Last week’s Nigerian election results drew global praise and stirred hopes of a democratic domino effect across the continent.
If an incumbent president could step down willingly, and power be transferred peacefully from one party to another in Nigeria — with its history of military coups and deadly ethnic and religious rivalries, not to mention a raging Muslim insurgency — why not elsewhere?
In the past two decades, incumbents have lost elections and relinquished power to the opposition in about 10 other African nations, mostly smaller ones like Senegal, Benin, Zambia and Malawi.
ROLE MODEL?
However, nowhere were the stakes as high as in Nigeria, where vast oil wealth has long intensified political battles and where the loss of power, in this case by Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan and the powerful Peoples Democratic Party, has meant a sudden stop to the flow of riches for one group.
“Given Nigeria’s size and the direct influence it exercises on neighboring states, it does make far more respectable and acceptable in elite circles the idea of a change,” said Steven Friedman, a political analyst at the University of Johannesburg. “We have to see what happens, but from that perspective, the way in which is has happened has been significant.”
“[However,] is it going to persuade the generals in Zimbabwe to stop doing what they are doing?” he added. “Absolutely not.”
Amid the accolades for Nigeria last week came a development on the other side of the continent more in keeping with the practice of clinging to power.
In recent months, supporters of Rwandan President Paul Kagame — who exercises outsized influence in Africa as a darling of Western governments, international donors and investors — have started a media campaign clamoring for constitutional change that would permit him to run for a third term in 2017.
Similar efforts are under way in other nations, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Burundi.
Two days after Jonathan conceded defeat in Nigeria — telling his party that it “should be celebrating rather than mourning” because it had “established a legacy of democratic freedom” — Kagame gave the clearest indication yet that he would be open to staying in power beyond the two terms allowed by Rwanda’s Constitution.
“Those who think the president should continue, they should convince me,” Kagame said on Thursday. “I am not asking anybody to change the constitution.”
Across the continent, there are equally powerful trends and countertrends, making it difficult to say what Nigeria’s impact will be.
RESHUFFLING
Some analysts said that Nigeria’s election could be regarded as less of a genuine democratic transfer than as a reshuffling of the nation’s historical power brokers.
New Nigerian president-elect Muhammadu Buhari is a former general who once served as the nation’s military ruler after coming to power in a coup.
The first Nigerian president after its return to democracy in 1999 was also a retired general and former military ruler, Olusegun Obasanjo.
Buhari’s political party, the All Progressives Congress, was established after three opposition parties formed an alliance in 2013 with the view of challenging Jonathan this year. Jonathan’s Peoples Democratic Party had held power since 1999.
Some see in Jonathan’s concession — and the possible emergence in Nigeria of a two-party system — a sign of political maturity. They also see it as a challenge to other African nations — including South Africa — that are effectively one-party democracies.
South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) has governed since the end of apartheid in 1994.
Alfredo Tjiurimo Hengari, an expert on African foreign policy at the South African Institute of International Affairs, said that Nigeria lacks the kind of strong civil society and domestic democratic institutions that hold South Africa’s government more accountable.
Few doubt that the ANC will peacefully accept an eventual loss of power nationally, he said.
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