Tag Archives: The British Empire

At a banquet in Windsor Castle on 18 March, 2026, in honour of Nigeria’s President King Charles said in his speech: “There are chapters in our shared history that I know have left some painful marks. I do not seek to offer words that dissolve the past for no words can”. This wimpish half-apology for the years that Britain ruled Nigeria with competence, humanity and fairness and without corruption is, to put it mildly, BONKERS.

British rule in Nigeria ended the slave trade there, built the roads, railways, ports and bridges, and gave peace, order and security to its people – a peace, order and security that they did not know before the introduction of British rule and which they have not known since their Independence in 1960. Instead of proudly noting these achievements of British rule (with which most Nigerians would agree) the King embraced woke-ism and contributed to the false notion that somehow British colonial rule was something that we should be forever ashamed of.

In 2024 Tross Publishing published a book “The British Empire; A Force for Good” by John McLean which deals with 101 colonies that lived under British rule at one time or another. It compares colonial rule in each colony with what preceded it and what has come after. So as not to be confused by the King’s nonsense we print below the section on Nigeria. This book, “The British Empire; A Force for Good”, is available at Paper Plus and independent bookshops or can be purchased through the Tross website: www.trosspublishing.com

Nigeria

“We are grateful to the British officers whom we have known first as masters and then as leaders and finally as partners, but always as friends”.

Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa speaking on the occasion of Nigeria’s Independence in October, 1960. 34

As with the Gold Coast it was the traders who established British influence in Nigeria before the Government took formal control and sovereignty. After the slave trade was made illegal in 1807 the Liverpool traders switched to the palm oil of the Niger Delta, a key ingredient in soap which at last was becoming in regular use by people in Europe. Exports of palm oil from the Delta rose from 150 tons in 1806 to over 30,000 tons by the 1870s. However, the British traders, fearing disease from the mangrove swamps inland, stayed at the mouths of the Oil Rivers, which were the mighty Niger’s outlets to the sea.

In 1851 Britain got its first foothold in what was to become Nigeria. As was so often the case in acquiring African colonies, the suppression of the slave trade was the motive for establishing British rule. Lagos, under its Oba (king), Kosoko, was a key slaving port that refused to give up its trade in human beings and so it was bombarded by a flotilla of the Royal Navy in two battles in November and December, 1851, in which a total of fifteen British sailors were killed.

Kosoko was deposed and replaced by Akitoye, who signed a treaty with Britain that required Lagos to abolish the slave trade, liberate enslaved Africans, expel European slave traders, abolish human sacrifice, and allow British subjects to have legitimate trade access to its port.

However, shortly after signing the treaty Akitoye died and was succeeded by his son, Dosunmu, whose observance of the treaty terms was more lax and so, in pursuit of the same goal of ending the slave trade, Britain acquired a formal protectorate over Lagos in 1861 and the following year it was declared a British colony, being ruled directly by the Crown. This, the only effective method of stopping the slave trade, was done somewhat reluctantly as “acquiring territory and administrative responsibility was definitely not part of Britain’s policy”. 35

Under the Union Jack Lagos became a haven for runaway slaves but it was opposed by the Yoruba people in the hinterland. However, these people were preoccupied by a series of civil wars which were brought to an end in 1888 when a treaty with the Alafin of Oyo brought all of the Yoruba country under British protection.

In 1877 Sir George Goldie – a type of mini Cecil Rhodes – arrived in the area where he reformed the United African Company into the National African Company with a view to obtaining a charter to administer this potentially rich territory on behalf of the Crown. This became more urgent as a result of French trading activities along the Niger River.

Goldie got rid of the French by trading at a loss, forcing the French firms to sell out to him. By the time of the Berlin Conference for dividing up Africa in 1884 Goldie was in the position to say that Britain was “now alone on the Niger” and so the other powers had to agree to British control in the area of this, the greatest river of West Africa.

