Nigeria: Democracy or civil war?
By Gwynne Dyer
LONDON (JP): Can "30 years of rule by guns, boots, loot, whip, whims, decrees and prison bars," as Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka put it, really be coming to an end in Africa's biggest country? Maybe, but nobody is counting chickens yet.
Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria's best-liked ex-president, spent the last years of Gen. Sani Abacha's dictatorship in jail precisely because he was too popular with ordinary Nigerians: Abacha had Obasanjo arrested on trumped-up charges of plotting a coup. But Abacha died one night last June (his heart turned out not to be up to the strain of Viagra plus two prostitutes), and now Nigeria is allegedly heading back to democracy.
The newly freed Obasanjo is now the presidential candidate of the People's Democratic Party (PDP) -- and Nigeria's future would seem a lot brighter if you could believe he will really be allowed to win the presidential elections scheduled for Feb. 27.
Of all the generals who have ruled Nigeria over the past three decades, Obasanjo is the only one who was not a liar, a thug and a thief. He got power by accident when the tyrant of the day, Gen. Murtala Muhammad, was killed in 1975 in a failed coup, and he used it to carry out the sole successful hand-over to a democratically elected civilian government in Nigeria's history.
Obasanjo did not enrich himself, and at the time of his arrest he was chair of the advisory board of Transparency International, the corruption-rating agency that has ranked Nigeria worst in the world for the past three years. So when Obasanjo's PDP won control of over half the local councils in nationwide municipal elections on Dec. 5, there was a surge of hope in Nigeria.
If the PDP can repeat that feat over the next 10 weeks in the successive elections for state governments, the federal parliament, and the presidency, then maybe Nigeria can have a decent future. But the signs are mixed, at best.
On the one hand, the interim government led by Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar is actually getting back some of the money that Abacha stole. US$750 million has been recovered from Abacha's immediate family (including 38 suitcases of cash that his widow Maryam was trying to check onto a flight to Saudi Arabia), and another $250 million from his security adviser Ishmael Gwarzo.
On the other hand, many of the exiles who fled abroad under Abacha fear that their lives are still in danger from officers determined to maintain the army's stranglehold on power. Those who do return, like Wole Soyinka, tend to stay only a short time.
Soyinka paid a six-day visit to Nigeria in October, gave a high-profile lecture on "Redesigning a Nation" at Lagos law school -- and went back to the safety of Emory University in Atlanta to await developments. Not because he is a coward, but because he sees every day that he spends in Nigeria as a "calculated risk".
You have only to look at the hard men like Generals Jeremiah Useni and T.Y. Danjuma who lurk behind Abubakar, the seemingly sincere head of the transitional military government, or at the legions of senior officers from the north who dominate the recently purged army, to realize that the game's not over yet.
At one level, it's simply a matter of not losing control of the trough. The fact that the army has run oil-rich Nigeria for most of the time since independence has enabled generations of officers to get rich (though it has not done much for Nigeria: after pumping $225 billion of oil over the past 30 years, Nigeria's per capita income is no higher than it was at independence).
But it's not just private greed. Ever since independence Nigeria has been run by the north for the north -- even though half the population, most of the business activity, and all of the oil is in the south. Indeed, that's the main reason why most of Nigeria's history has passed under various military dictatorships: only continual military interventions by the northern-dominated army can preserve this unjust situation.
It's true that most of Nigeria's north is Muslim and most of the south is Christian, but this is not really a religious divide.
Rather it's a conflict between the socially conservative, almost feudal relations that underpin the northern elite and the more modern, democratic and business-oriented attitudes of the south.
The last time that the military tried to stage-manage an election, however, a southern (but Muslim businessman called Moshood Abiola managed to win a majority in every city in the country, including all those in the north. The army annulled the election and clapped him in jail, but it was a clear sign that the old system was breaking down. As the north modernizes, non- elite northerners are losing patience with the old system too.
This is the hope for Nigeria, and the source of the support that might carry Obasanjo to power with a truly national mandate in February. But if the military frustrate change again, then Nigeria faces civil war, for patience is running out everywhere.
When Abiola died in prison in July, there was a week of rioting by Yoruba fellow-tribesmen demanding a 'Republic of Oduduwa' in the south-west. More recently Nigeria's fourth- largest tribe, the Ijaws, have begun seizing oil facilities in the south-eastern coastal region, demanding a better return for local people from the oil wealth that is concentrated in their region.
"Democracy is not the slogan in the Niger delta," says Mofia Akobo of the Southern Minorities Group. "The slogan is self- determination, self-rule, and control of our resources." An understandable demand -- but if it is pursued in an undemocratic Nigeria, it means secession and civil war.
There will be no "African renaissance" without the 120 million Nigerians, and if the current attempt at democratization doesn't succeed, there may be no Nigeria at all. "Let's say there are prospects for a new Nigeria," said Wole Soyinka during his October visit, "but I don't think we have a new Nigeria yet."