Nigeria’s main opposition party chose a former military dictator as its presidential candidate on Wednesday, setting up a Muslim versus Christian ”clash of the generals” with President Olusegun Obasanjo.
A dramatic walk-out by former general Muhammadu Buhari’s rivals at the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP) convention in Abuja left him the only candidate seeking to lead the party into the April 19 poll.
This ensures that both leading candidates at the election will be former dictators. Obasanjo, now an elected civilian leader, was on Monday re-selected in a competitive vote to represent the ruling People’s Democratic Party.
Significantly, in a country wracked by ethnic and religious tension, Obasanjo is a Christian southerner from the Yoruba ethnic group, while Buhari is a Hausa-speaking Muslim from the north. At the ANPP primary late on Tuesday, five of Buhari’s rivals declared that they were victims of a plot to exclude southerners from the ticket and walked out.
Four more of the 11 would-be candidates failed to turn up and one, former senate president and southerner Chuba Okadigbo, agreed to be Buhari’s vice-presidential running mate.
Just after midnight the chairman of the selection committee, Seidu Kumo, declared that in the absence of other candidates the primary vote would go ahead on Wednesday with just one: Buhari.
As the five candidates from the mainly Igbo-speaking south and southeast announced their decision to leave, former information minister John Nwobo said: ”The process of this election has been characterised by ethnicity.”
”We are no longer interested in participating,” said former parliamentary speaker Edwin Ume Ezeoke, reading a joint letter signed by the five which accused party officials of attempting to engineer a victory for Buhari.
Buhari himself said be regretted the timing of the decision, but that his rivals had a right to stand down.
A further 28 parties are due to select candidates or form coalitions before the election, but the PDP and ANPP have been the most powerful groups since Nigeria’s return to civil rule in 1999. The prospect of the contest focusing on a battle between a Christian southerner and a Muslim northerner will heighten fears that the vote could be marred by violence.
More than 10 000 people have died in ethnic and religious clashes since 1999, many of them triggered by resentment among Christians at northern Nigeria’s reintroduction of Islamic Sharia law.
But both candidates and their parties have so far insisted that they are candidates for all Nigerians, and have not played the ethnic card. Both parties have support across the country, but the ANPP is seen as strong in the north.
Obasanjo’s running mate is a northerner, Vice President Atiku Abubakar, while Buhari will hope that the presence of Okadigbo on his ticket will quell Igbo anger at the apparent exclusion of his rivals.
Nigeria is Africa’s most populous country and its 120-million people come from 250 ethnic groups.
The dominant groups, however, are the mainly-Muslim Hausa from the north, the mainly-Christian Igbo of the southeast and the religiously mixed southwestern Yoruba.
In 1976 Obasanjo, a veteran of the 1967-1970 civil war between loyalist forces and mainly Igbo-speaking Biafran separatists, took power when the then military dictator Murtala Mohammed was killed in a failed coup attempt.
Obasanjo led the country until 1979 when, in a first for Nigeria, he agreed to step down in favour of an elected civilian regime headed by Shehu Shagari.
Shagari was ousted in a 1983 military coup by Buhari, who ruled until he was deposed in his turn by yet another general, Ibrahim Babangida.
All three strongmen have now left the army and moved into civilian politics, and Babangida is a powerful behind the scenes player strongly rumoured to nurse presidential ambitions of his own.
Obasanjo’s 1999 election brought to an end 15 years of military rule and April’s election is seen as a chance for Nigeria to demonstrate that it has embraced democracy. – Sapa-AFP