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Projects: Nigeria |
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New Book for World Peace Foundation Nigeria Project Nigeria is the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa and a supplier of 7 percent of U.S. petroleum imports. It is and has been a largely dysfunctional polity, with a steady record of brutal dictatorship throughout large periods of its post-independent existence. Since the restoration of democracy in 1999, and the re-election in 2003 of President Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria is poised to achieve its vast potential as the western linchpin of Africa. Can it do so? If so, how?
In order to provide answers to those questions, the Foundation invited Nigerian scholars and practitioners, and American and British scholars and practitioners, to meet in Cambridge, Mass., at the end of 2002. The presentations from that conference were edited by Robert I. Rotberg and are collected in a new book, Crafting the New Nigeria: Confronting the Challenges (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004). This volume asks whether Nigeria, with its vast wealth in both human and natural resources, is on the path to realizing its enormous potential or is it in danger of becoming a failed state? Crafting the New Nigeria considers the challenges that the country's leadership now faces, offering rich—and sobering—analyses of Nigeria's current political and economic systems, ethnic divisions, the HIV/AIDS crisis, and human rights.
The 2002 conference discussions on the problems of Nigeria were summarized by Deborah West in Governing Nigeria: Continuing Issues after the Elections, WPF Report 35 (Cambridge, MA, 2003). |
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