LAGOS: Trade unions in Nigeria hope unpopular free-market reforms may have created the conditions for a credible popular opposition challenge to the government. But analysts said corruption and the fact that popularity has little impact on who wins power in Nigeria mean the chances of unions and other opposition groups evolving into a force to rival President Olusegun Obasanjo’s ruling party are slim.

“Politics in Nigeria is singularly concerned with power and the trappings of office, not with principles or ideology,” said Pini Jason, a columnist for Vanguard newspaper. “It will take a long time to change.”

Left-wing groups opposed to the rising price of fuel, a key element of the government’s liberalization drive, will stage the first of a series of mass protests on Wednesday in Lagos.

Union chief Adams Oshiomhole said he hoped the upcoming march will kick-start ‘a broad, popular movement aimed at far-reaching and fundamental restructuring of governance’.

Some civil society groups want a sustained period of civil disobedience that would topple the government, along the lines of the ‘velvet revolutions’ in some eastern European countries.

“We must demand a reversal of the price increase, but not stop at that,” said Chima Ubani of the Civil Liberties Organization. “We must proceed until there is a new responsive and responsible government for the Nigerian people.”

But after six years of democracy, analysts say Nigerian politics have evolved little from the days of military rule.

The People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which has won two elections marred by rigging since 1999, is a collection of disparate, often feuding, interest groups united, quite simply, by power and patronage, critics say.

The attempt to mount a grassroots opposition based on ideas, rather than ethnic differences or personalities, is a necessary step in Nigeria’s democratic development, analysts said, but it stands little chance against the well-oiled PDP machine.

Protests over fuel prices in Lagos and Abuja last year were quickly snuffed out by riot police who beat and arrested protesters, using tear gas to disperse crowds.

The government routinely denies permits to demonstrators on security grounds, saying they could threaten democracy itself, an irony not lost on unions who were at the forefront of the struggle for democracy during the dictatorship years.

Abubakar Momoh, political science lecturer at Lagos State University, said rigging elections is only one element of a vicious cycle of dubious practices which keep the PDP in power.

Senior party figures in several states in the 2003 poll, known locally as godfathers, sponsored candidates in return for promises of big financial rewards to be looted from public funds, Momoh said.

Officials have estimated that 40 per cent of Nigeria’s $30 billion annual oil earnings is lost to waste and corruption.

Obasanjo has declared a war on corruption, launching probes into several state governors and even sacking a minister and his police chief earlier this year. But this campaign could also be used to entrench the status quo, analysts believe.

In an environment where graft is endemic, campaigners say his selective application of the law smacks of political expediency.

With an eye on elections in 2007, they say Obasanjo may be positioning his anti-fraud unit to discredit rivals, hoping to leave the field open to a preferred candidate to succeed him. —Reuters