POLITICS-NIGERIA: Concern About the Future Unties More Tongues

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Marc Idohou and IPS correspondents

COTONOU, May 27 1998 (IPS) - Concern over the future of Nigeria’s transition to democracy has been leading personalities from an increasingly broad spectrum in the West African nation to speak out against military rule.

Over the past few days churchmen, politicians and economists have expressed concern about the direction the transition appears to be taking following the move last month by the five political parties authorised by the government to choose military leader Gen. Sani Abacha as their joint presidential candidate.

Even former military rulers have joined in the chorus of criticism — explicit and implicit — of the Abacha regime. They include Muhammadu Buhari, who seized power from an elected government in 1983, and who attributed Nigeria’s woes to the absence of good civilian and military leadership.

“On reflection, it is clear that we (the military) have not given our politicians enough time and chance to mature and we unreasonably expected maturity from them while in fact, they are political infants,” Buhari, a retired general, said.

Since independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria has had eight separate coups that have yielded as many military governments.

Another former de facto president who appeared to have undergone a change of heart was General Ibrahim Babangida (1985- 1993), who said military rule had lost its appeal, and that he believed “a democratic order would lay the foundation of peace and stability so essential for development”.

It was under Babangida’s rule that presidential elections were held in June 1993. However, he went on to annul the result of the poll.

Ernest Shonekan, who headed an interim government that ruled for three months until Abacha seized power in October 1993, said Monday that prolonged military rule was a major impediment to stability and the growth of the Nigerian nationhood.

“Apart from subverting the process of orderly succession in governance, the people are denied the opportunity to participate in their own governance and overall development,” Shonekan said.

“Our military must be ready to subordinate itself to the control and direction of civil political leadership,” added Shonekan, who chairs the Vision 2010 committee, a think tank established by the Abacha administration

The three former leaders were among personalities here who made statements or delivered lectures in connection with Africa Day, which fell on May 24.

The government has been struggling to restore confidence in its transition programme, which was to have culminated with the inauguration in October of a civilian president who should have been elected in Aug. 1.

Last Wednesday, Information Minister Ikeobasi Mokelu sought to assure Nigerians, in a televised broadcast, that “General Abacha is fully committed to the successful completion of the transition programme through the very same democratic processes that have been put in place.”

But that assurance and earlier ones by other top government officials did not appear to have convinced observers of the Nigerian political scene.

“Let Abacha make for competition,” Tanzanian political scientist Ali Mazrui commented, in reference to the choice of Abacha as presidential candidate, during a lecture in the central Nigerian town of Jos. “There should be room for competition, the people should be allowed to choose their leaders.”

“It is a strange arrangement and unheard of in the history of mankind,” added Mazrui, director of the Institute for Global Cultural Studies in New York. “At a time Nigeria is longing for peace, some few individuals would want to draw it back by wanting the Head of State to transform into a civilian President.”

That peace will continue to elude Nigerians unless Abacha leaves the scene, predicted Emmanuel Gbonigi, the Anglican Bishop of the western Nigerian diocese of Akure in an interview published this week in ‘Tell’, a Nigerian magazine.

“We cannot continue like this till October,” Bishop Gbonigi said. “It is just not possible. God will not allow it to happen and we are beginning to see signs of it … when people are frustrated and you don’t take care of the frustration, it leads to worry and if you don’t take care of worry it leads to anger.”

“If anger is not taken care of quickly it may lead to violence, that’s the situation we are in now,” he added, in what may have been a reference to May Day riots in the west Nigerian city of Ibadan in which at least 40 deaths were reported.

The Bishop alleged that Abacha was dancing to the tune of greedy politicians and business people who were urging him to stay on. “They are using him to amass wealth illegally and immorally, that is why they are encouraging him to do that,” he charged.

“Abacha should hand over immediately. It didn’t take him one week to take over, it shouldn’t take him one week to hand over,” the bishop added, echoing a position often stated by Nigeria’s more outspoken pro-democracy activists.

A group of 34 less outspoken ones, called ‘Allied politicians’ is planning an all-politician conference to work out arrangements to ensure the return of true democracy.

The 34 politicians, led by former elected Vice President Alex Ekwueme (1979-83), had earlier written to Abacha giving legal, historical and moral reasons why he should honour his word to return Nigeria to a democratically elected government in October.

“All we have been saying is that Abacha should not succeed himself because he is a military man,” Solomon Lar, a former elected governor of the central state of Plateau told reporters in Lagos during a recent planning meeting of the group.

Abacha’s transformation into a civilian president “will not bring about the needed and genuine democracy,” he said. “It is like clothing a tiger in sheep’s clothes. It will remain a tiger … I believe that power should shift now in the overall interest of the nation. The South has been accusing the North for so long that we have held on to power.”

It is such regional and ethnic sentiments that are responsible for the political instability the country now suffers, according to Sam Aluko, chair of the National Economic Intelligence Committee and one of Abacha’s closest aides.

Ethnic mistrust, he said a statement read at a gathering of Anglican clerics, is plaguing the country’s current march towards democracy. “It is also responsible for rumblings even among the military leadership,” added Aluko. “It is such fear that recurrently makes some of our leaders collude with the military to distrupt our attempts at civil rule.

“We are a nation divided between the rich and the poor, between the ruler and the ruled, between the Christians and the non-Christians and between the military and the civilians. But behind each division is the problem of fear.”

He added that “a large number of our enlightened citizens are, possibly, as anxious today as they were on the eve of Nigeria’s civil war of 1967-70, or immediately after the presidential elections of June 1993 … The anxiety is characterised by feelings of apprehension, dread, uneasiness and worry about what lies ahead in the political horizon.”

The anxiety is visible even on the money market: this week the naira, the national currency, crashed to its lowest exchange rate in three years: 89 to the U.S dollar. Five months ago, the rate was 75 to 1.

In a critical overview of the economy, published this week in the Nigerian press, Bassey Ndiokho, executive chairman of the British-Nigerian company, UAC, suggested that things were so bad that Nigerian businesses would leave the country and invest elsewhere if they had the chance.

“Since 1976, we have not made progress. We are just regressing. It is sad,” Ndiokho said. “I think the very thing that is facing Nigeria is creating the enabling environment that will allow foreign investors to come and invest.

“We cannot run away from the fact that we are a member of the international community. The world has become a global village. A situation where we do not have an enabling environment that will allow people to come and invest will only make things difficult for us to project into the future,” Ndiokho added.