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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Nigeria
Index
Nigeria has experienced substantial internal
insecurity. Mass
violence erupted frequently. During the five years
immediately
preceding the civil war, 124 riots were reported. The
civil war
between 1967 and 1970 produced about 2 million deaths.
Regime
instability also came to characterize political life,
which was
punctuated by a members of coups between 1966 and 1985;
several
attempted coups, often accompanied or followed by violent
retribution; and periodic government reorganizations and
leadership changes. Primary sources to potential dissent
and
opposition were illegal aliens, sectional-ethnic
cleavages,
religious sectarianism, the labor force and labor unions,
and
intellectuals. Although none of these groups was capable
of
overthrowing the government or of offering an alternative
political formula, recurring and sometimes widespread
violence
involving one or more of these interests precipitated
major
security crises.
Nigeria's relative wealth, particularly during the
oil-fueled
boom of the 1970s, was a magnet for alien migrant
laborers, many
of whom entered illegally. Relations with these workers
were
tense and marked by two large-scale expulsions. In early
1983,
Nigeria ordered all foreigners illegally residing and
working in
the country to leave within a matter of weeks; most had
entered
under the ECOWAS protocol on free movement of people and
goods
but had overstayed. At least 1.3 million West
Africans--mainly
from Ghana, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon--were expelled
despite
international protests. A second campaign to expel 700,000
illegal aliens took place in May 1985, but it was not
clear how
many were actually repatriated.
Nigeria's ethnic and religious heterogeneity was the
most
persistent source of violent conflicts. Although the issue
of
secession based on regional ethnic nationalism was settled
by the
unsuccessful Biafran experience and later muted
politically by
the abolition of the regions in favor of twenty-one
states, the
assertion or reassertion of the country's primordial
"nations"
remained a latent threat to national unity.
Data as of June 1991
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