Election not a way out of Nigeria's problems

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): To lose one national leader, as Oscar Wilde almost said, is a misfortune. In the case of Nigeria's dictator Gen. Sani Abacha, who died on 8 June of a heart attack, it could even be counted as a thinly disguised blessing.

However, to lose another national leader within a month -- as Nigeria did when its legally elected president, Moshood Abiola, imprisoned by Abacha in 1994, died in jail of an apparent heart attack on 7 July -- can only be seen as carelessness. He may have been Nigeria's last chance for a democratically elected president who was acceptable to all regions of the country.

Last Monday, the front-man whom the soldiers on the Provisional Ruling Council chose after Abacha's death, Gen. Adbulsalam Abubakar, went on television to promise democratic elections early next year. "Nigerians want nothing less than true democracy in a united and peaceful country," he intoned, and no doubt they do. But they doubt that they will get it from the army, which has ruled Nigeria for all but four of the past 32 years.

"These people are not going to give up power," said Beko Ransome-Kuti, recently freed leader of the Campaign for Democracy. "They are rogues."

And even the body language of Abubakar, who often looks like a deer caught in the headlights, suggests that he cannot deliver on his promises. He seems to be a well-intentioned man, but behind him are ruthless men like Generals Jeremiah Useni and T.Y. Danjuma who are not widely suspected of being closet democrats. In fact, one senior Nigerian politician observed privately that Abubakar looks like a man "frightened for his life".

Like most of his military colleagues from Nigeria's Moslem north, Abubakar never addresses the real problem. Half of Nigeria's population, most of its wealth, and all of the oil is in the largely Christian south, but it is normally ruled by northern soldiers for the benefit of themselves and their allies in the northern feudal elite. Indeed, that is why Nigeria is normally under military rule; only force can maintain that system.

So when Gen. Abubakar half-apologized for the excesses of Abacha's regime and appealed for national unity -- "We must admit that mistakes have been made....Our most recent attempt at democratization was marred by maneuvering and manipulation" (i.e. Abacha forced all five political parties he created to nominate him as president) -- most southern Nigerians were not impressed. Abacha was not a mistake; he was a natural product of the system.

The system is the worst inheritance of British colonial rule. As the British historian Lord Hailey said in 1955, Nigeria is "perhaps the most artificial of the many administrative units created in the course of European occupation of Africa." It is a country of around 120 million people, half the population of all of West Africa, with over a hundred ethnic and linguistic groups of significant size, including three huge ones: Ibo, Yoruba and Hausa.

The British system for governing this vast area was 'indirect rule': that is, you buy up the traditional ruling elites and get them to do your dirty work. They will, after all, be just as scared of modernization as the colonial rulers are, since modern-minded people will challenge both feudal privilege and foreign rule.

The north of Nigeria was full of rulers who fit that description, and the deal was consummated with Britain's decision to join together northern and southern Nigeria in 1914. It was northerners who dominated the civil and military services under British rule -- and northern soldiers who ran the new national army (and soon enough the government as well) after independence.

This north-south split is often simplified as a Moslem- Christian quarrel, but there are many northerners who don't like being ruled by traditional emirs and brutal soldiers either. That was what made Moshood Abiola so important: he was a southerner, from the Yoruba tribe that dominates Lagos and the southwest, but he was also a Moslem.

In the 1993 elections, which then-dictator Ibrahim Babangida held with the intention of putting an obedient puppet in power, Abiola astonished everybody by drawing support from all over Nigeria: not only 58.4 percent of the total popular vote, but strong support across the more urban states of the Moslem north.

That was what panicked the military into annulling the election, and jailing Abiola when he claimed the presidency: he had shown that a new Nigeria was coming into existence where their formula for permanent power (and great wealth) would no longer work. And that had to be stopped -- even if it was Nigeria's best hope for the future.

Abiola was no saint, but his death in prison this month was a disaster. He was a symbol of a modern Nigeria that could rise above the manipulators of ethnic and religious identity and begin to fulfill its great potential. "Abiola represented the unity of this country," said Gani Fawehinmi, Abiola's lawyer. "They (the regime) killed the unity. Now there will no longer be one Nigeria."

There were days of demonstrations in Lagos after Abiola's death, with some 60 people killed and demonstrators demanding an ethnic Yoruba 'Republic of Oduduwa'. Other parts of the south are just as alienated. If the military go ahead with their current plans -- no transitional civilian government including all major ethnic groups, no time to form real parties, and elections under military rules early next year -- Nigeria may just break up.

"The international community comes here with a very wrong idea about how Nigeria's problems should be solved," said Ayo Obe, head of the Civil Liberties Organization. "They think it is just a matter of elections. Nigeria is a country of many nations, and these have to be consulted so that we move away from tribal bias."

She is absolutely right, but neither the military nor the foreigners are listening.