By Jide Osuntokun
It is common knowledge that the republic of Lebanon is abysmally broke due to corruption, institutional political instability, politics of ethnic and religious preferences and alienation, foreign meddling and the fact that it is located in a dangerous part of the world sharing borders with Syria to the north and east and Israel to the south while Cyprus lies west across the Mediterranean Sea.
The current population of this unfortunate country is only 6.8 million just about a third of the estimated population of Lagos State of Nigeria. At different times in history before the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, Lebanon was ruled or inhabited by different peoples namely by Canaanites whom the Greeks called Phoenicians, then the Hittites who are now in parts of Turkish Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon and Cyprus, later by Assyrians now largely found in Syria and Iraq then the Babylonians of modern day Iraq and Persian rule before the Ottoman Turks conquered the place in 1516 and ruled it till the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the western Allies in 1918.
In short, Lebanon has been at the crossroads of peoples, cultures and religions. While under the Ottomans, Lebanon was administered as part of greater Syria until 1908 when it gained its autonomy under the Turks. It was jointly administered as part of Syria by France under the League of Nations mandate granted France in 1923 but was separated from Syria in 1943 by France and constituted into an independent Republic of Lebanon. The people of modern Lebanon are mixed but the Lebanese Arabs form the majority while Armenians are an important minority forming about four per cent of the population. Some of the Lebanese actually dispute whether they are Arabs at all. They say 50-70% are descendants of the Canaanites/ Phoenicians and/ or West Aramaic, while the Arabs constitute only 20-30% and the Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Hebrews, Kurds, Persians and others form about 10-20% of the population. To add to this mix is the complex religious configuration of the country. The two main religions are Islam with 61.1% of the citizens (Sunni and Shia) and Christianity with 33.7% of the citizens (the Maronite church, the Orthodox Church, the Melkite Greek Catholic Church, Protestant churches and the Armenian Apostolic Church).
Power is also distributed among all these groups making what the French call l’unite de direction almost impossible. The president of Lebanon by tradition is always a Maronite Christian elected by parliament for a term of six years. The current president is Michel Aoun. By tradition, the prime minister is usually a Sunni Muslim and Speaker of Parliament a Druze (small Muslim sect) or someone from the Shia group. Until 2019, the prime minister was Saad Hariri, the son of the brutally assassinated prime minister Rafic Baha El Deen Al Hariri who was prime minister from 1992 to 1998 and again 2000 to 2004 and was eliminated by the bombing of his motorcade in 2005 after he had left office by members of the Hezbollah (Party of God ) that along with the Amal movement represents the Shia Muslims in Lebanon. Until Hezbollah became a militant party and armed group, the Amal movement founded in 1974 by Musa al- Sadr as Harakat Amal (the movement of the dispossessed), represented the Shia Muslim in Lebanon. Hezbollah was founded by Imad Mughniyeh, Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah and Ali Akbar Mohtashamipur under the inspiration and support of the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini in 1980. The current leader of Hezbollah is Hassan Nasrallah. Hezbollah has proved its mettle in confrontation with Israel in the 1980s until its forces withdrew from the Bekaa valley. Hezbollah cadres are currently fighting along the Syrian forces in suppressing a largely Sunni majority rebellion against the minority Alawite Shia in Syria. The Alawite domination of Syria has lasted for almost 50 Years since 1971 ruled first by President Hafiz al -Assad and currently by his son, Bashar al -Assad and the resistance against it has spilled over to Lebanon by the influx of about one and a half million Syrians to Lebanon thus complicating an already hopeless political and economic situation of the country. The government of Syria occupied Lebanon from 1976 to 2005 presumably guaranteeing internal peace among the warring Muslim and Christian militias that had fought over Lebanon in the 1970s to 1980s and ending in 1990. Syria only recognized Lebanon’s sovereignty in 2008.
The Lebanese economy is based on free market and laissez- faire market economic commercial tradition. The economy is service oriented with banking and tourism playing commanding role. There was free movement of money in and out of Lebanon. This allowed the considerable number of Lebanese Diaspora in France, West Africa particularly Sierra Leone and Nigeria and also in the Americas both north and south and the Caribbean to move in and out money from the country. The freedom in Lebanon also extended to the relaxed way of life in the rather suffocating religious environment of the Middle East earning the city of Beirut its capital the nickname of “Paris of the Middle East”. Rich Muslims including Nigerians went there to let down their hairs and to indulge themselves with wine, women and song far from the preening eyes of their people at home. The involvement of the Lebanese in diamond mining in Sierra Leone and the various businesses in Nigeria including gold mining in Ilesha is well known. Some of them and their Nigerian patrons involved in the oil and gas sector have become billionaires. Actually, the Lebanese have been in Nigeria even before the amalgamation of Southern and Northern Nigeria in 1914. They were trading in Lagos and Ibadan and presumably in Kano until the 1960s before they moved into soft drinks and light manufacturing and some into estate development and hotel industry.
Chicken has now come home to roost in Lebanon after the free for all corruption in the country. The foreign exchange of the country has been wiped out with no money to import essential commodities or service existing foreign loans and conduct necessary commercial deals. The World Bank/ IMF have refused to lend the country money saying it is a basket case and the rich Arab states have their own problems with the drastic reduction in oil and gas income and the burden of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Lebanese in West Africa and the Americas particularly in Argentina and Venezuela have their serious economic problems. It was at this inauspicious time that due to negligence and bureaucratic inefficiency an explosive material ammonium nitrate used in making fertilizer which had been in the port of Beirut for years caught fire leading to an explosion killing instantly 200 people and wounding thousands of people and rendering about 300,000 people homeless. It does not only rain in Lebanon, it pours! President Emmanuel Macron of France in solidarity with the former colony of France rushed to the country and got pledges of $300 million from Europe, the USA and Canada and presumably some Arab Gulf countries. But the estimated need of the country is put at $15 billion so what has been pledged is merely scratching the face of what Lebanon‘s needs. The days ahead are going to be very tough for the Lebanese but many of them will leave their country for their second homes in France, the USA, Argentina, Chile, Canada and Nigeria among other countries.
What can Nigeria learn from the situation of Lebanon? This is that rampant corruption, injustice, inequitable distribution, and monopoly of power can not only kill, they can also destroy a country. The Lebanese are now calling for the scrapping of their old constitution and political arrangement where power was shared along ethnic/religious lines thus perpetuating power among certain families and religious groups. They now want a system of careers open to talents instead of present system of political and ethnic and religious balancing leading to mediocrity instead of meritocracy. Unless the leaders of Lebanon listen to their people, the country will split into little statelets while their more powerful neighbours will grab what can be easily digested or agree to maintain some kind of condominium over the ancient people of Lebanon with their glorious historical heritage. There is a lesson for Nigeria to learn from the Lebanese tragedy.
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