: "You know, the biggest danger for your relationship with the United
States is not our opposition but that we will find you irrelevant."
The point is that Nigeria
can become much less relevant to the United States. We have already seen
evidence of it. When President Obama went to Ghana and not to Nigeria, he was
sending a message, that Ghana symbolized more of the significant trends, issues
and importance that one wants to put on Africa than Nigeria.
And when I was asked by
journalists why President Obama did not go to Nigeria, I said "what would
he gain from going? Would Nigeria be a good model for democracy, would it be a
model for good governance, would he obtain new commitments on Darfur or Somalia
or strengthen the African Union or in Niger or elsewhere?"
No he would not, so he did
not go.
And when Secretary Clinton
did go, indeed but she also went to Angola and
who would have thought
years ago that Angola would be the most stable country in the Gulf of Guinea
and establish a binational commission in Angola.
So the handwriting may
already be on the wall, and that is a sad commentary.
Because what it means is
that Nigeria's most important strategic importance
in the end could be that it
has failed.
And that is a sad sad
conclusion. It does not have to happen, but I think that we ought to stop
talking about what a great country it is, and how terribly important it is to
us and talk about what it would take for Nigeria to be that important and
great.
And that takes an enormous
amount of commitment. And you don't need saints, you don't need leaders like
Nelson Mandela in every state, because you are not going to get them.
I served in South Korea in
the middle of the 1960s and it was time when South Korea was poor and
considered hopeless, but it was becoming to turn
around, later to become to
every person's amazement then the eleventh largest economy in the world. And I
remember the economist in my mission
saying, you know it did not
bother him that the leading elites in the government of South Korea were taking
15 - 20 percent off the top of every
project, as long as every
project was a good one, and that was the difference. The leadership at the time
was determined to solve the fundamental economic issues of South Korea economy
and turn its economy
around.
It has not happened in
Nigeria today. You don't need saints. It needs leaders who say "You know
we could be becoming irrelevant, and we got to do
something about it."
Thank you...................
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