Brussels - Nigeria's federal system is so deeply flawed and its politics so corrupt as to risk destabilizing Africa's most populous country and largest oil producer, according to an International Crisis Group report.
The study, entitled Nigeria's Faltering Federal Experiment, warned that unless the nation's leaders address "the underlying issues of resource control, equal rights, power sharing and accountability, Nigeria will face an internal crisis of increasing proportions."
The "failure of political leadership at every level," the report said, has contributed to rising violence in the oil-rich Niger Delta, inter-communal conflict in Plateau State and the emergence of numerous ethnic militias and separatist movements wrongly dismissed by the government as common banditry.
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Rife with corruption - nearly 400-billion petro-dollars have been embezzled in 45 years, according to a federal anti-corruption commission - Nigeria is preparing for the first electoral transfer of civilian presidential power, scheduled for April 2007, since independence in 1960.
Also at stake in next year's election, and no less critical in a country more familiar with military dictatorship than democratic rule, will be Nigeria's 36 governorships.
The report is especially critical of Nigeria's federal system, which has sparked dangerous rivalries between the central government and states over natural resources, encouraged sharp struggles between interest groups bent on siphoning off the state's wealth, and allowed for the growth of inter-ethnic violence.
The resource problem is most critical in the oil rich - but, paradoxically, desperately poor - Niger Delta, which has made Nigeria the sixth largest oil exporter in the world.
The failure to distribute oil revenue more equitably, the report suggests, has pushed a local ethnic-rights movement toward greater violence.
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