POLITICS-NIGERIA: Limping From Crisis To Crisis

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Remi Oyo

LAGOS, May 11 1998 (IPS) - Following the announcement that General Sani Abacha will be Nigeria’s sole presidential candidate, the West African nation has gone from crisis to crisis as Abacha tightens his grip.

The crisis seems to have intensified after Lt-Gen. Oladipo Diya and five other top officials were sentenced to death for allegedly trying to topple Abacha.

Diya, who until his detention was the number two official in the military dictatorship that has ruled Nigeria for the past six years, is now awaiting a crucial presidential decision to confirm or commute his death sentence to a prison term.

As the nation waits breathlessly for Abacha’s decision, ordinary Nigerians — especially those at the bottom of the economic ladder — are trying to get on with their lives in the face of a crumbling economy.

Nigeria is gripped by a severe fuel shortage, dry water taps, faulty telephones lines and a severe power shortage.

Transport fares have been hiked by about 200 percent since fuel queues, supervised by a joint security force made up of armed police and the army, were introduced recently.

Most motorists spend the night in the queue. “I had been on a queue since Wednesday night, but was not served until 10 a.m on Thursday morning, because soldiers were taking advantage of their uniforms to jump queues for fuel, while we — the powerless civilians — looked on helplessly,” said Adedipe Adeyinka, a businessman here.

The fuel crisis is primarily caused by the breakdown of the country’s four refineries and by the diversion of imported oil products, like petrol and diesel, into the parallel market.

The shortage has caused panic among motorists and desperation on the part of the Abacha regime which called in military administrators of Nigeria’s 36 states last week to discuss the fuel crisis. The situation remains unabated.

Perhaps the most disturbing snag here is the prevailing political crisis. This week, as the nation awaits the possible verdict from the military regime on the case of Diya and others accused of planning a coup in December 1997, security agents have arrested at least four prominent pro-democracy activists.

The whereabouts of Bola Ige, a senior lawyer and former civilian Governor of the Western state of Oyo, the Secretary of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) — the main opposition group — Ayo Opadokun, and two other activists, have remained unknown.

“We are particularly disturbed that the wave of arrests is coming against the background of palpable fear, anger and tension currently enveloping the country in the aftermath of the nationwide fuel scarcity, failed national assembly elections, the coup verdict and ridiculous adoption of Gen. Abacha as presidential candidate,” said Abdul Oroh, Executive Director of the Lagos-based Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO).

Oroh expressed concern over the May 1 killing of “unarmed protesters” during an anti-Abacha rally in Ibadan, 120 km north of Lagos, the commercial capital.

Official figures put the number of the dead in the fracas at seven. The offices of the “Monitor” newspaper and establishments owned by Abacha-ally Arisekola Alao, a businessman, and the homes of relations of politician Lamidi Adedibu were destroyed in the city which is still tense following the incident.

It is believed that the four activists arrested recently are being held in connection with the Ibadan riots. But the arrests have also assumed an ethnic dimension with calls for resistance to the perceived persecution of the Yoruba, the major ethnic group in the South west, where most of the current political detainees — including Diya and the presumed winner of the 1993 annuled presidential elections, Moshood Abiola — come from.

“The renewed clampdown on the leadership of the Yoruba is further testimony of the spate of persecution of the Yoruba ethnic nationality by the present military government,” said Wole Oke, Secretary of the Afenifere, a Yoruba-based non-governmental organisation (NGO).

Oke said in a statement made available to IPS that, “Yorubas in Nigeria will not allow themselves to be provoked into an unnecessary civil war which some people have been expecting since the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election believed to have been won by Abiola”.

The alleged marginalisation of the Yorubas was also echoed by Adebayo Adedeji, former Executive Secretary of the Addis Ababa- based Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), in a public lecture in Ibadan last week.

The former UN official said the marginalisation of the Yorubas includes denials of access to political posts in the country. “We must cut the umbilical cord and amend our inherent weakness by evolving new strategies,” said Adedeji, himself a Yoruba.

Adedeji’s comments came just one day after several more NGOs joined the dozens of calls for a reprieve of the sentences on Diya and the others. They also demanded lessening of tensions in the country and respect for human rights.

“We insist that the social, economic and political crisis created and imposed by the ruling military government are responsible for the civil unrest and social upheavals which are engulfing the country,” the United Front for Democracy said in a statement here.

The Front argued that: “While the Nigerian people strive to join the rest of the world in building genuine democracy, the military is imposing dictatorship and economic slavery on the people”.

The Front’s statement coincides with a statement by the European Union last week on the country’s on-going transition programme. “The EU has been following closely the so-called transition to civil rule in Nigeria, and has concluded that it is a failure,” said a statement issued here.

The statement added that the programme “holds out little hope”, as exemplified by the April 25 election of national assembly representatives. It is estimated that only a mere one percent of the 50 million expected voters turned out at the polls.

But Nigeria’s Foreign Affairs Minister Tom Ikimi insists that Nigeria’s problems are externally-created, chiefly, by Britain. Ikimi said at a farewell lunch for the Nigerian Ambassador accredited to the Vatican last week that: “There is a plot to organise terrorism in Nigeria and destablise the transition programme”.

“Some countries in Western Europe want to perpetuate terrorism in our land. This violence you see is being funded and financed by Western powers who have made it their concern that unless their friend takes over power in Nigeria, we shall have no peace,” Ikimi said.