Karl Vick in Lagos
Behind all the talk of returning democracy to Nigeria looms the burned wreckage of the Paki Trading and Transport company. As word spread last week that Moshood Abiola, the man Nigerians five years ago thought they had elected president, had died just as he was to be released from prison, the muggy streets of Lagos filled with angry young men.
At Paki Trading and Transport, a crowd methodically brought down its towering concrete wall, stripped and burned 16 big rigs inside, incinerated the offices and looted the warehouses. In the tin- roofed shelter that serves as a workplace mosque, security guard Garda Ali Paki was sliced to death.
Company co-owner Alhai Abdullahi Usman Dan Inn stood beside the bloodstain and announced: “The whole problem here is ethnic. We are from the Hausa tribe. They came here attacking our people.”
In Lagos, “they” could only be Yoruba, the tribe that dominates south-western Nigeria as the Hausa dominate the country’s north and the Ibo its south- east. The three ethnic groups account for most of the population of Africa’s most populous country, and in the mythology of nation-building they are supposed to be equals. But the increasingly perilous reality is that Nigeria has been dominated through nearly its entire history by Hausas – usually Hausas wearing green berets and epaulets. The military regimes that have ruled the nation for 28 of its 38 years have been overwhelmingly northern.
The democracy movement, not coincidentally, is dominated by southerners – and mostly by Yorubas, who blame the government for everything from the nation’s economic plight to the decision to move the capital from Lagos north to Abuja.
Abiola, who was winning the 1993 presidential election when the military annulled it, was a Yoruba. And in the wake of his extraordinarily untimely death the cry for democracy in Nigeria – though heard in all parts from members of all ethnic groups – is loudest in Lagos and is more than ever a cry for Yoruba power in the face of Hausa domination.
Analysts say the fear is that ethnic tensions that so far have been channelled mostly into the democracy movement might – if that movement is again blocked – find an outlet elsewhere. “It is too terrible to contemplate,” said Abraham Adesanya, a leading democracy activist.
“The road to Kigali”, reads the headline in the latest edition of The News, a Nigerian weekly. Nigerian readers immediately recognised both the capital of Rwanda and the pointed reference to the tribal violence that left up to a million dead in that country four years ago. Although not nearly on the scale of the Rwandan genocide, Nigeria has known communal violence itself. In 1966, tensions between Hausas and Ibos climaxed in mass killings and mass exodus. The Biafra war – with one million people dying in the famine that came with it – was fought over the Ibos’ attempts to form their own republic.
“The experience of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are object lessons for us in this country not to assume that the unity of Nigeria is a given,” said Stephen Olugbemi, a leading Nigerian political scientist.
“People can see the benefit of living together and being one. But they will say, if worse comes to worst, if we can’t get what we want, we will go our own way.”
Many are already saying it on the streets of Lagos. “The northerners have dominated; all the advantages are on them,” said Ide Kaffo (57).
“We are fed up in the south,” said Christopher Abiodun (44). “I believe 50% of us want war. I believe it, because we cannot send our children to school any more. No food. No shelter. We cannot continue.”
Outside Abiola’s home, a separatist group hung a banner reading: “Now We Stand on the Republic of Oduduwa,” the historical name for the western region.
Inside the Abiola compound, however, separatism had not yet ripened. “We are going to douse it, because when all is said and done, we don’t want our country to fragment,” said his eldest child, Lola. “I like our country. I like the size of it. We need a totally detribalised country, like the man that just died.” Indeed, Abiola was much more than a Yoruba. He was also a Muslim like most northerners. In 1993, before the ruling generals decided to call off the presidential balloting, he was carrying even the far-northern home district of his Hausa opponent.
“We voted for him” said Aliyu Asman Dan Inna, a partner in the Hausa trucking company destroyed by Yoruba rioters.
“All the cleavages which had bedevilled this country seemed to have all vaporised in 1993,” said Ibo Alex Ekwueme, who was vice-president in Nigeria’s last elected government and now heads a political reform group.
Some see the way to a Nigeria united even without Abiola’s charisma and largess. “Abiola was only a symbol,” said Soji Onafedeji (27), a Lagos hotel clerk. “The struggle is about June 12,” the date of the annulled 1993 election – the first time Nigerians had voted for president in 14 years.
Abiola’s closest allies are saying that rather than mount a search for another messianic figure, the focus should be on reshaping the structure of government. Nigeria, founded as a loose federation that allowed each region room to breathe, has developed a rigidly centralised government under military rule, noted Olugbemi, the political scientist.
“We have to start with a clean slate,” said Adesanya, who chairs the National Democratic Coalition, a leading democracy group. The group is urging military ruler General Abdulsalam Abubakar, who has vowed to return the nation to civilian rule, to endorse a government of national unity, composed of representatives from each region, who would rule while a new Constitution is drafted and parties formed. Adesanya, who met with Abubakar, said elections would follow in four or five years.
Abubakar, however, is said to be cool to that suggestion. One diplomat said that the general may schedule elections for the end of the year. The military regime would retain power in the meantime, the diplomat said, but to lend credence to the election plan, Abubakar might free all political prisoners, replace a significant number of state military administrators and name a new Cabinet that includes civilian “statesmen”. Whatever the plan, few in this fractious country expect things to go easier without Abiola to unite it. “We are being forced to play Hamlet without the prince,” said long-time supporter Olabiyi Durjaiye at Abiola’s burial.
A reporter, not sure he had heard right, asked: “To be or not to be?”
“That is the question,” Durjaiye replied. Then with the smile of a man just released from almost two years’ detention he predicted Nigeria’s answer. “To be,” he said. “We’re always optimistic. We will be.”