August 4, 2002	Sunday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 24,1423

LAGOS: Nigerian democracy looks set to fail an important test next week when Africa’s most populous country is due to vote in its first elections since military rule ended in 1999.

The local elections are scheduled for August 10, but ballot lists are not ready, politicians are challenging the process in court and no one in the country of over 120 million people is sure the polls will go ahead.

Nigerian analysts said on Friday they feared that if the voting did take place, it could be marred by violence similar to the sporadic clashes that have killed over 10,000 people across the country in the past three years.

Oil-rich Nigeria has mostly been ruled by the military since independence from Britain in 1960 and has never managed a successful transition between elected regimes.

If local elections end in fiasco, next year’s presidential, national and gubernatorial elections could lead to even wider mayhem, putting the entire democratic process at risk, the analysts said.

“It is very worrying,” said Clement Nwankwo, head of the Constitutional Rights Project, one of the groups that battled military rule in the 1990s.

“The voters’ register has not been compiled,” he said. “The old voters register is in tatters, and it will really be magic to conduct uncontroversial elections without a revised register.”

The central problem appears to be Nigeria’s 1999 constitution, handed down by military rulers before they stepped aside after 15 years at the helm.

The constitution entrusts governors of the country’s 36 states with conducting local polls, while the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), controlled by the central government, must revise voter lists.

VOTER LISTS DELAYED: INEC says it has been unable to compile a voters’ register until now because of funding problems. Any list compiled before August 10 will certainly be challenged in court.

Former ambassador Mahmoud Yahya, a ruling party member, said the constitution required a clear 60 days between the revision of the register and voting, to leave room for complaints and amendments.

“People will challenge such elections in court and will succeed,” Yahya said.

But state governors, keen to have loyalists installed as local councillors before their own re-election bids next year, have vowed to go ahead with the polls next week.

President Olesegun Obasanjo can only negotiate with state governors and has no powers over the elections because Nigeria’s complex American-style constitution has a clear separation of powers between the federal and state governments.

Nwankwo said Obasanjo was seen by many Nigerian politicians as a major part of the crisis because he would rather have the local polls delayed until he won nomination for re-election.

Obasanjo fears that a poor showing by the ruling party in his base in the southwest could weaken his chances of nomination, Nwankwo said. Obasanjo’s spokesmen were not available for comment.

Adding to the confusion, a court ruled last month that the registration of three new political parties was unconstitutional. The parties have vowed to press for the polls to be annulled.

The build-up to next week’s elections has taken place in possibly the harshest economic environment in Nigeria’s history — a fact that has fuelled widespread unrest.

“People are of the conviction that the military have never provided a viable alternative in Nigeria,” one analyst said. “The worry is that all this could degenerate into a general breakdown of law and order.”

Nigeria’s only previous attempts to transfer power between civilian regimes ended in failure in the mid-1960s and in 1983. In each case, the army seized power after widespread poll violence.—Reuters