Nigerians experience deformed democracy

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "The current democratic experiment in Nigeria is like the pregnancy of a badly deformed mother carrying an equally deformed baby," said Douglas Anele of the Lagos Vanguard, Nigeria's best and bravest newspaper. "All Nigerians must join hands together so that the deformed political baby is delivered as safely as possible... We then have to cooperate to nurse it to maturity."

The analogy of a deformed baby would not go down very well in the politically correct West, but the 108 million Nigerians have had few chances to develop such a refined sensibility. Nigerians born since independence in 1960 have spent at least three- quarters of their lives under brutal and corrupt military dictatorships, and are far poorer, less educated, and less healthy than the citizens of the world's fourth-largest oil exporter should be.

So though everyone knows the presidential elections on Feb. 27 are not fully free, they are willing to seize the chance in the hope that it will be the first step towards better times. And "chance" is the right word, for this election would not be happening at all if Gen. Sani Abacha, the ninth and worst of Nigeria's military rulers, had not died in his bed last year (from over-exerting himself with two foreign prostitutes, it is universally believed in Nigeria).

At the time of his death, Abacha had been organizing rigged elections to ratify his transformation into a "civilian" president.

The general who took over as caretaker, Abdulsalami Abubakar, has turned them into more or less real elections -- although the army has only allowed three parties to emerge, has banned independent candidates, and has refused to reveal its plans for a new constitution until it knows who will be president.

There is also the small problem that one of the two presidential candidates in next Saturday's election, ex-general Olusegun Obasanjo, is himself a former military ruler, while his opponent, Olu Falae, was finance minister in another former military regime. There are no outsiders in the race: the military want to be sure that nobody is elected who will subsequently come and ask what they did with all the country's money.

And despite all that, Femi Kuta supports the elections. He is the son of Nigeria's best known singer Fela Kuti, a brilliant and anarchic rebel whose pidgin Afrobeat songs, like Soldier Come, Soldier Go, gave voice to the disgust ordinary Nigerians feel at the behavior of their arrogant army and its civilian hangers-on.

Femi Kuta is a well-known singer in his own right now, and after Fela's death from AIDS last year he launched his own political party, the Movement Against Second Slavery (MASS).

"We were enslaved before..." he explains, "but now we are enslaving ourselves. A lot of young people are frustrated because their elders have not provided them with a future. If they don't find something to encourage them to live, we are going to end up like Sierra Leone or Rwanda or Somalia."

If that did happen, it would dwarf all the other disasters, for Nigeria has almost 10 times as many people as all those other countries put together. It clearly frightens Femi Kuta, as it does many other Nigerians, and so he supports the election process despite the evident manipulation -- the Independent National Electoral Commission itself estimates that only 40 million of the 53 million registered voters are genuine -- and also despite what the likely winner of the presidency did to his family.

Olusegun Obasanjo, whose People's Democratic Party has come out of last week's parliamentary elections with a slight lead, is well respected because he was the only one of Nigeria's military rulers to hand power back to civilians voluntarily (in 1979). The reality was a bit more complex -- he inherited power because his predecessor was assassinated, and lacked sufficient backing in the army to keep it himself -- but on the strength of that reputation he even became a candidate for UN Secretary-General in 1991. He would not, however, be Femi Kuta's first choice.

Back in 1977, when Gen. Obasanjo was ruling Nigeria and Fela Kuti was being particularly annoying, Obasanjo's soldiers broke into the singer's compound, fractured his skull, threw his 82- year-old mother from a window (she died of her injuries), and burned the place to the ground. Obasanjo is not a man without a past -- nor without a present either. Most Nigerians assume that his well financed presidential campaign is being funded by his old friends in the army, in return for immunity from prosecution for their stolen millions.

That is probably true, but nobody would seriously argue that his opponent, Olu Falae, would do any differently. The military are his old friends too, though they do prefer their fellow- soldier.

And the current front-man for the military interest, Gen. Abubakar, has carefully left a three-month gap between this election and the transfer of power on May 29, so that the terms of an (unpublished) amnesty can be nailed down before the hand- over.

This is not so much an election as the first, ultra-cautious step by a country which must now tiptoe out of a minefield that took 30 years to lay. Tribal, regional, and religious differences have been exacerbated by decades of military regimes dominated by the Muslim north, and undoing the damage and creating a Nigeria worthy of its citizens' loyalty will take decades more.

Nobody is expecting miracles, but they must see movement in the right direction soon or the "Sierra Leone option" will grow.

"The presidential candidates have been chosen by questionable means," admits Abdul Oruh, director of the Civil Liberties Organization. "There were problems with registration...and the constituencies are very inequitably drawn, to favor the north... Even with these elections, we are very far from being a democracy. But it is a start."