In 1886 Goldie’s company (by now the Royal Niger Company) received its royal charter from the British Government, authorising it to administer the banks and hinterland of the Niger and Benue rivers, the latter being more easterly than the former. Law and order were to be maintained by the Company’s armed constabulary. It suited the British government very nicely as the Company would bear the financial burden of opening up these areas and not the government.

Although it was declared that the two rivers would be open to all, the Company used its semi-official powers to charge duties and even stop trade other than its own on the Upper Niger. The Company made treaties that brought states like Sokoto and Gwandu into the British sphere of influence, thus hampering the French.

The King of Nikki, said France, was the true ruler of Borgu, a large territory on the Upper Niger, and not the chiefs with whom the Company had made treaties. To enforce its rights on behalf of the Company Frederick Lugard led a force of forty British soldiers against Nikki and in the ensuing encounter Lugard got a poisoned arrow in his head. “His men dragged him about the ground by the arrow in their attempts to pull it out, until someone braced his feet on Lugard’s shoulders. The arrow, which was extracted with a sizeable piece of his skull attached, was poisoned. He chewed some antidotal roots, led a successful counter-attack, and marched thirteen more miles before calling it a day”.36 It was this sort of toughness that built the Empire.

At Nikki the king refused to see Lugard, believing that, if his eyes should perceive a white man, he would die. In the event he gave his oral approval and the treaty was signed by Nikki’s senior officials. However, sixteen days after the British left, the French arrived with 300 soldiers and began occupying the area, claiming that Britain had got its treaty by force.

This was not Lugard’s only problem as the Brassmen of the Niger Coast Protectorate were justifiably annoyed at the Company’s Upper Niger monopoly because it denied them their traditional sources of palm oil. In January, 1895, they raided the Company’s fort of Akassa, killed many of its employees and ate forty-three of them.

Continuing to ignore Britain’s treaty with Nikki, the French were progressively occupying parts of the Upper Niger. Under the leadership of Joseph Chamberlian, the Colonial Secretary, the British government realised that continuing to rely only on the chartered company to uphold British interests in the Niger region was no longer feasible and so Chamberlian instructed Goldie to organise an army of 3,000 men. This, the new West African Frontier Force, was put under the command of James Willcocks and in May, 1898, he led it into the area which the French were occupying in defiance of treaties which Britain had made with the local rulers.

There were some small, bloodless confrontations and it wasn’t long before the French realised that the British were serious and, not wanting to start another war between France and Britain, they withdrew. This was what Chamberlain had planned all along – get them out but without fighting.

Under the Anglo-French agreement of 1898 Britain was able to keep the richest part of Borgu and she also won recognition of her claims to the northern provinces of Sokoto and Bornu. Like British rule on the Gold Coast, the bringing of Nigeria into the Empire was done in a graduated way.

One result of this struggle with the French was that London decided to end the charter to the Royal Niger Company and take over the territory itself on 1st January, 1900, Goldie and his fellow shareholders being adequately compensated. They had done the hard yards but more was now required than could be performed by a chartered company. This ended the story of Goldie on the Niger. The epitaph on the grave of this empire builder in Brompton Cemetery, London, reads “Founder of Nigeria”.

The Company’s former territory (land in the Niger Delta and along the lower reaches of the river) was added to the Niger Coast Protectorate, which itself was renamed Southern Nigeria while the northern part of the country became the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, with Lugard as its High Commissioner. As such, he assumed control over around ten million people spread over more than a million square miles, most of it still unexplored by the white man. It was a mixed bag – from tribes that had not yet invented the wheel to relatively sophisticated Islamic societies living within walled cities. It was certainly a daunting challenge for him and his handful of European administrators supported by about 3,000 African troops under British officers.

At the time British authority barely touched one tenth of this vast domain and the rest was in the power of slave-raiding tribes. “There is probably no part of the Dark Continent in which the worst forms of slave raiding still exist to so terrible an extent,” Lugard wrote dolefully.37 Thus, as in Sierra Leone and Gambia and to a lesser extent the Gold Coast, the suppression of the slave trade was a – if not the – main driver for Britain to assume control of the place as nothing but full sovereignty could defeat that continuing evil.

