It has taken nearly half a century but Nigeria will finally hold an election on Saturday that sees one elected leader pass power to another for the first time since independence from Britain.
But many of Nigeria’s 60-million voters are less concerned with the ballot’s potential to consign military coups to history than the more mundane hope that this election might finally deliver what they were promised with the return to democratic rule eight years ago — a regular power supply and no longer having to pay off the cops.
The outgoing President, Olusegun Obasanjo, has made much of ending the looting of the national treasury by military leaders and politicians that has bled the economy of hundreds of billions of dollars since independence in 1960, and he boasts of creating a clutch of new billionaires through privatisation and reform.
But for many Nigerians that appears merely to be a more creative way for the elite to enrich itself while they continue to live day to day, their cities and roads crumbling around them.
Graft is as pervasive as ever for any Nigerian who encounters one of the ubiquitous police roadblocks — where uniformed men brazenly demand money for ”chop” (food) — or who tries to get anything done in a government office without ”dashing” the civil servant behind the desk.
But nothing infuriates many people more than the government’s inability to keep the power on. Electricity comes and goes as often as the rain.
”If you look around, you see nothing has changed. The rich men are in their Mercedes with their generators at home and we have no money and no power,” said Joyce Kadiri, whose small grocery shop in the heart of traffic-clogged Lagos was in darkness. ”Look at the roads here. Are they better? Look at what happens when it rains. We are up to our knees in water because the drains don’t work. Is that better? It doesn’t matter who runs this country. They are the elites. They get rich, we suffer.”
The grievances aren’t limited to the sprawling townships of Lagos. Africa’s most populous nation is among the most divided on the continent. The staid Islamic north, the freewheeling boisterous south and the embittered oil-rich east, which has benefited least from the wealth generated from under its soil, all view each other with suspicion.
Each region tends to believe it is somehow losing out though some underhand political scheming that benefits the others. The ethnic and religious rivalries occasionally burst forth with the massacres of Christians in the north or Muslims in the south.
But the opinion polls reflect an unusual consensus on what matters in this election, if not who to vote for. Surveys show that across large parts of the country the major issues are corruption, electricity and unemployment.
Obasanjo says corruption is being curbed and jobs will flow from his economic reforms. But in an interview with the Financial Times this week he acknowledged public frustration over his failure to alleviate the power cuts.
”When we came in, we didn’t know how deep the rot was. My minister … I had to remove him from that ministry because one year on and he did not know his right from his left. That was how bad the situation was,” he said.
As always, the contenders for president are promising things will be different — and the provision of electricity is at the top of the pledges.
But the election campaign has not instilled confidence that the old ways are passing. Political violence has left more than 150 people dead in recent months, including two candidates for state governor. Last weekend’s state elections were marred by the open stuffing of ballot boxes, the inclusion of babies on the electoral roll and the widespread buying of votes, all of which bodes ill for for Saturday.
The election was thrown into further turmoil on Monday after the supreme court ruled against what many saw as a politically motivated move by the election commission to stop the vice-president, Atiku Abubakar, from running.
Abubakar was a founder member of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) but fell out with Obasanjo after opposing his attempts to alter the Constitution to serve a third term.
The electoral commission said the vice-president was barred from running because he is under investigation for corruption, accusations that are widely believed in Nigeria but have yet to be tested in court. The supreme court ordered Abubakar’s name put back on the ballot as the candidate of the opposition Action Congress.
His re-entry into the race pits him against the other main contenders: Umaru Yar’Adua, the PDP candidate, and Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler in the 1980s. Buhari’s opponents have been running adverts reminding voters of the people he had locked up without trial, calling him an ”unreconstructed despot”. That has not gone down well in the south, where there is an inherent suspicion of authority, but it has added to Buhari’s popularity in the north, where his authoritarian tendencies are appreciated.
Yar’Adua has made much of the fact that he is one of only five of Nigeria’s 36 state governors not under investigation for corruption, with campaign adverts calling him ”Mr Integrity”.
Abubakar cannot make the same claim. He got rich as head of Nigeria’s customs office and was indicted last year by a Cabinet committee for allegedly funnelling $139-million in state funds to businesses in which he had a stake.
One of Yar’Adua’s closest allies, the influential federal capital minister, Nasir El-Rufai, welcomed Abubakar’s inclusion on the ballot by saying it will give the electorate a clear choice.
”Nigerians will be able to make a choice between Yar’Adua, a man whose honesty and integrity is unquestioned, even by his opponents, and a man for whom the same cannot be said. There is no contest and I am confident that will be reflected in the polls,” he said.
El-Rufai may be right but Yar’Adua may suffer from coming in on Obasanjo’s coat tails. The outgoing president’s popularity has faded and he is now a deeply divisive figure.
He has won praise, particularly from businessmen and Western governments, for eradicating Nigeria’s foreign debt and liberalising the economy, although some of what passes for privatisation is no more than state assets being sold off to the elite at knock-down prices.
But the renowned Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe spoke for many of his compatriots when he said that the past eight years of democratic rule have been wasted.
”President Olusegun Obasanjo has taken Nigeria as low as it has ever gone,” he said. ”This will surprise the foreign ‘friends’ of Nigeria who may believe the myth that Obasanjo has been fighting to end corruption in the country and to bring democracy to its citizens. Nigerians know better.”
At a glance
Population 140-million
Religion 50% Muslim, 40% Christian, with the remainder holding indigenous beliefs
Ethnicity 250 ethnic groups, the most influential being Hausa and Fulani (29%), Yoruba (21%) and Igbo (18%)
Life expectancy at birth 47 years
Infant mortality 95,5 per 1 000
Literacy 68% in population over 15
HIV/Aids 3,9% of the adult population are living with the disease
Workforce 49-million. 70% work in agriculture. Unemployment is 5.8%.
Voters 61-million people have registered, and will vote at one of 130 000 polling booths – Guardian Unlimited Â