NIGERIA: Party Leaders Face Tough Sell in the United States

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jan 7 1997 (IPS) - The question posed to four of the five leaders of Nigeria’s new political parties was a simple one: What role did they expect the Nigerian military to play in the ongoing political process?

But the four party chairmen visiting New York responded with anger and bafflement. “What do you mean?” asked Senator Magaji Abdullahi, chair of the National Centre Party. “I don’t know,” responded Alhaji Isa Mohammed of the United Nigeria Congress Party tersely. “You would do better to ask (Nigerian ruler) Gen. Sani Abacha.” None answered the question.

It was that kind of a U.S. tour for the leaders of the five new political parties: tense, combative, and short on answers.

Since the presumed winner of the 1993 elections, Moshood Abiola, has been jailed for the past two years without trial, the new party chairs, on their current six-city tour of the United States, have faced a tough sell in arguing that the next democratic process will be honoured.

“It is a recurring question: whether we have an assurance that the military will not take power again,” Mohammed conceded. “Our mission here is for us to assure…that we want to get it right. The military will be kept at bay. They will have no excuse to come in.”

He argued that, in recent months, Nigeria’s political parties have worked together to ensure that the previous reasons the military has dominated Nigerian politics — from party rivalry and corruption to regional and ethnic divisions — will not apply.

Among other things, Abdullahi said, power will rotate through the six main zones of Nigeria, so that both the predominantly Muslim and Hausa Northwest — which has long controlled political power — and the Christian and animist South will be represented.

“Every group has been given the assurance that power will rotate to them,” Mohammed added. Moreover, he said, even small political parties stand to gain in the proposed National Assembly, which would shun the “winner-take-all” system of the past to allow any party that wins 10 percent of the popular vote to be represented.

Still, the current crop of party leaders are far from diverse. The four present at the New York visit — Alhaji Suleiman Ahmed of the Democratic Party of Nigeria, Alhaji Gambo Lawan of the Grassroots Democratic Movement, Mohammed, and Abdullahi — are all Muslims from the North. The fifth, Abel Ubeku of the Congress for National Consensus, is a Southern Christian who has been present at other stops of the U.S. tour.

Abdullahi explained that Southerners were represented in the parties, but were not present as party chairs since the chairs cannot also run for the presidency — a position the South feels it has been unfairly denied. Abiola, a Southerner and a Muslim, was one of two major candidates accepted by then-ruling Gen. Ibrahim Babangida in 1993, but the elections were nullified by the military before vote totals confirming Abiola’s victory could be released.

More to the point, the current chairs’ support base is still tightly linked to the military, which has ruled Nigeria for 26 of the past 30 years.

“Three of the parties took out full-page political ads in November, congratulating Gen. Abacha on his third year in power and praising his record,” noted Mike Fleshman, human rights coordinator for the New York-based Africa Fund, a rights group.

“They’re all cronies,” he argued. “These guys are in the pocket of Abacha.”

The ads themselves, submitted by the Democratic Party, the Grassroots Democrats and the United Nigeria Congress Party, are similar. They variously praise Abacha’s “meritorious and selfless service to the nation, Africa, and the world” and all, in only slightly different wording, call upon “Almighty Allah…to bless (Abacha) abundantly and to grant infinite wisdom”.

Nor are the parties the only ones which sought inclusion in the current proposed democratic transition. Ten other parties failed to meet various requirements for registration, paving the way for five parties linked to or supportive of the military regime being the only authorised political parties.

“We are not the biggest parties,” Ahmed acknowledged. But he contended that the new groups nonetheless represented “diversities in the country”.

Still, the political hopefuls’ U.S. trip, like many recent efforts by Nigeria to improve the Abacha dictatorship’s image, has clearly been a public relations disappointment. Roy Innis, an African American activist who supports the Abacha regime, argued that media interest in the chairmen’s visit was much lower than it would be for opposition leaders from other troubled states.

Other African American lobbyists, including Maurice Dawkins, who has played a major role in an estimated 14-million-dollar public relations campaign to improve Abacha’s image, charge racism over recent calls in the U.S. media for sanctions on Nigeria. No similar calls are made for sanctions against China, he said.

Such charges, and the current party chairs’ visit, are part of an overall campaign to target the African American community to believe that Nigeria is being treated unfairly over its poor rights record, Fleshman said. But that campaign has had only mixed results, he added.

Nigeria’s image in the United States continues to suffer, particularly since the government executed environmental and human rights activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders of the Southern Ogoni minority in November 1995. That act has prompted calls here to boycott the Dutch Shell Oil conglomerate, which had sparred with Saro-Wiwa over the environmental damage caused by its oil drilling.

But the party chairs show no sympathy for Saro-Wiwa or Abiola. Mohammed described Saro-Wiwa, a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize, as “a person who was pestering oil companies asking for contracts” and a murderer, and he accused Abiola of attempting to set up a parallel government. Lawan blamed recent violence in Nigeria on “terrorists and people who don’t want progress in our country.”

Fleshman said that with more than 7,000 people in jail on political or untried charges and the current transition process “absolutely illegitimate”, Nigeria’s poor image will likely continue.

“At the end of the day, it’s very hard to sell this regime,” Fleshman said. “It’s a classic neocolonial regime: Abacha and the military are there to serve the big oil companies.”