General Muhammadu Buhari holding a broom at a campaign rally. Photo credit: By Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Flickr: Wahlkampf in Nigeria 2015)/CC BY-SA 2.0

By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK/ABUJA, Apr 2 2015 (IPS)

After several tension-filled months, a majority of Nigerians swept in an opposition leader and former military man, Muhammadu Buhari, to succeed incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan, whose failure to contain a terrorist wave in the northern states doomed his re-election chances.

Buhari had previously ruled Nigeria from January 1984 until August 1985 – a period in which there were widespread accusations of human rights abuses – after taking charge following a military coup in December 1983.

The Mar. 28 elections were observed by teams from the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union. Carl LeVan, an assistant professor at the School of International Service, American University in Washington, DC, took part in the National Democratic Institute’s election observation mission from the United States.“[President Muhammadu] Buhari has an unprecedented opportunity to recast the Muslim face of Africa at a time when violent terrorist movements have both perverted Islam and distorted Western foreign policies meant to be more multifaceted” – Carl LeVan, member of a U.S. observation mission for the Mar. 28 presidential election in Nigeria

Speaking with IPS, LeVan, author of Dictators and Democracy in African Development (2015), remarked on the surprise success of Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) party that was only formed in February 2013.

“The defeat of Africa’s largest political party, the People’s Democratic Party, will bring the All Progressives Congress (APC) into power after barely two years of organising, mobilising and coalition building. (Muhammadu) Buhari will enter office with a strong mandate from the voters, having won four out of the country’s six geopolitical zones, and the APC will enjoy a comfortable majority in the Senate.

“Though a northern Muslim from Katsina, his support included the predominantly Yoruba southwest, where President Goodluck Jonathan recent delivered bags of cash to traditional rulers according to news reports and where the militant Odudwa Peoples’ Congress launched a wave of thuggery in recent weeks.”

The election upset was especially poignant for Nigerians of the northern states, the area most devastated by Boko Haram terror attacks. While some of the vote counting was impeccable, not all of the voting went smoothly. Observers told of protestors objecting to perceived rigging, harassment, ballot boxes snatched and over-voting.

“Even before the results were announced,” said LeVan, “voters in the north reacted with jubilation, and militant groups, including the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, began surreptitiously re-arming in the creeks of the south. Sources I met with over the weekend in Rivers State say they have seen caches of weapons in camps backed by militants such Ateke Tom and others.

“In addition to such seemingly minor procedural problems, the public was locked out of some collation (vote counting) centres. We also received credible reports of serious harassment. A soldier was killed in some of the violence in Port Harcourt, and a large protest took the state electoral commission by storm on Sunday.”

The opposition victory has been achieved but some are already wondering what the new leader, not known for his adherence to human rights, will prioritise.

According to LeVan, “Buhari has a mandate, and his most urgent challenge is to neither misinterpret nor abuse it.

“According to an Afrobarometer poll released on Mar. 23, 40 percent of Nigerians say the president ‘should be allowed to govern freely without wasting time to justify expenses’, and 25 percent say the president should ‘pass laws without worrying about what the National Assembly thinks’. Sixty-eight percent are not very or not at all satisfied with the way democracy is working.”

Recalling a recent national election won by a former dictator, LeVan said that “the last time Nigeria elected a former dictator, Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999, he spent his first term battling the National Assembly and quelling violence in the region that largely voted against him. But he also began building institutions and establishing trust with his sceptics.

“The last time Nigerians had Buhari at the helm, the jubilation quickly gave way to frustration, repression, and economic failure.

“Buhari’s ‘honeymoon’ will therefore be critical, and probably even shorter lived than his memories of 1984. He will need to do more than make grand rhetorical gestures to democracy; he’ll need to practice it and educate his own supporters about the advantages of the justice and fairness it offers, even where the cost may be the kind of efficiency the Afrobarometer respondents appear to be longing for.”

