By Harrison Chidiogo Diala
The signs are getting clearer that Nigeria's fragile democracy may soon crumble due to the increasing tension between various segments that form the loose federation of over 300 distinct ethnic groups that gained independence from Britain 50 years ago. At its independence there was justifiable optimism that with its enormous human and material resources that Nigeria was destined to be one of the emergent global economic centres at the turn of the century, comparable perhaps to Malaysia, Singapore, India and Brazil. Indeed such a comparison was made recently by Peter Cunliffe-Jones in his new book, My Nigeria: Five Decades of Independence in which he drew a comparison between Nigeria and Indonesia, another vast, diverse and oil-rich country. The author emphasised two key differences: in Indonesia the generals and their friends did not steal 100 percent of the oil money, and they invested it in productive industries. Nigeria’s billions, he stated, lie in foreign tax havens. Those who rule Nigeria, he concludes, do not believe in the country.
The country in its 50 years chequered history has survived prolonged periods of military dictatorship, a thirty-month brutal civil war and highly divided society to launch an ambitious plan to transform the country into a modern economy that will rank among the top 20 in the world by the year 2020.
Towards this lofty goal, the then President, Olusegun Obasanjo brought stability to the Nigerian economy with the annual growth in the real sector of the economy at an average of more than 8.5%. He assembled a team of highly talented men and women to drive the nation's economy. With relatively free hand to operate, Obasanjo's economic team revolutionized the economy and by the time the ex-army general left office the country had cleared all of its international debt estimated at over $36bn and left behind a foreign reserve of nearly $50bn. The leaders of the economic team have since moved to the top leadership positions in the World Bank and IMF in recognition of their unusual feat of turning a backward economy around in less than 4 years. Obasanjo's regime also managed to stabilize the political landscape of Nigeria by bringing much needed discipline into the ruling party and superintended the first ever handing over power from one democratically elected government to another. Obasanjo has also the singular honour of being the only military leader in the history of Nigeria to voluntarily hand-over power to a civilian president. Perhaps, the retired general's biggest mistake was the selection of the late Umaru Yar'Adua as his successor. Many have accused Obasanjo of deliberately selecting the weak and sick Yar’Adua in order to manipulate him and remain in power by proxy. The election that brought Yar'Adua to office has been unfairly criticized as not credible even when the ruling party PDP was by far the dominant party in the country and was not subjected to any meaningful opposition in the 2007 poll.
For most countries, sustenance of the progress or limited success made by the Obasanjo regime would have been the most feasible strategic option to move the country forward. Instead, the Yar’Adua Administration sort to distance itself from nearly all the policy directions of the previous government. Buoyed by the Lagos media and political action associations masquerading as civil society groups, the government 'reviewed' all the initiatives started by Obasanjo. The immediate causalities were the partnership with China to build a new modern rail system that will ease transportation between the North and South, and West to East, the independent power project that would have solved the problem of Nigeria's epileptic power problem by 2011, a national security initiative that nipped coup-plotting in the bud, and a foreign policy programme that was intended to remove Nigeria from the suffocating grip of Whitehouse and Downing street by forging closer ties with China and non-EU member European countries. The Yar'Adua administration subsequently embarked on a witch hunt of people who were associated with President Obasanjo. The very same people who brought him to office were harassed by countless probes. Even Obasanjo himself was invited several times by the House of Representative Committees probing various aspects of his period in office. What happened 2007 - 2010 was a classical lesson of the outcome of a nation that based its policy on the views of those who shout the loudest and as would be expected, the resultant cacophony become unbearable and destructive.
As often the case with political power games, those who were displaced by the new Yaradua boys began to plan their revenge and come-back. Mr El Rufai, a fomer Minister of the Federal Capital Territory and Nuhu Ribadu, the Chairman of EFFC who were declared wanted and charged to court to answer to various allegations of improper conduct while in office fled the country. They had willing partners in the vocal Nigerian opposition groups and some international organizations who had genuine fears that Yar’Adua was becoming uncontrollable. This new coalition of the aggrieved had receptive ears in the then Vice President and now president Goodluck Jonathan. It was the group that founded and financed the Save Nigeria Group, the Good Governance Group (3G), CODER and seven other pro-democracy groups. With the near monopolistic control of the Nigeria media by Bola Tinubu of ACN, the views of this group became the voice of Nigerians. Demonstrations were organized against Yar'Adua, the then INEC chair and the National Assembly. Before Yar'Adua's death in May the group had succeeded in hoodwinking the country to accept clear violations of the Nigerian Constitution by blackmailing the National Assembly to invoke the ‘Doctrine of Necessity' to install Mr. Jonathan as Acting President (a title not even provided by law), interfering in the removal of the INEC Chairman six weeks before he was due to end his tenure as a trade-off to the NLC to abort a fathom strike planned for May 1, 2010, and compelling the Courts to drop charges against key members of the group. The group's appeal for reform and anti-corruption resonated with many Nigerians but like most reformers, they have good knowledge of what may be wrong with the country but wrong on what is right for the country.
With these remarkable successes, the anti-Yar’Adua campaign took a whirl of its own. Opinion page editors were hired and unleashed on the unsuspecting and trusting public. Editorial pages were procured from almost all the newspapers. The members of the National Assembly were easy commodities paid for with the proceeds from inflated contracts and grant from a 'friendly country'.
The initial plan was to raise a dissident group within PDP and to engineer a breakaway faction of the party which will join ACN and General Buhari's faction of ANPP to form a 'Mega Party'. Two unrelated events conspired to force a change of plan. The first was the relative ease with which the PDP leadership headed by Chief Vincent Ogbulafor was dismantled and the second was the impatience on the part of Alhaji Abubakar and Buhari to stick with Tinubu until the break-up of PDP was achieved. There was therefore no need to go through the tortuous route of breaking up PDP and to assemble a new Coalition. The release of an electoral timetable in March 2010 by Iwu's INEC for the 2011 elections added a further impetus for the Coalition to go ahead with the new plan.
