Midterm: Poli60: Essay Outlines
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Governments in both Nigeria and Indonesia face significant challenges in holding their respective states together. Discuss the challenges and the political and institutional strategies developed to address them.
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NIGERIA: \"In over five decades since gaining independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria has struggled to achieve national, socio-economic development, and democratic political stability\" (131). National Unity: \"A mosaic of three major ethno-nationalities (Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo), hundreds of smaller ethno-linguistic identities, and roughly equal numbers of adherents of Islam and Christianity, Nigeria descended into a gruesome 30-month civil war from 1967 to 1970\" (131). \"Since overcoming this war, Nigeria has relied on a remarkable, but corruption-prone, multi-unit federal structure to contain its deep ethnic, regional, and religious fissures, and avoid total state disintegration. Yet, the country continues to be plagued by horrific ethnic, regional, and religious conflicts (including the loss of at least 18,000 lives in hundreds of incidents of communal bloodletting since 1999) and its legitimacy and viability as a multiethnic state is still acrimoniously debated and relentlessly contested Socioeconomic Development: \"[Nigeria] is blessed with enormous oil resources, huge exportable gas reserves, a diverse ecosystem, relatively fertile agricultural lands, once bountiful cash crops, a vast internal domestic market, and a vibrant informal (unrecorded) economic sector\" (132) \"...one of the world's fastest growing economies and emerging markets, with impressive annual economic growth rates of seven percent since 2003\" (132). Yet, the country's recent economic performance remains a classic case of 'growth without prosperity'. Despite earning hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenues since 1970 (including the $50 billion annually in recent years), Nigeria's key socioeconomic indicators (per capital income, unemployment and underemployment, infant and child mortality, and access to immunization and sanitation) are among the worst in the developing world (132) From a national poverty incidence of less than 30 percent in 1980, the proportions of Nigerians living below an income poverty line of US $1.25 doubled to 64.4 percent in 2011\" (132) Democratic Political Stability: \"protracted crisis of political development and order\" (132). \"Nigeria made the transition to its current fourth democratic republic only at the end of May 1999, after fifteen years of plundering and frequently brutal military rule. Thrice the country has undertaken to govern itself under liberal democratic constitutions, following carefully staged transitions\" (132)\" The first two republics were desecrated by antidemocratic behavior and then overturned by popular military coups (132) The third was similarly undermined, before it was even fully born, by rank opportunism, fraud, and greed on the part of the politicians, but with military actively orchestrating the destruction of its own democratic transition (132) Nigeria's fourth republic, however, seems to have broken the cycle of military dictatorships with the conduct of four successive general elections (1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011) and the relatively orderly transitions from the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo (1999 to 2007) to Umaru Yar' Adua (who died in office in May 2010) to Goodluck Jonathan (2010 date)...Yet this unprecedented record of relative democratic continuity and inter civilian transition notwithstanding, Nigeria's Fourth Republic has been degraded by electoral fraud, sectarian violence, massive corruption, state failure, and declining popular legitimacy. Indeed, the continuing corruption and dysfunction of its Fourth Republic marks Nigeria as a case not of democratic consolidation, but of regression away from democracy, with potentially disastrous consequences for the polity's economic development and national unity (132-133) \"protracted crisis of political development and order\" (132). \"Nigeria made the transition to its current fourth democratic republic only at the end of May 1999, after fifteen years of plundering and frequently brutal military rule. Thrice the country has undertaken to govern itself under liberal democratic constitutions, following carefully staged transitions\" (132)\" The first two republics were desecrated by antidemocratic behavior and then overturned by popular military coups (132) The third was similarly undermined, before it was even fully born, by rank opportunism, fraud, and greed on the part of the politicians, but with military actively orchestrating the destruction of its own democratic transition (132) Nigeria's fourth republic, however, seems to have broken the cycle of military dictatorships with the conduct of four successive general elections (1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011) and the relatively orderly transitions from the presidency of Olusegun Obasanjo (1999 to 2007) to Umaru Yar' Adua (who died in office in May 2010) to Goodluck Jonathan (2010 date)...Yet this unprecedented record of relative democratic continuity and inter civilian transition notwithstanding, Nigeria's Fourth Republic has been degraded by electoral fraud, sectarian violence, massive corruption, state failure, and declining popular legitimacy. Indeed, the continuing corruption and dysfunction of its Fourth Republic marks Nigeria as a case not of democratic consolidation, but of regression away from democracy, with potentially disastrous consequences for the polity's economic development and national unity (132-133) Political and Institutional Strategies to Address the Problems: Second Democratic Republic: Oct. 1. 