LeVan also urged the new president to “go south” in view of the fact that Nigeria has often been a divided country with loyalties to different regional centres and different religious and ethnic affiliations, because this would send a “valuable message to northerners that he is everyone’s president.”

By “going south”, he said, the newly-elected president “could also include a clear transition plan or policy for the status of the ongoing amnesty programme for the Niger Delta militants, who need reassurance that they do not need an Ijaw president [like President Goodluck Jonathan] in order to have “resource control” taken seriously, or to have environmental clean-up and developmental needs addressed.

“The sooner and more clearly they hear this message, the less likely will be the re-ignition of the Delta rebellions … This is also important because in a country partly divided along religious lines between north and south, Afrobarometer reports that trust in religious leaders at 29 percent is higher than in the National Assembly, governors, local governments, or even traditional rulers (16 percent).

“Christian Igbos in the east (who overwhelmingly rejected the APC) and minorities in the south need to know they can trust Buhari, and he needs their cooperation to govern peacefully and practically.”

LeVan also suggested that Buhari should “reset” national security strategy, perhaps by ”replacing key members of the national security establishment.

“While some continuity may help preserve institutionalised knowledge, particularly with regard to the recent ‘surge’ against Boko Haram, the mishandling of the Chibok girls’ kidnapping reduced confidence in the national security team, and the pressure applied to the electoral commission prior to the election delay has contributed to the perception that some soldiers and many advisers are partisan.”

Boko Haram has been displaced but not defeated, LeVan warned, and this means creating a “credible counter-insurgency strategy”.

Among others, such a strategy would include “sustained high-level interactions with the multinational coalition partners, and a repairing of bridges to the United States, United Kingdom and other allies with a stake in Nigeria’s peaceful prosperity.”

In this context, said LeVan, a visit to the United States and the United Kingdom would be beneficial to reconnect with a disenchanted diaspora. “This will be important in the United States, where leadership in Congress has interpreted Boko Haram as a war against Christians, rather than a complex insurgency with many different victims and deep historical and socio-economic roots.

“Buhari has an unprecedented opportunity to recast the Muslim face of Africa at a time when violent terrorist movements have both perverted Islam and distorted Western foreign policies meant to be more multifaceted.”

LeVan also advised Buhari to pick a “credible, competent and diverse economic team”, noting that “in early 2014, the government of Nigeria (along with the World Bank and others) highlighted trends in economic diversification. The near crisis triggered by the decline in oil prices since then suggests either these claims were overstated or much more work needs to be done.

Buhari could reform the refinery and oil importation mechanisms, commit to publishing all of the federal governments revenue transfers to subnational units each month (like it used to), and pick a combination of experts from academia, the private sector and the bureaucracy to get the economy back on track.”

“A few obvious steps,” concluded LeVan, “would go a long way: reaffirm the independence of the Central Bank (whose governor was replaced last year), stabilise the currency, and consult the National Assembly about budget plans and fiscal crises … The rest is up to the Nigerian people, who spoke on Mar. 28. Voting was just the beginning.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

Any views expressed by persons cited in this article do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

With the Cambodian national assembly elections fast approaching on Jul. 28, local and international organisations are expressing concerns about the fairness and transparency of the electoral system.

According to an audit of the Cambodian voter registry conducted by the National Democratic Institute (NDI), a U.S. government-funded entity, almost 11 percent of eligible citizens wrongly believe themselves to be registered to vote.“Cambodia should rise above a mechanical application of democracy ." -- U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Cambodia Surya P. Subedi

“These citizens will show up to the polling stations on election day and not be able to vote,” Peter Manikas, NDI’s regional director for Asia, told IPS. “Further, more than 10 percent of the names listed on the voters’ list are invalid, of unknown people, presenting an opportunity for fraud on election day.”

The results of the audit haven’t been accepted by the Cambodian National Election Committee (NEC), which maintains that the number of names on the voter registry represents 101.7 percent of the eligible population, even more than the actual number of eligible citizens, in stark contrast with NDI’s findings that only show an 82.9 percent registration rate.