The worst of the slave trading groups was the Fulani who were as fanatical supporters of Islam as they were of slavery. In a particularly brutal jihad they had conquered much of the territory of the pagan Hausas. Their raids to capture slaves had turned much of the Hausa land’s productive areas into wastelands. The Fulani regarded the Hausas as fit only to be slaves and so it was not surprising that the Hausas preferred British rule to that of the Fulani. At the time that Lugard took over Northern Nigeria these Moslem raiders were moving south and confrontation with the British became inevitable.

Lugard’s biggest challenges in his struggle to end slave raiding were the Fulani city-state of Kano and the two emirates of Sokoto and Gwandu (also Islamic). In the words of the Sultan of Sokoto, “Between us and you there are no dealings except as between Musselmans and Unbelievers: War as God Almighty has enjoined on us”. 38

This attitude emboldened some in the already occupied areas and in 1902 a British Resident, Captain Moloney, was murdered by the Magaji of Keffi within his palace. The Magaji fled to Kano where the emir made a great fuss of him for the achievement of killing a representative of the British Empire. In Lugard’s words, “If the life of a European can be taken with impunity, the prestige of the government would be gone, and prestige is another word for self-preservation in a country where millions are ruled by a few score.”39

As punishment for this murder Lugard ordered a force of 800 men under Colonel Thomas Morland to march up to Kano where they encountered an army of about 6,000 Fulanis inside the city walls that were fifty feet high and forty feet thick. With superior firepower the outnumbered British broke down a gate and managed to kill about 1,200 Fulanis with artillery fire.

With Kano in the hands of Morland’s forces Lugard arrived and set himself up in the palace of the emir, who had fled with his army and his family. The once busy slave market in this Islamic city was immediately closed down.

One of the emir’s brothers, Wombai, returned to Kano and submitted himself to Lugard and here we see the beginnings of the Indirect Rule which forever more has been associated with Lugard’s name and was responsible for bringing peace and order to northern Nigeria. Indirect Rule brought the chiefs into the ambit of British authority, persuading them to co-operate rather than resist the new order.

Lugard nominated Wombai as the new emir and explained to him and other chiefs that ultimate authority would be in the hands of the British who would appoint emirs and chief officers. The people could continue to live by Islamic law so long as it did not conflict with the British laws of the Protectorate. Slave raiding and trading were forbidden but at this point, with British rule so tenuous, it was not felt feasible to outlaw slavery itself. In the meantime people could keep their existing slaves but buy no more. In view of Lugard’s minimal resources of government in such a vast territory it was as much as he could do.

From Kano Lugard went on to Sokoto where a Fulani force of 15,000 horsemen and 3,000 infantry were lined up in front of the city. The Fulanis charged but hundreds were killed by the Maxim guns and the others dispersed. The British casualty was one dead as they marched in and took charge of Sokoto.

Again Lugard appointed a friendly Sultan to govern under Indirect Rule. From there he went to Katsina where he confirmed the rule of the existing sultan who had given no trouble. Then to Zaria where he deposed an unfriendly sultan and installed a better one. “Within a month and a half and with a force that never numbered more than 700 African troops and 35 British officers, he had completely overturned an old and powerful empire”.40 The chiefs appointed by Lugard had their own treasuries and received a proportion of the taxes for their administration.

Indirect Rule, which was being widely practised in the princely states of India, was the only effective way for the British to rule such a vast new territory as Northern Nigeria. In fact, without Indirect Rule both in Africa and beyond, the British Empire could not have been as large as it was.

Lugard was smart enough to see this and energetic enough to get it up and running in only six weeks. “It is obvious that we cannot in any sense administer it,” he said of his new territory. “We must use the existing machinery and endeavour only to improve it”.41 This he did by slowly but steadily getting rid of their traditional despotism and pulling them towards British law – through courts and otherwise.

