Extremism and Poverty

I’ve been particularly appalled by recent events in Nigeria. Boko Haram, a terrorist organization, has kidnapped hundreds of girls from their school and threatened to sell them. The Nigerian government has, so far, had little luck in finding the girls. Their efforts are hindered, to some degree, by the fact that many people in the area where the girls went to school support Boko Haram. Many others are indifferent. Although I’m sure nearly everyone would agree that it is wrong to kidnap people, attitudes toward extremist groups are often complex and difficult to navigate.

There’s so much in this issue to address, and I’d love to hold forth on how easy it appears to be for many people in the world to treat girls and women as property. But, that’s for another day. Right now, I’m thinking more about the relationship between extreme poverty and extremism/terrorism. For a long time, I thought I knew what poverty was and I felt grateful to have escaped it. After a little research on life in Nigeria and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), I have revised my understanding of poverty. I know nothing about true poverty.

In Nigeria, most people are illiterate and hardly anyone goes to school at all. The average life expectancy in Nigeria is 52 and almost half of the people don’t have access to clean water. Electricity is just a dream to most Nigerians. Diseases that we thought were gone, such as polio and cholera, are still public health concerns for Nigerians. And yet, the country has the 30th highest GDP in the world and it is the second largest economy in Africa. People often live in mud brick houses, but there are also plenty of multimillionaires in Nigeria, including the President. So, there is a chasm between the wealthy and the rest of the Nigerian population.

Life has been difficult in Nigeria for a long time. It was a British colony from 1914 to 1960, when it gained independence. However, a series of military coups in the 1960s and military juntas through the 1990s left the country poor, underdeveloped, and divided along ethnic lines. Recently, there’s been significant economic development, but most elections are seen as fraught with fraud, and corruption continues to be pervasive. Child marriage is common and slavery still exists within Nigeria.

The DRC has been described as the “rape capital of the world,” which gives you an idea of what it’s like to be female in that country. Economically, the Congolese are among the world’s poorest, with the 4th lowest GDP per capita in 2013, according to the World Bank (the CIA puts it at 2nd lowest). There have been ongoing armed conflicts in the country since 1998 and, although there have been some recent signs that the government is gaining control, there are still armed groups in the eastern region of the DRC. Because of the conflicts, there have been few opportunities for children to attend school and 5.4 million Congolese have died since 1998, mostly due to diseases brought on by the unsanitary living conditions of displaced persons. Half of all children under the age of five are malnourished. Less than 10% of the country has electricity and most do not have clean water.

The DRC is also a former colony, although it belonged to Belgium. In 1885, King Leopold II of Belgium took control of the territory and named it the Congo Free State. He set up an administration that was brutal in its treatment of the people and ruthless in its extraction of natural resources. In 1908, Leopold’s rule was ended by the Belgian Parliament. Eventually, the DRC was created when it gained independence in 1960. After armed struggles for control, the country came under the leadership of President Mobutu and changed its name to Zaire. Mobutu was forced out of the country in 1997 by Laurent Kabila’s forces and Kabila declared himself President and renamed the country the Democratic Republic of Congo. He has been president ever since.

In both Nigeria and the DRC, armed conflicts continue due to terrorist or insurgent groups in parts of the countries. What the groups are trying to achieve varies, but their goals are generally related to their ethnic or religious affiliations. In both countries, colonization meant that disparate ethnic groups were brought together in a newly created territory with foreign leaderships. Some of these groups had been hostile to each other prior to colonization. In some cases, those hostilities continue today. But the difficulties in these countries today aren’t caused exclusively by ethnic conflicts. 

Extremist groups continue to recruit, mainly among those living in rural regions. Some of these recruitments are forced, with some groups using children as soldiers. However, not all of them are forced. So I wonder why someone would choose to join an extremist group in an armed conflict. What I’m left to conclude is that abject poverty is the main reason. Poverty in these countries is so extreme, so different from what is currently poverty in the US, that it may be hard to really imagine what life is like for the poor in Nigeria and the DRC. 

Imagine you are a woman in your 20s living in a town in the north of the DRC. You have not attended school, you cannot read or write, and you live in a tent. Your tent is located in a small collection of tents of other families. You have no running water, no electricity, no mode of transportation. You have a young child. Your husband has left you to raise the child alone. Every day, you must walk to get fresh water and haul it back to your tent. You farm and gather food without any equipment. You wash your clothes by hand. There is no reliable local government, so no police force to help you when a soldier in the army comes to your tent one night and rapes you. The people around you see the rape as somehow your fault and tell you to be embarrassed by it. 

Would you be angry? Would you feel hopeless? Would you want revenge against the government that employs the soldier who raped you? The government that is full of corrupt individuals who are rich because they have taken the funds that could have been used to give you an education? The government that is led by people who have electricity, running water, all the food they can eat, and transportation? The government that allows you to live in fear, without a reliable source of food and water, without any health care? What kind of justice would you want?

This scares me, because I can see a possible future for the US in which economic disparities worsen, corruption worsens, and extremist groups get more powerful. Given the number of guns in the US that are not owned by our military, this could create a horrible situation in which there are multiple, well-armed extremist groups around the country. It would take a while for things to get that bad, but it could happen. If we don't change how we treat people who are poor, and if we don't change the rules that have made it so hard for people to get ahead, it could get very ugly, indeed.

Poverty is a terrible thing. Extreme poverty is dangerous. When people don’t have hope, they become desperate. Desperate people do dangerous things.