Now the group has to bend all the rules in order to install Goodluck Jonathan as the President after the 2011 election. This is where the concept of a banana republic seems most appropriate. According to Wikipedia, banana republic is a term that refers to a politically unstable country dependent upon limited resources (e.g. bananas), and ruled by a small, self-elected, wealthy, and corrupt politico-economic clique. The original concept of banana republic as outlined by Wikipedia was a direct reference to a "servile dictatorship" that abetted (or supported for kickbacks) the exploitation of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially banana cultivation, originated with the introduction of the banana fruit to Europe in 1870, by Captain Lorenzo D. Baker, of the ship The Telegraph, who initially bought bananas in Central America and sold them in Boston at a 1,000 per cent profit. If you substitute banana for petrol then the characterization becomes obvious.
Democracy and good governance in any nation require more than just the conduct of elections as the group seems to believe by their successful nomination of one of their confidants as the INEC Chair and vigorously marketing him as having integrity. The presence of strong laws, respect for human rights and institutions are in fact more important than mere conduct of elections. Even for the elections, the environment in which the elections are conducted often determine the credibility of the process. As former Governor Donald Duke revealed recently. Rigging of elections are often a local affair that involves field operatives and the corrupt politicians who have no intention of playing by the rules. Governor Duke maintains that, contrary to widely held view, the INEC Chairman has minimal influence in the conduct of elections in the states and supervised by Electoral Commissioners appointed directly by the President. As Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society, noted recently, "election vote rigging was not only organized by government and state officials - everyone was at it. This is the way Nigeria works. It’s a system too strong for one person to change; progress will require a whole new generation committed to cleaning things up."
Now for the first time in the history of the country, laws are broken or amended to suit the strategic plan of a political clique bent on creating a new 'progressive' ruling elite. Like in a banana republic no one knows when the election will take place. The National assembly that is supposed to provide the check and balance of a modern democratic state is too compromised to play its Constitutional role. Nigeria’s elected politicians warded themselves some of the highest salaries in the world and they openly indulge in stupendous exhibition of power and wealth. In May this year, the legislators shamelessly approved a pay rise that would have given them each $$120,000 per month.
On the specific issue which I have been asked to address regarding the possibility of post election violence in Nigeria, I must admit that the analysis provided by Ambassador Campbell is indeed on the mark. But I do not agree with the conclusions he posited. While there could be prolonged instability in the country, not necessarily from the post election conflict, Nigerian politics is not issues or ideological based and the possibility of settling seemingly irreconcilable positions is indeed high. Things can only go wrong if Washington and London do not accept the outcome, regardless of how credible the poll is. As was recently noted by Norman Amidu in the Conscience magazine, disputations over elections in Nigeria were deliberately externalized by certain elements whose intents could not be anything but mindless and self serving. In a dispute where there are no fixed positions and no values or group interests are at stake, agreements and settlement are often easily procured. According the extant plan, the muddled election will benefit a wide spectrum of the key players and serious opposition or challenge is not envisaged.
As I indicated earlier in this presentation, the plan was for Jonathan to run under PDP rebel faction sponsored by the Presidency and included the former Senate President Ken Nnamani, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Masari and several former Ministers under the Obasanjo Administration. With the successful containment of the influence of the governors in the PDP, the new arrangement is to cause serious disorganization in the electoral system and the general polity and in the resultant installibilty and insecurity in the country a mass movement will be raised to market Jonathan as the panacea of Nigeria’s developmental problems. A new electoral support base anchored on the minorities of the political South-South, Christian North East and the various tribes of the North Central will be used to make Jonathan President. The majority tribes, Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa/ Fulani have been factored into this equation as obstacles to be contained in this political chessboard. The candidature of Mr. Ribadu, for example, was not envisaged to pose any serious challenge to PDP as a presidential candidate for the opposition party, ACN but to neutralize the votes of the more ideological South West and in return ACN will be assisted by INEC and the security agencies to retain all the states of the South West in 2011.
The spanner in the works may come by way of the various amendments that have been proposed both on the Electoral Act and the 1999/ 2010 Constitution aimed solely to diminish the stronghold of the governors have on the party and to recruite members of the National Assembly to support this new political movement. Such a move will greatly over-centralize the power on the already too-powerful presidency. For some reason one cannot discern, the group also plans to elongate the tenure of the present administration and the legislators. They have learnt from the mistake of Obasanjo who was widely believed to have tried to elongate his tenure through Constitution amendment and attempted to truncate the 2007 election by placing almost insurmountable upstacles for the election management body. For the 2011 elongation plan, the tactics this time is to use electoral logistics as acceptable excuse not to hold the election on time and extend the handover date of May 29th to October 1 in the first instance. But as widely rumored the plan is to allow the current administration including parliamentarians stay additional six months in office to enable the new power elite to consolidate.
The project has now taken a life of its own and many frustrated young people who genuinely believe that the time has come for change in Nigeria are lending their support in this massive social marketing project oiled with Nigeria's huge petroleum resources. The trajectory this will take after 2011 is difficult to predict. One thing is however certain that with the strong-arm tactics against the opposition politicians, the many changes in the electoral law and even the Constitution a few months to the scheduled date of the elections and the possible shift in handover date, Jonathan’s expected victory in 2011 presidential election may not be acceptable as free and fair.
Dr. Harrison Diala, Trevor Campbell Fellow lives in Shipley, West Yorkshire and contributed this lecture in a symposium to mark 50 years of Nigeria’s Independence
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