The extra names in the NEC registry data “could be duplicates or could be those of unknown/non-existent people,” Manikas told IPS.

Irregularities in the voter registry are also cited in a report compiled by the Phnom Penh-based Committee for Free and Fair Elections in Cambodia (COMFREL) just after the last commune council elections in June 2012, as well as in the last report of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Cambodia, Surya P. Subedi, dated July 2012.

Some of Subedi’s recommendations to the Cambodian government “could have been implemented within a short period of time without requiring many additional resources if there had been the political will to do so,” he told IPS.

The present electoral system requires every eligible citizen to register in order to vote, which can only be done in September and October, nine months before the election, and in the place of one’s own residency. This will potentially disenfranchise those who change their residency within nine months of the polls, as well as the homeless and evicted, who are unable to show proof of residency.

A “dire need for electoral reform” in the longer term is called for in NDI’s report. Subedi has made similar recommendations, and hopes for a more independent NEC, composed of neutral and high-level personalities able to represent all political parties in a balanced way.

A democracy trapped in patronage networks

Electoral malpractice, such as vote buying, use of state resources for political campaigns, threats and intimidation of some candidates and unequal access to media for all parties have been monitored over the years by organisations like COMFREL.

According to Trude Jacobsen, assistant director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University, Cambodian political culture is deeply informed by patron-client networks, in which votes are given in exchange for protection and personal favours.

“People would vote according to whoever is at the top of their [patronage network], it has nothing to do with what they actually think about elections,” she told IPS.

“No one would do anything to change the status quo at the bottom because it is simply not in their best interest,” she said, as they rely on political patronage connections for daily needs, such as having a job or sending their children to school.

Change can only come from the future generation of political leaders who are being exposed to alternative models outside Cambodia and will hopefully be “willing to sacrifice their own self-interest for the greater good”, said Jacobsen.

Another reason for concern is the decreasing voter turnout in the last years, which could be a sign of voters’ frustration with the current electoral system.

However, according to NDI, 92.8 percent of eligible citizens plan to vote on Jul. 28, which is a notably high percentage in a country in which voting is not compulsory.

Several rallies organised by opposition parties in the last months have gathered crowds of thousands, but according to Jacobsen, participants are not all authentic political supporters. Some of them are paid to attend, a practice widely used by both governing and opposition parties.

Following the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements in 1991, which gave the U.N. the responsibility to supervise peacebuilding operations and the first democratic elections, the country embarked on a democratisation process and went seven times to the polls, for the national assembly (1993, 1998, 2003 and 2008) and commune council elections (2002, 2007 and 2012).

July’s elections will renew for another five-year term the 123 seats of the national assembly, which is the lower house of the Cambodian parliament, and the winning party will be assigned the task of forming a new government.

The current ruling coalition of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and the royalist party FUNCINPEC is expected to remain in power, defeating the opposition’s Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) and extending for another five years the already 28-year-long tenure of Prime Minister Hun Sen.

Land has become a pivotal issue, in a country where 80 percent of the population is involved in subsistence farming but 20 percent of agricultural families are landless, due in part to the government’s scheme of leasing millions of hectares of agricultural land to mammoth multinational corporations.

“Cambodia should rise above a mechanical application of democracy … ,” said Subedi in his report, “and implement the fundamental principles and spirit behind the notion of the rule of law.”

“The country has come a long way since the Paris Peace Accords, but it still has some way to go to meet the international standards in a number of areas including the holding of transparent, free and fair elections,” he told IPS.

According to Jacobsen, “The mistake that was made was expecting people to be able to come out of a 20-year civil conflict and then adapt to Western models immediately,” with the result that the existing conception of political power as a patron-client relationship survived under the surface.

“It’s not going to be an immediate change,” she added, “and certainly not for this election.”

President Barack Obama’s administration and several major rights groups are reacting with frustration to the decision of an Egyptian court, announced Tuesday night, to convict 43 civil society organisations and 16 U.S. employees of illegal use of foreign funds.

