The crowd gathers around the polling station officials, gesticulating angrily. Several pages of the voters’ register are missing and about 700 people will not be able to vote. The young man who brought the ballot box on the back of a motorbike looks terrified.
Suddenly soldiers appear. A sergeant strides toward the crowd pointing his gun, bayonet fixed. Terrified, they tumble over each other to get away. That morning, the military’s Major General Muhammad Abubakar warned that the army had been told to shoot to kill anyone who tried to disrupt the poll.
“If such a person resists arrest we will shoot him,” he said.
Welcome to Nigerian democracy, three weekends of voting that was supposed to change the political climate in Africa’s most populous nation. Last weekend, they voted for parliamentarians; next weekend it will be for governors. Saturday was the big one: a presidential race likely to reinstall Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan, a steady former zoology lecturer.
It’s been a bumpy ride. Since military rule ended 16 years ago, the integrity of elections in the post-military era has grown progressively worse. The 2007 poll was a violent farce, universally condemned. This time Nigerians were told it would be different. A local election observer said authorities had promised to raise their game.
“The last election represented, at the most, 10 percent of the will of the people. We told Jega [Attahiru Jega, the electoral commissioner] that he should get this up to 60 percent. He said he would make it 80 percent,” a Nigerian said.
However, on April 2, polls for the legislature opened only to be canceled at midday because voting materials had not been delivered in some areas. A frisson went through Nigeria. Chaos has come again, many thought. In truth, the chaos has never really gone away.
Politically and economically, Nigeria dominates west Africa and is second only to South Africa in political weight in the continent. It is fabulously endowed, having the largest population in Africa — about 150 million people. It pumps more oil than any other African country, much of it to the US, and has at least 50 billion barrels still to be sucked out. It has vast untapped mineral resources and its economy has grown at 6 percent or 7 percent for the past few years. More global companies are acknowledging that if you are going to invest in Africa, you have to be in Nigeria. Sales of beer, Maggi cubes and toilet paper, a local index of the rising middle class, are growing rapidly.
However, Nigeria is also bottom of the league table of progress toward the Millennium Development Goals and going backward. The public education and health systems have all but collapsed. Since 1990, the proportion of Nigerians living in poverty — less than US$1.25 a day — has increased from 49 percent to 77 percent. If the figures were to be believed, recent economic growth has not only failed to bring mass development, it has made the masses poorer.
The truth is that Nigeria is a failed state as a deliverer of safety, health and education to its people, but a very successful state for those who own and control or benefit from its increasingly dynamic economy. It is believed to have more millionaires than any other African country.
Writing in the Nigerian newspaper This Day two weeks ago, columnist Arnold Obomanu said: “Corruption is so ubiquitous that it has become the default way of getting things done.”
After the outcry over the previous elections, the government put in effort and money, firing the electoral commissioner and replacing him with Jega, a respected academic. A voter education program was established along with an expensive electronic voter registration system, identifying the 72.5 million voters by photograph and fingerprint.
On Saturday, northerners and southerners voted for different parties, but both voted massively against the perennial party of power, the People’s Democratic party (PDP) to which Jonathan belongs, sharply reducing huge majorities in both Senate and House of Representatives. At the polling station in the State House itself, the ruling party was humiliatingly defeated.
However, because the 2007 election was a farce of rigging and intimidation, it is impossible to know if this is a political shift or what would have happened four years ago had there been no rigging.
What is clear is that even since 2007 the gulf between the Hausa-speaking Muslim north and the rest of the country has deepened. Jonathan will not have an easy ride. Picked as running mate to Umaru Yar’Adua, a northern aristocrat, four years ago, he was catapulted into the limelight when the president died of kidney disease in May last year.
His advance was not smooth. Under an unwritten agreement between all major parties known as “zoning,” the presidency is supposed to rotate between north and south. Former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo from the south had two terms and Yar’Adua did not complete one so northerners felt they should retain the presidency. Jonathan, who comes from the Niger Delta, toughed it out.
Many of the former armed militants in the Niger Delta have become Jonathan’s special advisers. His inner Cabinet is entirely from his own area.
His main challenger is retired General Muhammadu Buhari, a northern Muslim who overthrew the elected government in 1983 and was president for two years before being overthrown by another general. He waged an authoritarian “war against indiscipline,” particularly against corruption and clashed with many powerful interests. To this day the northern politico business bosses hate him.
The ordinary people of the north voted massively for his Congress for Democratic Change candidates on Saturday. In the southwest, people voted for other opposition parties and the PDP lost seat after seat. The latest indications are that the PDP will barely retain control of the Senate and House of Representatives.
“This comes from hatred of the PDP, which has been in power since 1999. It has brought no development, but relentless stealing and corruption. That’s the perception,” one Western diplomat said.
However, Jonathan is liked better than his party. Faced with a straight choice between Jonathan and Buhari, many voters could plump for the sitting president even though they voted against his party in the other elections. He does, moreover, have some support in the north, enough for him to comply with the regional representation formula that demands that winners must win 25 percent in two-thirds of the 36 states.
Buhari is popular in the north, which claims it has the most people. However, he enjoys almost no support in the south. If, as looks likely, there is a run-off between them, it is just possible that Buhari might win, although most analysts say this is unlikely.
If Jonathan wins, he would be a minority southern president whose party has tenuous control of the legislature, and would have to make so many deals to get anything done he would be a lame duck president from day one. That would be a recipe for four years of dangerous instability.
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