This House Has Fallen: Midnight in Nigeria

""We... ignore Nigeria at our peril,"" warns Maier, a journalist who was stationed in Africa for more than a decade (as a London Independent correspondent). Nigeria, the tenth most populous country in the world and the sixth largest oil producer, is home to more than 300 distinct ethnic groups--and it is a society in total chaos. Billions of dollars have flowed into Nigeria in exchange for oil, yet most people live in grinding poverty; meanwhile, ethnic and religious strife threatens to split the country apart, and years of ineffectual and corrupt military rule have resulted in a lack of health and educational services. In painting an often depressing portrait, Maier (Into the House of Ancestors) argues these facts have combined to create civil disorder and despair in the country that is possibly the most important on the African continent. Maier untangles Nigeria's political and social chaos for readers by talking to individual Nigerians--desperately poor Igbos, angry taxicab drivers, military and religious leaders, businessmen--and creating out of these encounters a compelling narrative, though one that fails to cohere at points when it feels as though Maier has pasted together old articles with the glue of historical background. In an effort to learn something about Nigeria's hope--and despair--for the future, he writes about Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Ogoni activist who was hanged by the government; about a doctor/hotel owner who is also the founder of a political party; and about angry young revolutionaries who no longer have any faith in the system. Throughout, Maier puts a human face on a disheartening situation that seems remote and impersonal to most Americans. Maps. (July)