13th October, 2012
Francis Fukuyama, author of the world acclaimed book “The End of History and the Last Man,” has described as ”outrageous” the way Nigeria’s leaders steal from the public purse, handing down also the familiar verdict that Nigeria is one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
Fukuyama spoke about Nigeria in an interview with AFP Geopolitics editor, when he was asked to explain the social and political context of Islamist movements and the Arab Spring.
Fukuyama illustrated his response with the Boko haram deadly insurgency:
“Look at Boko Haram in Nigeria. Nigeria is one of the most corrupt countries in the world. It is outrageous the way leaders there steal from the public. True, it has taken a very bad, violent turn, but the demand there for Sharia is the same as the demand in the Christian west that rulers must be subject to a a higher morality and cannot simply do whatever they want”.
Fukuyama, an American academic, is rounding up a two-volume opus on the origins of political order and was therefore asked to apply the upheavals in the Arab world and North Africa to his thesis that “stable and successful democracies are built on the three pillars of a strong state, rule of law and institutions of accountability.
Fukuyama said: “The Arab Spring is a great development because you cannot get to democracy unless you have social mobilization. That means that people have to get mad, they have to get angry about the way authoritarian governments are treating them. Until January of last year, a common view in the West was that Arabs were somehow different from everybody else, that because of Arab culture or Muslim religion they were acquiescent under dictatorship, that they were very passive culturally. But if you look at Syria – which has basically been in a state of civil war for 18 months — that’s obviously no longer the case. The way you got democracies in Europe, first in England, was by people resisting the authority of the King, fighting a civil war, and fighting to a standstill. Obviously we are nowhere close to having real democracies in Egypt or Tunisia or Libya. The initial transition is the easy part. It is actually creating political parties, justice systems, of a kind of normative respect for compromise – these are the things that take time. But you have to start somewhere, and that cannot happen without this initial act of mobilization.”
For the full interview, click here: Fukuyama: China on the brink, US on the blink – Geopolitics