“It was Lord Lugard, more than any other single individual, who set the style for future Crown rule throughout the British territories in Africa”, wrote Charles Allen in Tales from the Dark Continent. “In particular he was the architect of indirect rule, the system of dual government which came about partly because in various parts of Africa we’d bitten off more than we could chew. We couldn’t possibly administer all these people and these vast territories closely. So our policy was always to leave as much as possible to the people themselves and not to interfere with their lives unless it was obvious that what they were doing was wrong. If they could settle their own quarrels, so much the better.” 42

Each emir was “advised “ by a British Resident. In the more sophisticated societies of this vast new domain the Resident was indeed an advisor but in the more primitive areas he had to be a lot more; in fact, nothing less than the local government itself.

It was these committed and incorruptible Residents, drawn initially from his occupying force, who were the main factors in bringing peace and stability to northern Nigeria. “And it was they that really gave substance to a somewhat extravagant boast within a few years of the occupation that a virgin could walk from Lake Chad to Sokoto with a bowl of eggs on her head and neither the virgin nor the eggs would be spoiled.” 43

Administrators and traders travelled largely by water. The coastal area was mainly mangrove swamps with many creeks and rivers proceeding inland. In the smaller waterways launches and canoes were used while the bigger, crocodile infested rivers accommodated sternwheelers with engines heated by wood. In the very early years of the twentieth century there were no roads in northern Nigeria – just canoes, camels and native carriers who could each carry 56 pounds of baggage and supplies.

In 1927 when Martin Lindsay arrived on attachment to the Nigeria Regiment “There was only one railway line, from Lagos in the south to Kano in the north, and if you were stationed at one of the outstations like Sokoto in the north-west or Maiduguri in the north-east, from the moment you left the railhead you walked. You walked for three weeks to get to your post, with sixteen to twenty bearers carrying your kit on their heads”.44

In the words of Nigel Cooke, a District Officer, these early administrators laid up “a capital of prestige and goodwill. One was very conscious all the time that in most places the British administrators were there and the people wanted them to be there because there was a need for law and order.” 45

In 1906 a rising took place in Satiru when fanatical Islamic followers of Sudanese Mahdism massacred all 70 soldiers of C Company of Lugard’s Mounted Infantry. Lugard feared that neighbouring emirs would join the rebellion, which would bring to an end his noble and hopeful concept of Indirect Rule.

However, so well had he done his job over the previous five years with the emirs and so satisfied were they with Indirect Rule that they stood by him, the Sultan of the once troublesome Sokoto even taking the Europeans in his city under his protection. In fact, the people of Sokoto marched on nearby Satiru, the centre of the uprising, and “razed the town, slaughtered its inhabitants, and impaled the heads of the leading rebels on spears.” 46

That the emirs stood by him at this moment of crisis when Mahdi madness could easily have spread across the Islamic world of northern Nigeria was a true vindication of the merits of Indirect Rule. Islamic though they were, they preferred the stability and light touch of the foreign British rule to embracing Mahdism and seizing back the power that they had before the British presence. Of course, there was also the little matter of the Maxim gun and its effectiveness. Therefore it is not surprising that, when the two Nigeria Protectorates and the Colony of Lagos were united under a single government in 1912, the new Governor of this huge and still primitive colony was Frederick Lugard.

It was a mammoth task to unify the very different south and north of Nigeria. “Lugard carried through an immense task of unification. Historians must judge the event by the decision of the Nigerians to obtain their independence in 1960 as a united state and to defend it against the attempted Ibo secession to set up an independent state, Biafra, in the late 1960s.” 47

That a unitary state was established and that it lasted is a tribute not only to the perseverance of the British but also to their imagination, for the north was largely Hausa speaking Muslims who looked down on the darker skinned people of the south while the west, including Lagos, was dominated by the Yoruba, and on the eastern side of the Niger River were the poor and densely populated Igbos. In addition to these were about 250 different ethnic minority groups who constituted about a third of the population and who each spoke a different language and had its own area. Not many administrators of the Empire faced challenges more difficult than turning this almost unlimited mosaic into a functioning state – something it had never been before.

