Nigeria: Flailing State

On the final day of their summit last week at the German Baltic seaside resort of Heiligendamm, as they are nowadays wont to do, the leaders of the G8 received a select delegation of their African counterparts who had come to hear the group of industrialized powers reaffirm their commitment to promote democracy and development on the world's poorest continent.

Among the African leaders making the journey this year was Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, fresh from his May 29 installation as president of Nigeria.

Under normal circumstances, Yar'Adua would have been fêted by the assembled heads of state. Nigeria's 140 million people make the country by far the most populous African state, with a demographic weight equal to second-ranked Egypt and third-ranked Democratic Republic of Congo combined. The West African country's wealth of natural resources – according to the most recent data from the United States Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration, this past March, Nigeria edged past Saudi Arabia to become America's third largest foreign supplier of crude oil (it is also America's fourth most important source for liquefied natural gas imports) – likewise make it an object for courtship by the world's leading economies. Yet Yar'Adua was not singled out (he was, in fact, barely visible in the second row of the group photo) because things are anything but normal in Nigeria.

The transition from President Olusegun Obasanjo to his successor was supposed to mark a watershed. I wrote last year:

The Nigerian general elections, now set for April 21, 2007, take on an immense importance. If President 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.

Unfortunately, while Yar'Adua was the declared winner of the April 21 poll and assumed the presidency in time to give his predecessor the distinction of being the first Nigerian head of state to cede power at the end of his constitutional mandate, it is not quite so clear whether the new president can be described as “democratically-elected.” As I reported last month, in which I also described my first-hand observations of the electoral shenanigans, Nigerian civil society organizations as well as international observers from the European Union and the United States unanimously deplored the poor organization and massive rigging of the election. The head of the EU's delegation even described it as the worst poll the European organization had ever monitored. In testimony last Thursday before the Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nigerian Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka noted that the Carter Center had judged that the voting in just two of Nigeria's thirty-six states could be deemed as “free and fair.” Professor Soyinka was more generous than the Carter Center poll watchers, conceding the voting in five states could be considered having “reflected, fairly accurately, the electoral will of the people.” However, he added: “Five out of thirty-six, that is, one out of seven is generally considered an abysmal failure…A government that is the product of such woeful democratic collapse belongs in a special category of its own, one that defies definition.”

So instead of appearing before the G8 as the representative of country that has advanced on the road of democracy and empowered by democratic legitimacy not only to resolve his country's smoldering internal conflicts but also to contribute to much needed regional stability in Africa, Yar'Adua, a frail figure in the best of times (at one point during the campaign, he physically collapsed and had to airlifted to Germany for treatment), made his global debut as the very embodiment of flailing condition of a Nigeria that would not require much to slide into the category of a failed state.

Not that any of this seemed to bother Nigeria's newly ensconced chief executive. Apparently bolstered by an offhand comment made by former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who had help start the G8 summits in the 1970s, that the forum should be expanded to include select developing countries like Nigeria, whom he inserted in a shortlist alongside China, India, and Brazil, Yar'Adua became delusional, telling an audience in Berlin that he expected his country to have an economy that “would go even beyond what was witnessed during the emerging years of the Asian Tigers.” Yar'Adua then rhapsodized like a therapist-cum-guru: “In Nigeria, what we are and what we become in [the] future is what we choose to become today…I am going to provide the leadership to do this.”

Back on ground, things are less rosy. As the outgoing president of the Nigerian Senate, Chief Ken Nnamani, predicted to the Reuters news service shortly after the election results were announced, “There will be a legacy of hatred. People will hate the new administration and they will have a crisis of legitimacy.” The real question is how this hatred and lack of political legitimacy will impact the new regime and the country. Some civil society groups in Nigeria, including the Coalition of Civil and Human Rights Groups, the Campaign for Democracy, and the Centre for Constitutional Governance, were quoted in a recent International Crisis Group report as pledging they “will use all legitimate means to give the Yar'Adua presidency a tough time.” While a robust political opposition is healthy for democratic politics, the worry among observers is that the long-term indicators are not only far from reassuring, they underscore four major challenges, any one of which, amid the volatile context, might ignite violence and even civil war:

• One-party state. The results delivered by massively rigged elections in April continue a disturbing trend to de facto one-party rule. In the 1999 election, the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) standard bearer, Olusegun Obasanjo, won 62.8 percent of the vote to 37.2 percent for his opponent Olu Falae of the All Nigeria People's Party/Alliance for Democracy (ANPP/AD) coalition. During his disputed 2003 reelection, Obasanjo claimed 61.9 percent of the vote to the ANPP's Major General Muhammadu Buhari's 32.2 percent. In the recent election, the PDP's Yar'Adua was declared to have won over 70 percent of the vote to 18 percent for Buhari of the ANPP and a meager 5 percent for Vice President Abubakar Atiku, who ran on the Action Congress (AC) ticket. At the same time and through the same machinations, the PDP expanded the number of state houses under its control from twenty-one to twenty-eight.

