Africa Works

Last night I had as a guest for dinner a new arrival in America from the Delta, an Ijaw women who until recently worked for Michelin in Port Harcourt. She came with a sad story of Michelin closing its tire plant (which used locally sourced rubber). One thousand workers have been let go, this in the middle of a booming oil-economy. But of course the very oil boom has raised prices and instability, thus making Port Harcourt the least likely place for a manufacturing operation. How Michelin soldiered on for so long — amid the curfew and electricity outages — is itself a small miracle. The loss of important manufacturers in Nigeria, as elsewhere in Africa, is a reminder that de-industrialization continues apace — and underscores the importance of a vital agricultural sector. Impressively, Nigerians are growing food crops at a faster pace than population increases, so the real secret of Nigeria’s endurance as a society and phantom state is not oil but a vital rural sector. Nigeria is thus surviving on the backs of peasants, not petro-capitalists. It is time to celebrate these “peasants,” and reward them even with their own political party. If class-based politics were to replace regional and ethnic-based factions, Nigerian politics might radically change for the better. Certainly, sharpened class conflict — or at the least, the rise of a farmer’s political party that crossed regions and ethnicities — could deliver no worse results than now.