The pagans of southern Nigeria were helped along the road to Western civilisation by the missionaries, such as the mission of the Church of Scotland at Calabar on the eastern coast, which was set up as early as 1846 by missionaries from Scotland, Ireland and Jamaica. It was a Scotswoman from Dundee, Mary Slessor, who took a leading part in suppressing infanticide in the Calabar region after she arrived at the mission there in 1876.

It was believed by the natives that the birth of twins was an evil curse and the poor little mites were put in a clay pot shortly after they were born and left to die in the forest – either by starvation or being eaten by animals. This Scottish spinster scoured the bush, saving every abandoned baby twin that she could find and taking them to the nearest mission station, some of which were alive with crying babies. She also made efforts to stop the practice of determining guilt by making suspects drink poison.

Mary Slessor was the driving force behind the establishment of the educational facility, the Hope Waddell Training Institute, in Calabar. The Empire gave her the scope to perform these good works to the mutual benefit of the British colonial authorities and the natives themselves.

In 1954 there was a new constitution which set up the federation of Nigeria and on 1st October, 1960, this federation, the product of Britain uniting all the tribes and city states by a combination of diplomacy, treaties and force in the late nineteenth century, became independent with Abubakar Tafawa Balewa becoming its first – and only – Prime Minister. The reason why he was Nigeria’s only Prime Minister is because, after he was deposed, Nigeria has known only military dictators.

In his book, State of Africa, Martin Meredith wrote, “When Nigeria was finally launched as an independent state in 1960, it was with a notable sense of optimism. Led by popularly elected politicians, endowed with a strong, diversified economy and an efficient civil service, Nigeria, by virtue of its size, population and resources, was marked out as one of Africa’s emerging powers.” 48

After a small amount of trouble in the parliament Abubakar Tafawa Balewa unwisely declared a state of emergency in the Western region and brought a treason charge resulting in a conviction and imprisonment against Chief Awolowo, a local leader, and others of his party. This resulted in violent protests which brought about the ousting and murder of this first Prime Minister (and other leaders) in a military coup on 15th January, 1966.

The dead Prime Minister was succeeded by General Johnson-Aguiyi-Ironsi, who became the first of several military heads of state for Nigeria. He was removed and killed in a counter-coup in July, 1966 (dubbed “the July Re-match”), and was succeeded by the next dictator, General Gowon who in turn was overthrown in another coup in 1975 by Brigadier Murtala Mohammed.

It was during the Gowon dictatorship that the Hausa started to persecute any Igbos who were living among them in the north and so the Igbos fled to their homeland of the eastern region. Tribalism, long the curse of humanity but which the British had kept reins on, was rampant and others followed the example of the Igbos and fled from where they were living and working to their own ethnic areas. “By the end of the year [1966] more than a million refugees, many of them wounded, exhausted and in a state of shock, sought safety in the East”.49 And all this only six years after Independence.

The rich oilfields were largely in the eastern region (67% of them) and so the Igbos decided that they could “go it alone”, declaring their eastern region, known as Biafra, to be independent of the rest of Nigeria on 30th May, 1967. Like Abraham Lincoln when faced with a similar secession by the Southern states, the government in Lagos decided to fight in order to retain the union of the country that the British had bequeathed to them at Independence. The result was the Biafran war or, as it is sometimes called, the Nigerian Civil War.

Bombed and strafed by Nigeria’s air force, the people of Biafra suffered terribly – more from starvation than anything else. By the time that the utterly hammered state of Biafra surrendered in January, 1970, some one to three million people had been killed. 50

As already stated, General Gowon was overthrown in 1975 and the new military government organised multi-party elections, resulting in a win for Alhaji Shehu Shagari.

By 1979 Nigeria should have been on the road to economic recovery after all the instability and blood-letting as it had become the sixth largest oil producer in the world, with a revenue of US$24 billion a year. This was to set off a scramble for riches among the corrupt political elite that would bring ruin to the country and its people.

