LONDON: Far from settling matters, last week’s Nigerian presidential election, which gave General Olusegun Obasanjo a second four-year term as head of state, has plunged the nation into crisis.
Because in Nigeria everyone expects there will be rigging at any election, not unsurprisingly the opposition, led by another ex-General (and former military dictator), Muhammad Buhari, has rejected the result as a fraud. And, indeed, almost all the foreign observers of the election found aspects of it to criticize.
What is frightening this time round however, is that the opposition, instead of airing their criticisms before the election tribunals set up to hear objections, is threatening to embark on mass action and if opposition supporters do take to the streets, Nigeria could burn itself to ashes.
The reason is this. Nigeria is already sharply divided by ethnic and religious fault-lines which have to be papered over by all aspirants to high office. For instance, General Obasanjo, being a Christian, had to choose as his running-mate, Alhaji Abubakar Atiku, a Muslim. Similarly, Obasanjo’s strongest opponent, General Buhari, as a Muslim, chose Dr Chuba Okadigbo, a Christian, as his running-mate. On both tickets, a North-South factor, was also taken into consideration: Obasanjo (South) ran with Atiku, (North), while Buhari (North) chose Okadigbo (South).
So, at the national level, politics is about compromise. But on the streets, everything changes. There, if a Northern supporter of Buhari wanted to cause trouble, he would incite fellow Northerners with code words stirring up Northern discontent against Southerners.
For instance, the trouble-maker could chant such slogans as ‘The Christians want to oppress us Muslims!’ or ‘Why won’t Obasanjo allow Sharia (Islamic law) everywhere in the same way Christian law is observed in the whole country?’ or ‘Why have Southerners more money than Northerners?’.
Such sentiments can arouse people to hack their neighbours to pieces, or burn down their homes.
Yet, the results of the presidential election themselves demonstrated clearly that the Nigerian electorate is capable of making quite sophisticated judgments. For example, despite the undeniable ethnic and religious underpinnings of Nigerian politics, the Obasanjo-Atiku ticket did the job it was created for: it obtained 62 per cent of the presidential vote, nationally, and also got a quarter of the votes in more than two-thirds of the 36 states — as required by the constitution.
Buhari, with 32 per cent of the presidential vote, also managed to secure a quarter of the votes in 19 states — not bad, considering that he came late into the contest, and ran against an incumbent president.
Were he to bide his time, and allow the memory of his rather authoritarian rule as military head of state (from 1984 to 1985) to fade a little more into the past, he could be the man to beat in 2007.
If, however, the opposition embarks on mass action now, and law and order were to break down, Nigeria would find it hard to survive as a unitary nation. For both Obasanjo and Buhari, as ex-military heads of state, probably have pockets of support in the armed forces, which might be tempted to intervene militarily on behalf of either player. This, in turn, could lead to the fracturing of the Nigerian armed forces, and thence, to a full-scale civil war.
History is not on the side of Nigeria in this respect, for in the aftermath of elections in 1964 and 1983, the politicians bickered so bitterly about fraud that the military, using the politicians’ grievances as an excuse, carried out coups d’etat. In both cases, long, disastrous years of military dictatorship followed, marked by a looting of the state coffers.
Even worse, it was during military rule — between 1967 and 1970 — that the Biafran civil war broke out, in which at least two million Nigerians were killed by other Nigerians. So there does seem to be a jinx about elections in Nigeria, and everyone who wishes the country well will be hoping that the current hullabaloo will remain nothing more than just politicians letting off steam.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
