Nigeria Teeters Back from the Brink — For Now

Two weeks ago in this column space I observed that free, fair, and credible elections in Nigeria “would lead to the inauguration of a legitimate political order;[which] would not only consolidate democracy in Nigeria, but also endow the regime elected with a national mandate to tackle the country's endemic conflicts,” while failure could well destabilize not only West Africa, but the world at large. The polls have now come and gone. Voters went to the polls ; or at least attempted to do so; on April 14 to choose state governors and members of state legislatures in Nigeria's 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory. One week later, on April 21, they returned; or, again, tried to do so; to choose a new president, vice president, and members of the federal Senate and House of Representatives. Overall, the electoral exercise; which, according to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), resulted in Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, the presidential candidate of the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP), winning by a landslide and sweeping his party to another term at the helm with him; was nothing short of disastrous, a view shared by observers almost universally: The Transition Monitoring Group (TMG), a broad-based coalition of some sixty Nigerian non-governmental organizations which fielded some 50,000 observers across the country, declared that irregularities were so numerous and extensive that “the election was a charade and did not meet the standards required for democratic elections.” The Lagos-based Vanguard newspaper memorably opined that “Even a goat would have won the last elections provided it had the backing of the PDP.”

• The European Union said the polls fell “far short of basic international and regional standards for democratic elections and…cannot be considered to have been credible.” A Dutch member of the European Parliament, Max van den Berg, who led the European Union's election observers as he did in the previous poll in 2003, told reporters that Nigeria's was “one of the worst elections that the EU [has] observed.”

   

• The U.S. State Department pronounced the elections “seriously flawed.” Citing a litany of abuses, including widespread “underage voting, voter registration list errors, stuffed ballot boxes, group voting, party observers and police instructing individuals on who to vote for, lack of privacy for voting, lack of results sheets and other materials, falsified results sheets, and early closings” of polling stations, the International Republican Institute said the vote fell “below the standard set by previous Nigerian elections and international standards.” The National Democratic Institute, whose election monitors were led by former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, declared that “the electoral process failed the Nigerian people” since “the cumulative effect of the serious problems” observers saw “substantially compromised the integrity” of the vote.

  As I reported last week in a commentary for the online edition of the foreign policy journal The National Interest:

  Observing the voting in southeastern Benue State, the agricultural breadbasket just north of the oil-rich Niger Delta region, I personally saw police and other officials openly “helping” voters to mark their ballot papers for the ruling PDP. I also found entire areas whose residents professed support for the ANPP, the AC, or other opposition groups, where the polls never even opened, including a township outside of Makurdi that should have had six polling stations to accommodate some 5,000 registered voters. Instead, while no polling officials or materials ever arrived, a truckload of police in riot gear did show up to disperse the angry would-be electors. Towards the end of the election day, at a polling station just two blocks from where my colleagues and I were observing the vote tally, armed gunmen shot an election official and made off with the ballot box (nationally, some 200 people lost their lives to similar poll-related violence). All in all, I cannot help but concur with the judgment offered by the EU's van den Berg when he was asked if the irregularities represented an orchestrated attempt to rig the result: “In several places, yes, and in others, very magic results.”

  Van den Berg's “magic results” not only led to the overall lopsided vote tally reported by INEC – Yar'Adua was said to have received 24,638,063 votes to 6,605,299 for former military ruler General Muhammadu Buhari of the All Nigerian People's Party (ANPP), 2,637,848 million for Vice President Atiku Abubakar of the Action Congress, and a smattering to a number of minor candidates – but some vote tallies which more closely resembled returns in the old Soviet bloc (for example, INEC claimed that the ruling PDP won 96 percent of the vote in Delta State, 95 percent in Ebonyi State, 90 percent in Edo State, and 94 percent in Imo State) than those in any democracy. In fact, at the time of writing, about the only endorsement of the poll of which I am aware comes from South African President Thabo Mbeki – a judgment which should be taken with several large spoonfuls of salt given that the same Thabo Mbeki, in 2002, managed to declare Zimbabwe's widely condemned parliamentary poll a “peaceful, transparent, credible and well-managed” reflection of “the will of the people.”

