NIGERIA-POLITICS: A Troubled Land

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Analysis Hamid Bello

ABIDJAN, Jun 5 1996 (IPS) - Bomb explosions, political assassinations, and the hounding of the regime’s critics have punctuated Nigeria’s countdown to the third anniversary of a presidential election aborted by the military.

The winner of the election, Moshood Abiola, is in solitary confinement and in failing health. His wife, Kunirat Abiola, an outspoken campaigner for his release and validation of the result of the 12 June 1993, was Tuesday assassinated in broad daylight in a posh Lagos suburb.

The day before, an explosion ripped through the Nigerian Defence Industries complex in the northern city of Kaduna. If the cause of the blast proves to be a bomb, it will be the most serious in a string of attacks on military installations, airports and a hotel believed to be owned by head of state Gen. Sani Abacha.

At least five of those explosions have been in the north of the country, the region which has traditionally held power through successive military and all too few civilian governments.

The largely Islamic north is regarded as the area least concerned with the struggle to actualise the 1993 election result, unlike the south-west, from where Abiola hails.

The voiding of the election by then military leader Gen. Ibrahim Babangida is interpreted in Abiola’s heartland as a cynical attempt to preserve northern influence, even though his undeclared victory was dependent on northern votes.

No matter that Abiola, a multi-millionaire tycoon, was intimately linked to the military establishment and his businesses profited from those contacts, or that he was part of a transition process that appeared to engineer his selection as the presidential candidate of one of the two parties allowed to stand. The fact is that an election was held, annulled, and since then Nigeria has not been the same.

The country stands dangerously divided on the way forward.

Abacha, who took over from an unelected civilian government hastily assembled in the heat of the post-election crisis to allow Babangida to bow out, at first seemed concerned with assuring Abiola of his crown, to the extent of including several of his followers in the new government.

The promise to re-examine the Jun. 12 issue never materialised and instead Abacha moved to confirm his grip on the power he seized in November 1993. The response from pro-democracy groups was protest and demonstrations which in 1994, led to a two-month- long showdown with oil workers unions.

But, outside the southwest, anti-government action has never taken off and the vocal pro-democracy groups remain uncomfortably sectarian in their outlook and reach.

The government’s quashing of the oil workers’ strike by jailing their leaders and taking over the running of the labour movement spelt, for some, the end of conventional civil protest tactics. Abacha has dealt ruthelessly with his opponents, and for people like author and human rights campaigner Wole Soyinka, in exile in London, the time has come for armed insurrection.

Who is behind the bombings that have hit major towns in the country since last year is yet to be established. One theory is that it is dissident officers in a demoralised army that has been repeatedly purged by Abacha.

Abacha, who rarely leaves his Aso Rock fortress in the capital, Abuja, clearly sees his own military constituency as his greatest potential threat.

The trial of more than 40 army officers for an alleged coup plot last year, including former head of state Olusegun Obasanjo — the only military leader to have handed power to a civilian government — was interpreted as a deliberately public removal of possible opponents, a blow to the military intelligencia, and a crude warning both at home and abroad.

The dour Abacha, in extreme contrast to his publicity-aware and at times charismatic predecessor Babangida, has few things going for him except his iron hand and control of the levers of state power.

Even the north, his home region, is far from enamoured of its native son, although in the polarised ethnic politics of Nigeria, he is seen as standing steadfast against the Abiola cause.

There are three alternatives for the way ahead. One, off the scale of possibilities but pushed by the pro-democracy movement, is that Abiola is released to form a broad-based government of national unity, sees out his remaining term and then organises fresh elections.

The second, far more likely, is that Abacha manages his own retirement and hands over to a civilian government with guarantees stitched into the fabric of the democratisation process that he and his colleagues will not be held accountable for past misdeeds.

Repeated promises of the elaboration of a transition programme had been made by the regime. It took the international outcry and limited sanctions that followed the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other minority rights activists in November 1995 for Abacha to release the details of his timetable to culminate in an elected government in 1998.

The nature of Nigerian politics and politicians is that, despite widespread cynicism that Abacha will keep to that date, they have indicated their willingness to join the transition bandwagon. The scepticism of pro-democracy movements notwithstanding, local government elections held in March this year on a non-party basis — the first concrete step in the programme — were relatively successful in terms of voter turnout.

What was ominous was the accusation from the government’s own transition supervising agency that senior officials had attempted to tamper with the candidates’ lists to ensure the nomination of their cronies and supporters.

A controversial report by a U.N. fact-finding mission that spent two weeks in Nigeria in March-April endorsed Abacha’s transition programme as a genuine attempt at democratisation and concluded that further sanctions against the regime, despite U.S. insistence on a shorter timetable, would be counter-productive.

Given that Abacha’s programme is adjudged the only game in town, one telling recommendation from the four-man mission was that international monitors oversee the transition every step of the way, locking Abacha into his commitment to leave by 1998 in a free and fair election, saving further sanctions as a last-resort method of persuasion.

The third alternative for Nigeria is that one of the often rumoured coup attempts finally succeeds. What would be the outcome of that event, beyond the strong possibility of Abacha’s execution, is anybody’s guess. In the ethnic tinder box that the country has become, it could be the final spark that ignites the civil war that everyone dreads.