1979 - Dec 31. 1983 (Shehu Shagari) In attempts to resolve ethno-regional competition \"Gowon moved decisively on May 27, 1967, to divide the country's four regional governments into twelve states, six each in the south. Gowon's dismantlingg of the regional structure directly precipitated Ojukwu's declaration of the (defunct) Eastern Region's secession as an independent Republic of Biafra on May 30, 1967. There followed two and a half years of full-scale civil war in which up to one million Nigerians perished, mostly in ill-fated Biafra. Yet the new structure of multiple constituent states contributedcrucially both to the defeat of Biafra's secessionist campaign and to the longterm survival of the nigerian federation. In particular, the new multi-state federalism gave satisfaction to the long-standing aspirations of Nigeria's ethnic minority groups (including the non-Igbo peoples of the east) for sub federal units of their own in a more equitable federation. The new structure also diluted the hegemony of the north, undercut the conflation of regional and major ethnic group boundaries, and promoted the ascendancy of the federal government as an authority that is substantially independent of any one single ethnic or regional group. Yet, post-civil war Nigeria continued to be plagued by eruptions of ethnic and political turbulence, including the ethno-regional crisis over the 1973 census, the removal of General Gowon from power in 1975, and the assassination of his successor, Murtala Mohammaed, in an abortive coup attempt in 1976. Nevertheless, the massive inflow of federally collected export oil revenues after the end of civil war, and the creation of seven additional states in 1976, helped to stabilize the federation and ease to return to civilian rule\" (136) 4th Republic's Strategy of the 8-Month Transition Program \"An unexpected reprieve from the tightening spiral of repression and polarization came from Nigeria with the political accession of General Abdulsalami Abubakar following Abacha's sudden death in June 1998 (from a 'heart attack' widely believed to have induced by some of his fellow officers). With the northern-dominated military completely discredited, and with southern Nigeria in a state of biter ethnic ferment, Abubakar briskly conducted an eight-month transition program. This culminated in the election of retired General Obsanjo as civilian president in Februrary 1999, and in the inauguration of the Fourth Republic that May. The restoration of democracy relieved some of thee pessimism engendered by Nigeria's ruinous political and economy trajectories in the previous two decades. Yet, reflecting the debilitating legacy of military misrule and the shallow nature of the May 1999 transition to civilian rule...\" (137). INDONESIA: In the case of Indonesia... \"Serious problems remain, however, in both nation and state building. In six decades of independence, Indonesia has ben governed as a democracy for less than two decades, from 1950-1957 and again from 1999 to the present. Forty years of authoritarianism and governmental centralization, from 1959 to 1999 (1957-1959 was a transitional period) have left an organizational and institutional legacy of a weak interest group and party system, barely functioning legislatures, a corrupted bureaucracy and judiciary, and an armed forces not yet brought completely under civilian control. Within this setting, politicians in today's democratic Indonesia face major challenges, including slow economic growth, rising pressure against the secular state from Islamist (fundamentalist Islamic) groups and parties, and endemic local-level religious ethnic conflict\" (176). SOLUTIONS: In the period since the declaration of independence in 1945, indonesian politicians have sought to deal with the challenges of nation and state building. The most serious recent challenge to the Indonesian national identity which was established during the independence revolution from 1945 to 1949 was an armed independence movement in the northwestern province of Aceh that began in the mid-1970s. It was resolved in 2005 in a negotiated settlement proving special autonomy to the region Furthermore, the state's political and administrative capacity, weak in the early post-colonial years, was strengthened considerably beginning in the late 1960s. One consequence was an economic growth rate of 6-8 percent per year for more than 2 decades, placing indonesia in the group of east asian newly industrializing countries and making it the eight fastest growing economy in the world rapid and sustained economy development has in turn contributed to the rise of a modern middle class with an interest in further modernization and democratization in 1999 in response to widespread discontent with excessive governmental centralization, parliament passed laws devolving all state authority —-except in foreign policy, defense, security, justice monetary and fiscal affairs, and religion —to provides districts and municipalities
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