   

  While only the hopelessly naïve or the willfully ignorant would characterize the Nigerian poll as reflecting the “will of the people,” it might nonetheless be true that for all their anger there is also resignation, even on the part of the defeated candidates. General Buhari, for example, who was defeated by President Obasanjo in the contested 2003 election, has decided not to challenge his more recent loss in the courts. Last time, after thirty months of litigation, he was spurned by the country's Supreme Court, whose justices were all appointees of the incumbent head of state. This time, his reaction is almost fatalistic: “We shall be wasting our time and resources going to election tribunal. In 2003, we did so and wasted our time [while] the Supreme Court laid the foundation for the rigging of elections in Nigeria.” While others have called for street protests to demand the cancellation of the rigged polls and their rerun, it is not clear that such demonstrations will enjoy much support. Despite tremendous anger I heard expressed during my visit, I also detected little appetite among Nigerian voters with whom I spoke to risk anything to exchange one member of the political elite for another. In fact, the influential Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria subsequently has issued a statement exhorting the population to refrain from mass protests.

  Even the outside powers, which were so uncharacteristically undiplomatic in their condemnation of the electoral shenanigans have apparently reconciled themselves to the reality that, in the end, they have very little leverage in this situation. Thanks in large measure to the windfall it reaped from oil markets as well as some skillful negotiating with the Paris Club of lender nations, the Obasanjo government managed to wipe away the $37 billion foreign debt that it had inherited. And with the People's Republic of China, whose China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) paid $2.27 billion last year to acquire a 45 percent stake in a Nigerian offshore field last year, eager to buy what it can of the country's hydrocarbon production, whatever regime presides in Abuja can have its choice of suitors. Consequently, both Great Britain and the United States have already hastened to signal their willingness to work with the Yar'Adua government that is expected to take office on May 29. Within days of the election, Baroness Valerie Amos, Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council, gave a speech in Lagos in which she declared: “Nigerians should not expect a perfect election, but what is important is that the country is moving forward in terms of democratic development.” Meanwhile the U.S. State Department's deputy spokesman, Tom Casey, said that America is “prepared to work with Nigeria's next administration in building upon our excellent bilateral relations and to continue the promotion of peace and security throughout Africa.”

  So, for now at least, it appears that Nigeria has once again teetered back from the brink. While part of this might be attributable to resignation on the part of voters, the lack of a regional edge to the contest – all three major candidates hailed from northern Nigeria, Yar'Adua and Buhari from the very same state, Katsina – might have been serendipitous. However, there is no guarantee that this will always be the case – and therein lurks the danger for Nigeria's tomorrow.

  Anthony D. Smith, the noted scholar of ethnicity and nationalism at the London School of Economics, has defined the nation as a “named human population sharing a historical territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy, and common legal rights and duties for all members,” with allowances for variations of expression of this ideal type. Looking at Nigeria, it is hard to evince much evidence of any of these criteria being satisfied.

  Ethnically, the country's 140 million people, split roughly evenly between the north and the south, are subdivided into at least 250 ethnic groups, with the largest being the Hausa and Fulani in the north (29 percent), the Yoruba in the southwest (21 percent), and the Igbo and the Ijaw in the southeast (respectively, 18 and 10 percent). Religiously, the country is divided, roughly, between a predominantly Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south. Economically, the south's hydrocarbon sector account for 95 percent of the Nigeria's exports and 70 percent of the total national economy.

  At some point – whether it is this year, next year, or a decade from now – southern Nigerians of Yoruba, Igbo, and Ijaw extraction will be asking themselves what they gain from being in a united country with their relatively unproductive northern Hausa and Fulani neighbors with whom they share few bonds of kinship, religion, or culture, but whose demographic heft will guarantee them a certain predominance in the country's politics. If anything, given these multiple fault lines, the identity and interests of one Nigerian are more likely to be opposed to those of another Nigerian from a different part of the country as they are to be bound together – hardly an auspicious constellation under which to build a future together.

  Absent the requisite conditions for fostering a deeply-rooted sense of national identity and the consequent legitimization of the political order, it may be just a matter of time before the Nigerian political establishment's legitimacy deficit metastasizes into a mortal challenge to the very existence of that nation-state itself. And that will be one African crisis that America – and the world – will be unable to ignore.

  – J. Peter Pham is Director of the Nelson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a Research Fellow of the Institute for Infrastructure and Information Assurance at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.