Nigeria
What Everyone Needs to Know®
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
As the "Giant of Africa" Nigeria is home to about twenty percent of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa, serves as Africa's largest producer of oil and natural gas, comprises Africa's largest economy, and represents the cultural center of African literature, film, and music. Yet the country is plagued by problems that keep it from realizing its potential as a world power. Boko Haram, a radical Islamist insurrection centered in the northeast of the country, is an ongoing security challenge, as is the continuous unrest in the Niger Delta, the heartland of Nigeria's petroleum wealth. There is also persistent violence associated with land and water use, ethnicity, and religion.
In Nigeria: What Everyone Needs to Know®, John Campbell and Matthew Page provide a rich contemporary overview of this crucial African country. Delving into Nigeria's recent history, politics, and culture, this volume tackles essential questions related to widening inequality, the historic 2015 presidential election, the persistent security threat of Boko Haram, rampant government corruption, human rights concerns, and the continual conflicts that arise in a country that is roughly half Christian and half Muslim.
With its continent-wide influence in a host of areas, Nigeria's success as a democracy is in the fundamental interest of its African neighbors, the United States, and the international community. This book will provide interested readers with an accessible, one-of-a-kind overview of the country.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Africa's most populous nation totters toward the "failed state" abyss in this measured study of Nigeria's travails. Campbell, the U. S. ambassador to Nigeria from 2004 to 2007, juxtaposes the nation's great potential including huge petroleum reserves with its dire poverty and growing instability. He fingers a litany of dysfunctions: a weak government and rigged elections; a ruling elite of generals and plutocrats who view the state mainly as a dispensary of petro-profits; endemic corruption; bloody sectarian violence between Christians and increasingly radical Muslims; the curse of oil wealth, which encourages Nigeria to neglect industrial development and fuels insurgencies in impoverished oil-rich regions. Part history and part memoir, Campbell's chronicle of Nigeria since the 1960s civil war is fleshed out with firsthand profiles of its leaders and observations on recent political turmoil, along with a shrewd insider's analysis of Washington's policy toward the country, which he feels is too aloof. His rather dry and diplomatic account is written from an ambassadorial remove; his views are shaped by contacts in government and business, while everyday life filters in through reports and statistics. Campbell gives a lucid, perceptive survey of the hardships and perils Nigeria faces, but he doesn't make us feel its pain.
