According to a recent poll, an
equal number of Nigerian voters—41%—fell on either side of the debate
surrounding the postponement of presidential elections. It is perhaps no
coincidence that those numbers almost perfectly overlap with the results of a
December 2014 presidential voting survey, in which each of the two main parties
racked up 42% of the total tally. By a rule of thumb, supporters of the ruling
People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and president Goodluck Jonathan backed the postponement,
while those of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the main opposition party,
opposed it.
The opposition’s candidate is
Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler, and three-time presidential
contender, who has since his emergence undergone what is arguably the most
impressive political rebranding in the history of Nigeria. A man once given
exclusively to babarigas—traditional dress favored by Hausa-Fulani men from
northern Nigeria—now poses for photographs bow-tied and besuited, or in the
traditional outfits of southeastern Nigeria and the oil-rich Niger delta,
regions in which he has consistently recorded meager votes in his three
previous attempts at the presidency.
Buhari and his supporters insist
that the PDP forced the postponement to undermine the APC’s unprecedented
momentum, and to buy more time to work out a way of rigging an election it
looks set to lose. The PDP has denied those allegations, focusing instead on
querying the preparedness level of the Independent National Electoral Commission
(INEC).
By all accounts, the INEC has not
lived up to its responsibility. Going by several indices (distribution of
biometric voter-cards, accreditation of observers, training of election
personnel) the preparations have been shoddy, and a February 14 election, had
it gone ahead, would have been—not uncharacteristically, it must be
said—chaotic.
The PDP is also increasingly
voicing its opposition to the planned deployment of handheld card-readers that
the INEC wants to experiment with during the coming elections. The fingerprint
technology on which the card readers are based is designed to produce greater
transparency in the elections by ensuring that no one is able to vote more than
once. (One of the commonest of conventional voter-fraud methods in Nigeria has
been through the mass thumb-printing of ballot papers.)
On the surface, the PDP’s
argument is that the card readers are untested, and that it would be imprudent
to attempt an experiment using the all-important presidential election as a
catalyst. The actual reason, in my opinion, is not far-fetched: by insisting on
the use of non-biometric cards, the PDP will be able to throw open the
elections for the sort of rigging that earned it landslide victories in the
last four presidential elections.
Between insisting on the use of
card-readers and biometric cards, and that the rescheduled elections must on no
account be postponed again, the APC has its hands full. If it wins these two
battles, its chances of forming the next central government are significant.
The party, a merger of Nigeria’s
three leading opposition parties, has been fighting against-all-odds battles
even before it was formally registered by the electoral commission in July of
2013. The first hurdle was a court case by an organization—presumably sponsored
by the PDP—that called itself the African People’s Congress and laid claim to
the “APC” acronym, insisting it had filed for registration as a political party
before the All Progressives Congress.
Having been registered, the APC
wasted no time firming up its position, attracting a raft of high profile
defectors—including five governors—from the ruling party. The PDP, sufficiently
jolted, let go of Bamanga Tukur, the divisive chairman under whose watch the
defections happened, and replaced him with Adamu Mu’azu, a former governor with
a knack for political strategy.
The next big hurdle for the APC
was the selection of presidential and vice presidential candidates. Considering
its origins as a coalition of disparate political movements, it seemed unlikely
that it would manage the process of selecting flag-bearers that everyone felt
were in their interest.
It spectacularly disappointed
pessimists. In the days that followed, tensions swiftly rose over the choice of
a running mate to Buhari. Again the party smoothed over a looming dissension,
and presented a cerebral professor of law as Buhari’s deputy—a necessary
contrast to the former military man’s gruff, blunt demeanor. This carefully
structured campaign-organogram helped bring on board the influential interests
who had lost out up until then.
Events over the last several
months would then conspire to ensure that incumbent president Jonathan’s most
formidable opponent would not even be the APC, or Buhari, but instead the
terrorist group Boko Haram, and, to a lesser extent, the Nigerian currency (the
naira).
The abduction by Boko Haram of
more than 200 schoolgirls in Chibok last April, and the belated, incoherent
response of the Jonathan government, dealt a huge blow to his reputation at
home and abroad. Since then, Boko Haram has marched on confidently, seizing and
holding towns and villages, keeping the military consistently on defense. Last
year alone, the group’s onslaught claimed the lives of more than 4,000 persons;
and more than 1.5 million Nigerians have been displaced as a result.