Reactions by both the administration and members of the U.S. Congress are implying that the U.S. government may withhold an annual allotment of some 1.3 billion dollars in military aid to Egypt unless the U.S. accused are pardoned.“We were in the process of seeking registration at the time of the original raid – we were trying to comply with Egyptian law." -- Charles Dunne of Freedom House

“This decision runs contrary to the universal principle of freedom of association and is incompatible with the transition to democracy,” Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday. “I urge the government of Egypt to work with civic groups as they respond to the Egyptian people’s aspirations for democracy as guaranteed in Egypt’s new constitution.”

The decision was followed by an order to close the Egyptian offices of five U.S.-based NGOs, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute and the International Center for Journalists. Some from these groups are criticising the U.S. response for being too weak.

Kerry’s statement “could have certainly been stronger,” Charles Dunne, the director of Middle East and North African programmes at Freedom House, told IPS. “It called on the Egyptian government to work with civil society organisations in the midst of a campaign to destroy civil society, which is not the right tone to be striking.”

Tuesday’s verdicts originated from the December 2011 crackdown on NGOs as issued by Egypt’s transitional military government. According to some analysts, holdovers from longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime held civil society groups responsible for helping to start the 2011 revolution that toppled Mubarak.

During the crackdown, NGO offices were raided and criminal charges were brought against personnel.

More recently, President Mohamed Morsi has proposed a new law for regulating NGOs that would require the registration of foreign-funded groups with a committee that includes a government-appointed majority. Dunne condemned the law, calling it the “the most oppressive out there right now”.

Others have expressed similar concerns.

“If this bill passes, all of Egypt’s NGOs would essentially work under the government,” Hafez Abu Seada, chairman of the non-profit Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights, told IPS. “We would operate not as independents but as agents for the state.”

The proposed law received criticism from Egyptian NGOs, who say it would be stronger than Mubarak’s requirements, as well as from international groups including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Both groups say the law contradicts the terms of international treaties Egypt has ratified.

Quasi-government endowment

All but one of the U.S. defendants in the court case decided Tuesday, Robert Becker, a former employee of the National Democratic Institute (NDI), left Egypt before the trial was held, after posting bail. According to media reports, Becker was fired by the NDI after his decision to stay in Egypt.

“Personally, I will once again ignore my lawyer’s advice and will be in Egypt,” Becker wrote on his blog. “I was told it would be best for me to go home, so that is exactly where I will be … home, in Cairo.”

Eleven hours after the verdict was announced, Becker again wrote via Twitter that he had “unwillingly and angrily gone into exile until appeals get sorted out.”

If one looks at the history of several of the groups indicted under the new court decision, it is perhaps unsurprising that today’s Egyptian government would be sceptical of these groups’ goals. Four are connected with a quasi-government programme called the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

During the Cold War, U.S intelligence agents set up several fake foundations through which they gave money to anti-communist or at least non-communist groups. During the 1980s, the government set up the National Endowment for Democracy to take the place of these various groups.

Over the years, several countries, including, Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica and Czechoslovakia, have complained about interference in national elections by the National Endowment for Democracy. In 2012, Congress gave the group around 118 million dollars.

The International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) make up the endowment’s core constituents, while Freedom House and the International Center for Journalists received funding from the endowment.

According to CQ Roll Call, a Washington newspaper, the IRI has been accused of attempting to choose winners and losers in elections in Haiti and several countries in South America, though the organisation has denied this.

Though several of these NGOs have denied any wrongdoing, defendants received anywhere from one and five years in prison. Egyptian lawyer Khaled Abo Bakr, not involved in this case, said those defendants who did not receive suspended sentences would have to go to prison before they could appeal, and defendants returning to Egypt would be arrested upon arrival.

According to Freedom House’s Dunne, the court decision was political, and not the result of a legitimate judicial proceeding.

“We were in the process of seeking registration at the time of the original raid – we were trying to comply with Egyptian law,” he said. “This has to be resolved politically, and that’s going to require involvement at the highest level of U.S. government.”