The “election has brought Nigeria to the crossroads of an emergency,” it thundered in a front-page editorial, adding, “the options available to save the country from impending danger are now very few indeed.”
“The usual, easy route is to advocate putting up with the charade, not rocking the boat,” the editorial went on. “But Nigeria today is beyond such simplistic postulation.”
That message, coming Thursday as two leading opposition candidates reversed themselves and said they would run in Saturday’s presidential election after threatening to boycott it, reflected a growing consensus here that Nigeria was indeed at a dangerous crossroads, perhaps its most perilous since winning independence from Britain in 1960. The state elections held last week were marked by widespread vote rigging, intimidation, fraud and violence, and it is unclear how the presidential vote will be any better.
The most likely danger is not the obvious — the long-feared collapse of this vibrant nation of 250 ethnic groups into tribal and religious warfare.
Indeed, eight years into its young democracy, Nigeria is in many ways a better nation than it was when President Olusegun Obasanjo took office in 1999. Some forms of corruption have been curbed. The national debt has been paid off, and the economy is growing. Nigeria’s role as a regional peace builder has also grown, and as The Guardian editorial demonstrates, it has a robust free press and a blossoming civic society.
But that has not meant improvements in the way its leaders are chosen, nor in the way much of the country is run. The growing sentiment among international and local election observers is that electoral abuses are worse than ever.
“We are told things are improving gradually,” said Anyakwee Nsirimovu, a human rights advocate in the restive Niger Delta region. “But instead, as far as democracy is concerned, we are going backward.”
Nigeria has seen far worse troubles — civil war, brutal military rule and a seemingly endless array of corrupt leaders who have expropriated hundreds of billions of dollars, leaving Nigeria one of the poorest nations in the world despite its vast oil reserves. It is the depth of these problems that has taught Nigerians to value stability over almost anything else. The peril now, analysts, politicians and election observers say, is not an immediate catastrophe. It is that the nation’s leaders will once again be chosen through a deeply flawed process that leaves voters feeling as though they have no stake in the future.
With the decision on Thursday of Atiku Abubakar, the candidate of the Action Congress, and Muhammadu Buhari, of the All Nigeria People’s Party, to take part in the election on Saturday, the stage is all but set for a rerun of last Saturday’s state polls. The voting problems last week were so serious that international monitors are urging that several states redo the election. In the face of criticism, the Independent National Electoral Commission and Mr. Obasanjo have denied that there were any problems of significance.
“We are not sitting on any crisis in Nigeria,” Philip Umeadi, the spokesman for the electoral commission, told reporters in Abuja on Thursday.
Nigeria has a reputation for going right to the edge of disaster and then suddenly pulling back. This tendency has kept the country from absolute crisis, with at least one exception — the Biafran civil war in the 1960s, which killed one million people.
Since then the principle of unity has been sacrosanct, and the fear of a Biafra-like crisis, along with the country’s vast oil wealth, shared mainly among the nation’s entrenched elite, have kept Nigeria as one nation, for better or worse.
But Nigerians are beginning to wonder whether the national instinct for self-preservation that has bound them to their political elite, a bargain that has staved off disaster but also kept the majority in poverty, has been worthwhile, said Nnamdi K. Obasi, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. “All these masses of young, unemployed men we have in our streets, they have no stake in the current system,” he said. “They have no hope, no future. They are not bound by the same sense of shared destiny of years past.”
Nigeria’s allies and neighbors have made a similar bargain with the political elite. Nigeria is an important regional problem-solver and its oil is a crucial piece of the global market, particularly for the United States. The collapse of Nigeria would pose a tremendous security threat in a region still struggling to recover from a vicious cycle of war that drew in half a dozen nations over 15 years.
“Nigeria is West Africa’s big brother,” said Abdel-Fatau Musah, conflict prevention adviser to Ecowas, a regional economic alliance. “It has played a critical role in stabilizing the whole subregion.”
The West has for the past eight years approached Nigerian democracy as a gradual process. Banking that years of practice will make perfect, most of Nigeria’s allies have glossed over serious deficits in its elections. This approach has sent a message to Nigeria’s political elite that it will not suffer for electoral malfeasance, said Chris Albin-Lackey, a Nigeria researcher for Human Rights Watch. “What Western policy really amounts to is setting the bar so low that the Nigerian government can overcome it without really making any effort,” he said.
Kayode Fayemi, who ran for governor and was defeated by the ruling party in his home state, Ekiti, said that dealing with Nigeria’s flawed elections had to be the first priority.
“Anyone who is willing to steal a ballot box will steal public money,” Mr. Fayemi said. “It is all well and good to talk about fighting corruption, but there is no corruption more corrosive than corruption of the political system.”
In his essay the “Trouble with Nigeria,” written a generation ago, the novelist Chinua Achebe clearly says where the trouble lies: “The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.”
The lack of transparent elections is the reason, analysts say, that governance has been such a problem in Nigeria. “The voters have almost no role at all in the system,” Mr. Nsirimovu, the rights advocate, said. “So how can we have good leaders?”
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