Around October of last year, at a
time when Boko Haram was stepping up its attacks and seizing increasingly
larger swathes of territory, the naira began to slump, thanks to crashing oil
prices. If Boko Haram was mainly affecting people in the country’s remote
northeastern region, the devaluing naira took its own fight straight to the
economic heartlands of the country—the southern cities that are the hubs of
Nigeria’s banking and manufacturing industries.
The net effect of terrorism and
the economic downturn has been devastating for the president’s re-election
prospects. Boko Haram has depleted his northern support base so profoundly that
he spent quite a bit of time on the campaign stump trying to convince northerners
that he is not, in fact, a Boko Haram sponsor.
The naira—which has now fallen by
about 20% against the US dollar—is undermining his support among the business
community (manufacturers and merchants heavily dependent on dollar-denominated
imports of raw materials and machines), and among the multitudes of Nigerians
paying for education and healthcare abroad. Linked to the currency crisis is a
budgetary one. Nigeria, dependent on crude oil for as much as 75% of government
revenues (and 90% of foreign exchange earnings), is earning much less now than
it did a year ago. It is not a pretty picture at all. External reserves are
down to about $33 billion, the lowest in several years. This itself raises an
important question: what did the Jonathan government do with three years of
record-high oil prices?
This is where Buhari enters the
picture, poised to demolish an incumbent already weakened by allegations that
he has overlooked monumental corruption in his government, an Islamist
insurgency in the north, and a weakening naira.
Part of Buhari’s allure lies in
the ambivalent affinity that Nigerians have with “strongmen”—military-style
figures who sweep in to rescue a flailing country from a misruling government.
Buhari has the good fortune of being a retired strongman about to get a second
chance.
On January 1, 1984, when a group
of coup-plotters, having just overthrown the elected government of Shehu
Shagari, asked him, then a major general in the Nigerian army, to lead the
succeeding military government. Over the next twenty months, he went about his
redemptive task with gusto, slugging the recently deposed politicians with long
jail terms, slashing public service jobs, executing drug pushers using
retroactive decrees, and generally seeking to instill his own brand of
discipline in a country that had long discarded restraint.
By the time he was himself
overthrown in August of 1985, Nigerians had generally had enough of his
highhandedness. Therein lies an interesting paradox: Nigerians, as much as
they’ve loved their strongmen, have never had much patience for those ones who
either went too far, or didn’t know when their time was up.
In this love-hate relationship
with strongmen lies a substantial part of Buhari’s surprising popularity—and
president Jonathan’s unpopularity. Here is a an incumbent who has built a
reputation on not being a strongman. Months after his election in 2011, he told
a church gathering that Nigerians generally want a president who is “a lion or
a tiger,” or behaves like “the kings of Syria, Babylon; the Pharaoh, all the
powerful people that you read about in the Bible.” He made it clear he was none
of those. “I am not a lion, I am also not a general,” he said. “I can change
this country without those traits.”
Now, arrayed against an ex-general
who has acquired many enemies as a result of his draconian rule, and who, 30
years ago chased armed-to-the-teeth Chadian rebels out of Nigeria, Jonathan
looks to many Nigerians like the weaker choice.
The obvious danger here is that
Nigerians might be expecting too much from Buhari. While his army background
might work some magic against Boko Haram, there are no strongmen strong enough
to prop up declining federal revenues or floundering currencies. There is no
amount of political will that can singlehandedly cause oil prices to break free
of a $50-a-barrel curse.
As Dr. Folarin Gbadebo-Smith,
director of the Center for Public Policy Alternatives, a Lagos-based thinktank,
recently told me: “Since this [will be] a new government altogether, there’ll
be a steep learning curve. It won’t matter that Buhari was in power once. The
world was a different place, the country was a different place.”
Buhari’s best hope is that he
might be better able to bandage the wounds through which the country is
bleeding revenue. But considering just how numerous—and how deep—these wounds
are, that in itself might be all the game-changing move this broken country
needs.
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