Decision Time in Nigeria

Over the course of the last year, this column has regularly chronicled developments in Nigeria; including Islamist activism in the north, evidence of growing connections to international terrorist networks, and a simmering insurgency in the oil-rich Niger Delta region; which have only reaffirmed not only the strategic importance of Africa's most populous country, but the global geopolitical significance of the electoral exercise which the Nigerians are presently conducting (voters went to the polls last Saturday, April 14, to vote in state elections and will do so again this coming Saturday, April 21, to elect a new president, vice president, and parliament).

Decision time has come.

However, this being Nigeria, the road to the poll has been anything but smooth. In December 2006, an international delegation organized by the International Republican Institute and led by Ambassador Pierre-Richard Prosper, former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes, conducted a pre-election assessment. In addition to Ambassador Prosper, the other American delegates were former Congressman Harry A. Johnston II (D-Florida), who chaired the Africa Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives and later served as President Bill Clinton's Special Envoy to Sudan, and yours truly.

The delegation's final report, published in February, found that:

[T]he political climate in Nigeria today, while relatively open in comparison to many other societies making transitions toward greater democracy, is very tense. While the overwhelming consensus among the delegation's interlocutors – shared by the delegates themselves – is that elections must be held as scheduled and a transition must take place on the constitutionally-mandated date of May 29, 2007, there remains doubt on the part of a not insignificant number as to whether there truly exists a political will to actually have free and fair elections which are credibly carried out. Furthermore, even if assuming that the quasi-unanimous declarations of support for the poll on the part of political figures are indeed manifestations of the requisite will, the question remains whether Nigeria is prepared or can be reasonably expected to become prepared to actually carry out the exercise in a credible manner. Finally, even assuming both these presuppositions, serious concerns relating to security remain unanswered. In fact, enough reports of violence and fear in the current intra-party primary campaigns do not augur well for the general election campaign that is only now beginning.

While some of the issues that troubled us at the time have been resolved, others have not.

In fact, as I file this column early in order to travel again to Nigeria as part of another international delegation to monitor Saturday's federal election, it is not even clear who voters will be asked to choose between. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) disqualified Vice President Atiku Abubakar, standard bearer of the opposition Action Congress (AC), arguing that he had been indicted by the anti-corruption Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. The Supreme Court was scheduled to hear an appeal from the vice president last Thursday, but was forced to adjourn when President Obasanjo suddenly declared Thursday and Friday public holidays. According to the president, the holidays were “meant to afford sufficient time to those Nigerians who need to travel out of their bases in order to cast their votes,” however he did not mention that they also had the effect of stalling consideration of his vice president's appeal for four critical days around the voting for state governors and legislators (Obasanjo and Atiku have been feuding since the latter opposed the failed attempt last year by the incumbent head of state to change the constitution to allow for a third term).

On Monday, a unanimous Supreme Court was finally allowed to rule that INEC has acted unlawfully in disqualifying Atiku and that he should be allowed to contest the presidential elections along with Obasanjo's hand-picked successor at the head of the People's Democratic Party (PDP), Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, the sickly (he had to be medically evacuated to Germany for treatment last month) governor of Katsina state in the north whose older brother served as the president's deputy when Obasanjo was military ruler in the 1970s; Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler with ties to Islamism (during his 1980s dictatorship he took his half-Christian nation into Organization of the Islamic Conference) who is running as the candidate of the All Nigeria People's Party (ANPP); and several minor candidates. The ruling, however, throws the poll into confusion. Election officials have printed and distributed some 61 million ballots without Atiku's name and have not yet revealed how they propose to obey the court order – or if they can even do so in time.

