Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and has just become the largest economy on the continent. It should be standing at the brink of greatness, not only for its own citizens but also for the region and the world.
Yet Nigeria has seen growing poverty in recent decades, violence in various parts of the country and great uncertainty about its future. Much of recent international attention on Nigeria has focused on the activities of Boko Haram, an extremist movement that has despoiled large parts of the northeast and brandished an ISIS-type Islamist ideology. But religious and ethnic conflict has been a constant problem elsewhere in the country, and a more economically driven unrest has periodically gripped the southeast delta region, home of Nigeria’s oil industry.
In the Niger delta, there are reasons to be hopeful; efforts to combine peace-building and grassroots economic development are offering the promise of progress in a once deeply troubled area. The Niger delta is the source of Nigeria’s primary wealth and home of major international oil companies.
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