Banditry dissolves borders

Michael Schmidt’s article on insurgency in Nigeria with interest (“Banditry threatens to tear Nigeria apart”, August 2) appears to reflect a trend throughout Africa, where the collapse of central and regional governments through corruption, incompetence and waste led to dysfunctional and violent societies with governments losing control.

It would appear that hopelessly porous borders of the colonially created countries are dissolving, as they bear no resemblance to the reality of the actual ethnic groups living there, any more than the Sykes-Picot borders do in the Middle East.

When you see a straight line as a border, it makes you think. These fictional states will eventually cease to exist in reality and continue — as they have in a number of cases, to consist of a few large towns where the elite live in ghettos of affluence, surrounded by squatter camps of the poorest of the poor.

The elite flourish on the rewards of extractive industries such as oil and various minerals. The rural population will probably revert to the old ways of war, pestilence and famine. It is a perfect habitat for unscrupulous foreigners to plunder, as has tragically been the case for so many decades.

Aubrey Wynne-Jones Parkview