But assuming that adequate provision can be made to include the vice president's candidacy on the ballot come Saturday, many observers fear that the credibility of the entire process may nonetheless have been irreparably compromised by the government's heavy handed tactics throughout the campaign – in which case Nigeria's already significantly unstable internal ethnic, political, and security situation could be even further exacerbated. On Friday, a group of prominent Nigerians led by Nobel Laureate in Literature Wole Soyinka issued a statement warning that “if the executive continues to see itself as the government of a conquered people, then the ethnic nationalities in different parts of the country will have no choice but to resort to the same self-help methods, and there will be chaos in the country.”

This warning should not be taken lightly. Nigeria's elections have regularly precipitated crises which have paved the way for self-appointed “national saviors” to emerge from the barracks. Since independence in 1960, no elected leader has ever handed over power to an elected successor. And today the situation is particularly dire, as the violence surrounding last Saturday's balloting, in which at least twenty-one people died, demonstrates. (Early returns, denounced by the opposition as fraudulent, give the PDP control of 26 states, the ANPP four northern states, the AC the state of Lagos, and the small Progressive People's Alliance the state of Abia. Two southeastern states – Imo and Enugu – had their results annulled due to irregularities, while those in two states – Kano, the most populous state in the Nigerian federation, and Taraba – were still to be announced.)

All in all, it is bad enough that, as the International Crisis Group noted in a recent report, “ethnic and religious conflicts have caused over 15,000 deaths and displaced more than three million during [Obasanjo's] presidency,” but in the midst of a global war against terrorism, the U.S. and other allies must also confront the fact that radical Islamist elements have been increasing their activities to exploit the West African country's local religious and political tensions and to prepare the ground for further penetration and the opening up in Africa a full-fledge new front in their fight against the West, as a number of jihadi strategists have explicitly advocated. Professor John Paden, one of the world's leading experts on Nigeria and certainly no alarmist, has noted:

Without a doubt, Nigeria is central to global stability. If some form of dialogue between Nigerian groups … is not forthcoming, the prospect of violence and terrorism may well persist, and, in extreme cases, nations may fail. As a stark reminder of what can happen when political leadership or systems crumble, more than 2 million died in Nigeria's civil war of 1967-1970. A failure in Nigeria today would have even more extreme consequences in view of its oil wealth and military technologies, which would be available to destabilize the whole of West Africa.

On the other hand, free, fair, and credible elections – and, they are still possible even at this late hour, given Nigerians' incredible capacity to pull themselves back from the brink and the vast resources that they have at their disposal – would lead to the inauguration of a legitimate political order (one of the upsides of the Nigerian constitutional arrangement is the possibility of renewing the entire structure of government without staggered terms of office). The transition to such a government would not only consolidate democracy in Nigeria, but also endow the regime elected with a national mandate to tackle the country's endemic conflicts, including the insurgency in the southeast where increasingly tactically-sophisticated attacks by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) have slashed Nigerian petroleum production by an estimated 500,000 barrels per day, a margin of approximately 25 percent of output capacity without which cut the West African nation would have already surpassed Saudi Arabia as a supplier of America's energy needs.

Last year in this column space, I penned the following lines about Nigeria:

Over the long-term, perhaps no African country is as vital to the strategic interests of the United States as Nigeria … It is in this context the Nigerian general elections … take on an immense importance. If President [Olusegun] Obasanjo manages to hand over his place on Abuja's Aso Rock to whoever is elected, he will not only achieve a feat that no other Nigerian leader has ever managed – the peaceful transition from one democratically-elected head of state to another – he make a significant contribution to regional stability and international security, including the strategic interests of the United States, as an oil-rich nation with a Muslim population three times that of Saudi Arabia consolidates its budding democracy. If, on the other hand, the democratic transition falters or is otherwise thwarted or subverted or if, in the worst case – but by no means unimaginable – scenario, federal Nigeria simply comes unglued along regional, religious, and ethnic lines, it will not be long before the economic, political, and military ripples in the Niger come ashore as waves crashing over the banks of the Hudson and the Potomac.

The waters have ebbed; it is now up to the Nigerian people whether what returns is normal tidal current or a devastating tsunami wave.

– 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.