Shagari, the only civilian to have led Nigeria since its first prime minister, turned out to be the king of corruption and, after shamelessly and blatantly rigging the 1983 election, he was overthrown in yet another military coup on 31st December, 1983, by Major-General Mohammed Buhari. The position of head of state of Nigeria was fast becoming the most dangerous job in the world – so different from the long line of distinguished, competent and incorruptible British colonial governors.

Buhari ruthlessly repressed both the media and people’s rights. He had people whipped for forming disorderly queues at bus stops, and had an opponent snatched from a London street, drugged and packed into a crate as “diplomatic baggage”. Buhari in turn was ousted by General Ibrahim Babangida whose goons would stop drivers on the road and shoot them dead, especially drivers of petrol tankers, the petrol then being sold on the black market.

In November, 1993, a new dictator appeared, Sani Abacha, whose specialty was killing anyone whom he perceived as a political opponent, e.g. Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni rights activist.

Nigeria had become a horror story. Each new administration, according to Doctor Beko Ransome-Kuti, a campaigner for democracy who was held for years in solitary confinement, “plunged to new depths of venality, incompetence and corruption” 51 with the result that the country was barely functioning – closed hospitals, collapsing education, a corrupt justice system, a brutal, extorting, bribe-taking police force, broken roads, regular power cuts and – unbelievably for an oil producer – petrol shortages.

With oil revenues being grabbed by dictators and their cronies the ordinary Nigerians were worse off than they had been three decades earlier, with more than half the people getting by on no more than US30 cents a day. Short of food and clean drinking water, the child mortality rate was almost 20% by the turn of the 21st century.

Abacha died from apparently natural causes on 8th June, 1998. By the time of his death he had salted away a fortune “estimated at £3.6 billion during five years in power”.52 His wife fled to Saudi Arabia with thirty-eight suitcases containing several million dollars in foreign currency; his son, Mohammed, always kept around US$100 million in cash in his house while on the streets people were dying of malnutrition.

As David Blair wrote in London’s Daily Telegraph on 25th June, 2005, “The people who endure life in the fetid slums of Lagos are bitterly aware that thieves dressed as politicians have robbed them of practically everything. Much of Nigeria’s commercial capital, teeming perhaps with 15 million people, is an urban hell. Some shanty towns are so overcrowded that they spill into the sea – their shacks perched on wooden stilts above about three metres of water.

Among the potholed roads and alleys, patrolled by armies of hawkers and street children, there is palpable anger over the corruption that bled Nigeria of £220 billion during the first four decades of independence, impoverishing the great majority of its people. ‘Our leaders are corrupt, greedy and selfish men,’ says Jide Kwaku, who lives in a Lagos shanty. ‘They siphon our money into their bank accounts – and look, our education system is zero; our roads zero; our hospitals zero’. ”

In June, 2005, it was revealed by Nigeria’s anti-corruption commission that more than £220 billion of oil revenues reaped in Nigeria in the previous three decades had been looted by past leaders and their cronies. This was the equivalent of all Western aid given to all of Africa over the previous forty years, or the equivalent of six Marshall Plans. Result: two-thirds of Nigeria’s then 130 million people “live in abject poverty, a third is illiterate, and 40% have no safe water supply”. 53

The following year the Economist reported, “The country is in a crisis. Last week insurgents in the oil-rich Niger Delta region kidnapped nine foreign workers and blew up oil facilities there, forcing the world’s eighth largest oil exporter to cut its output by a fifth. This week, in the Muslim dominated north, mobs went on the rampage, burning churches and killing dozens in the most violent demonstrations sparked so far by the Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. And in the east, Christian mobs have retaliated by torching mosques, killing dozens of Muslims and forcing thousands to flee their homes.” 54

By 2007 this oil rich country was ranked at 159th out of 177 on the U.N.’s human development index.55 Three years later journalist Daniel Howden wrote in London’s Independent of “a toxic cocktail of unemployment, fuel shortages, pollution, poverty and power cuts”.56