   

• Loss of voter interest in the democratic process. Despite the considerable increase in population which Nigeria has experienced since the end of military rule in 1999, the figures for voter registration have hardly budged, barely shifting from 57.9 million to 61.5 million. Even with the stuffed ballots, the total number of votes counted actually went down from 38.9 million in 2003 to 35.2 million this year. More tellingly, despite calls for a rerun of the poll by civil society groups and even by a group of 48 Nobel Laureates, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama, convened by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, there seems to be little taste on the part of the man or woman on the Nigerian street to work themselves up over one member of the political elite or another.

   

• Continuing crisis in the Niger Delta. On the eve of the presidential election, I wrote in this column that “free, fair, and credible elections…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)…[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, including the insurgency in the southeast where increasingly tactically-sophisticated attacks by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND).” I could have added that the failure to do so could increase violence, as I have subsequently had occasion to verify (see my May 17 column on “Vulnerability of Nigerian Oil Infrastructure Threatens U.S. Interests“). In fact, recent MEND attacks, which have led oil companies to close fields and evacuate workers, have now had the cumulative effect of shutting down an estimated one-third of Nigeria's pumping capacity. Just last Friday, in response to the ongoing imprisonment of their militant leader Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo Asari, né Dokubo Melford Goodhead, Jr. (see the profile of this character in my column last November 30), a MEND spokesman told the Voice of America's Gilbert da Costa: “I'm betting you, you will live to hear that atrocities are happening in the Niger Delta. The present president, so-called Yar'Adua, will have it hot in this state. We will not relent; we will fight with our last drop of blood.”

   

• Renewed secessionism. Writing in the March-April issue of the foreign policy journal The National Interest, I observed: “ethnic divisions – a historical problem in Nigeria; recall the 1967–1970 Biafran War, when more than one million died as the Igbo in the east tried unsuccessfully to secede – have taken on a religious dimension with ‘Muslim' groups (Hausa, Fulani) pitted against ‘Christian' groups (Igbo, Yoruba). In fact, Nigeria's almost equal numbers of Christians and Muslims have been dancing very close to the precipice since 1999. In that year, twelve predominantly Muslim northern states (out of a total of 36 states plus the federal capital territory of Abuja) adopted separate legal codes based on Islamic law over the objections of Christian and other religious minorities, as well as protests from the southern and central states of the federation. The resulting riots have claimed an estimated 10,000 lives and caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.” More than any other part of the country, the Igbo heartland of the southeast were, in the succinct words of the International Crisis Group report, “poorly conducted and mindlessly rigged.” Add to this the fact that, the best efforts of the ruling party's hacks on the electoral commission notwithstanding, the country's commercial capital, Lagos, still plunked for the opposition. And, finally, add the consideration that, the south's hydrocarbon sector accounts for 95 percent of the Nigeria's total export revenues and 70 percent of the overall national economy. Consequently, I repeat the politically incorrect concern I raised last month: “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.”

The Nigerian government likes to claim that the handover of power from one civilian president to another is a great success. However, it is rather hard to credit a succession from a civilian president who failed despite his best efforts to amend the constitution to secure a third term to his handpicked heir (puppet?) through a farcical “electoral” exercise. In her Congressional testimony last week, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi E. Frazier correctly noted that “Nigeria remains vitally important to U.S. security, democracy, trade, and energy policy needs and objectives…one of our most dependable allies on the continent on a wide array of diplomatic initiatives from such as Darfur, peacekeeping, counter-terrorism, and HIV/AIDS.” Consequently, she argued against those urging America to isolate the Yar'Adua regime: “The stakes are too great to walk away from Nigeria. And in our judgment, the best way to nurture Nigeria's fragile democracy is for the United States to engage with them on the very issues at risk: political reform, regional security, and economic opportunity.”

For our sake as well as that of Nigerians, I hope Dr. Frazier has a strategy, because it usually does not take much to tip a flailing state into a failed stated.

– 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.