In 2014 Amnesty International reported, “Increasing atrocities by extremists and uncontrolled reprisals by security forces have killed at least 1,500 people this year in north-eastern Nigeria’s Islamic uprising” with “more than half of those killed this year being civilians, including scores of students who were gunned down in schools, had their throats slit or were burned alive in locked dormitories set aflame while they slept”. 57

This uprising got worse as the Muslims of Boko Haram carried out thousands of murders of Christians, abductions of schoolchildren and other atrocities. Like their fellow Muslims in ISIS controlled areas of Iraq and Syria Boko Haram jihadists engaged in slavery – especially of young women and schoolgirls, “using them as sex slaves as in the medieval glory days of Islam”.58 A return to the slave days that preceded Nigeria becoming British territory.

In a video message in May, 2013, the Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, claimed to have captured young women and girls as slaves, the first open claim of slavery in the 21st century. He justified it by saying, “What we are doing is an order from Allah, and all that we are doing is in the Book of Allah that we follow”.59 According to Wikipedia’s List of Wars by Death Toll, Boko Haram had started a war that had killed more than 350,000 people between 2009 and 2023.

Nigeria, with a population of around 200 million people and some of the largest oil reserves in the world, should be the richest country in Africa and providing its people with at least the basics of life that they were enjoying at the time of Independence. Instead, it is the most indebted of all African nations “with loans of almost £20 billion (2005), because previous rulers not only looted the country but also borrowed heavily against future oil revenues”.60 By 2023 a whopping 97% of Nigeria’s revenue was being applied to servicing its debt of US$91.46 billion.

In June, 2024, Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) reported that 31.8 million Nigerians were suffering from hunger while the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reported that this oil rich nation had “the largest number of food insecure people globally”. 61 This was the result of a foreign exchange crisis, big inflation in food prices, a shortage of fertiliser for farmers and the abandonment by northern farmers of their land because of kidnapping, extortion and killing of farmers by Boko Haram and other jihadist groups. In the first three months of 2024 some 175 farmers were murdered.62 In 2024 a third of Nigerians were living on less than £1 a day and the soaring food inflation was starving many of them to death.

Another country that has enjoyed similar oil revenues over the same period is Norway. There the government, without a taint of corruption, has used the money wisely, reducing debt to virtually zero, paying full fees for students at university, and building excellent infrastructure. A sad contrast with Nigeria, where the hopes were so high when it was decided to cut its colonial ties with Britain and go its own way.

References:

34. Tales from the Dark Continent, Charles Allen, P. xix‚

35. The British Empire, Vol. 3, P. 104‚

36. Ibid P. 195‚

37. Ibid P. 106‚

38. Ibid‚

39. The British Empire, Vol. 3, P. 111‚

40. Ibid‚

41. Ibid‚

42. P. 10‚

43. Tales from the Dark Continent, Charles Allen, P. 1‚

44. Ibid, P. 17‚

45. Ibid, P. 20‚

46. The British Empire, Vol. 3, P. 112‚

47. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 7, P. 550‚

48. P. 77-8‚

49. State of Africa, Martin Meredith, P. 202‚

50. Wikipedia List of Wars by Death Toll‚

51. Times, 3 July, 1998‚

52. Ibid‚

53. Daily Telegraph, 25 June, 2005‚

54. 25 Feb. 2006‚

55. Economist, 4 August, 2007‚

56. Amnesty No Cure for Militant Rage Created by Poverty, David Howden – as reported in Dominion-Post, Wellington, NZ, 10 April, 2010‚

57. AP as reported in Dominion-Post, Wellington, NZ, 1 April, 2014‚

58. Jihad; Blood and Slavery, M.A. Khan, P. 406‚

59. ABC News, 5 May, 2014, – Lee Feran: Boko Haram; Kidnappers, Slave-owners, Terrorists, Killers

60. Daily Telegraph, 25 June, 2005‚

61. Guardian, 1 July, 2024

62. Ibid