Nigerians vote amid chaos
As elections begin, a poverty-stricken nation hangs in the balance between peace and anarchy. Fred Bridgland in Johannesburg reports
Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, went to the polls yesterday in the first stage of all-important presidential and parliamentary elections marred by assassinations, commonplace massacres, allegations of vote-rigging, and deeply based ethnic and religious rivalries resulting in a confusion of mini-wars.
Nigeria's rulers and its people can consolidate a fragile democracy or they can throw it all to the wind, triggering more chaos in a west African region that has become an 'arc of crisis' mired in conflict and poverty, where rich resources are wasted and squandered, and where old autocrats too often refuse to give way to new, enlightened leadership.
President Olusegun Obasanjo, seeking re-election in the presidential poll next Saturday that follows yesterday's parliamentary voting, has issued a stark warning. Failure in the electoral process among Nigeria's 126 million people could spell 'disaster of monumental proportion' for the country's precarious unity, he said.
More than 10,000 people have died in outbreaks of ethnic, religious and political bloodletting since Obasanjo's election in 1999's military-supervised vote. Many Niger ians fear chaotic organisation, overwhelming logistical problems, mounting ethnic tensions and disputes over poll results could trigger wider mayhem across the country. The apprehension stems mainly from Nigeria's failure to ever transfer power from one elected government to another. Disputes over results and ethnic rivalries unleashed violence after elections conducted by civilian rulers in the mid-1960s and in 1983, leading to coups by power- hungry soldiers.
The 1960s' disturbances led directly to an attempt at secession by the Ibo-dominated, oil-rich southeast region of Biafra. It declared itself an independent republic in 1967 and more than one million people died in a terrible three-year civil war before government forces crushed the separatists.
After 15 years of traumatic military rule between 1983 and 1999, Nigerians overwhelmingly welcomed a return to democracy with Obasanjo despite the dire failures and corruption of all elected leaders since independence from Britain in 1960. The country has been ruled by military dictators for 30 of its 43 years of independence.
Nigeria in 1960 was more a geographical expression than a united nation. It was created in 1914 by Britain's Royal Niger Company. The British constructed a country that is multi-ethnic and multi-religious, with 300 tribal groups speaking more than 250 languages. There are three major ethnic groups: the Hausa, Yoruba and Ibo. With the artificial country's huge population, Nigerians count for one out of every six people on the African continent.
Partly because it is an unnatural state, corruption pervades Nigerian society so deeply that it has, in the words of Transparency International's Nigerian representative Bilikisu Yusuf, reached 'the degree of insanity'.
Despite their hatred of past military dictators, Nigerians now express open disenchantment with Obasanjo's failure to end a prolonged stagnation of the oil-dependent economy and to create jobs for millions of youths. The oil industry, on which Nigeria depends for more than 90% of its budget revenues, has been severely battered by tribal disputes in the oil-rich Niger delta.
American lobbyists were hyping Nigerian oil as a secure alternative source to supplies from the Middle East. But the pre-election violence in the world's sixth largest oil exporter has highlighted the dangers of putting faith in the stability of an extremely frail country.
Fuel shortages -- endemic in Nigeria despite the abundant oil because of gross corruption and misgovernment -- have worsened in the past two weeks after dissidents blew up the country's main crude oil pipeline. The damage set off huge fires and cut supplies to Nigeria's most important oil refineries close to the Niger delta city of Warri, the country's biggest oil centre. Militant youths from the Ijaw community in and around Warri threatened to blow up more oil facilities unless their tribe was given greater political representation in national and provincial governments.
The trouble in the delta -- pitching tribe against tribe, as well as against the government -- has reduced Nigeria's oil flow into international markets from two million to fewer than 800,000 barrels a day. Normally tenacious oil giants like Chevron, Texas and Shell have evacuated all staff and their families.
With stocks of crude oil in the United States at the lowest in years, the shutdown has come at the worst possible moment for Washington, which has increasingly turned to Nigeria and Angola to diversify its oil supplies sources beyond the Gulf.
The Niger delta disruption has shaken already twitchy global oil markets crestfallen at the prospect of absorbing the Nigerian shock as war continues in Iraq and as political tensions hobble another major supplier, Venezuela. While the Ijaw fight Big Oil, so do a neighbouring tribe, the Itsekeri. But the Ijaw and the Itsekeri are also fighting one another. In a bewildering local war, the Itsekeri accuse marauding Ijaw of trying to exterminate them in order to gain control of the oil-producing regions. Countless hundreds have died in this battle of the Delta. In one recent Ijaw attack, Itsekeri villages were set ablaze by rocket-propelled grenades and their residents decapitated or sprayed with machine- gun fire.
Thirty parties were yesterday vying for the 360 seats in the lower house of representatives and 109 seats in the senate. Results will be known only on Tuesday at the earliest. With more than 60 million people casting votes at 120,000 polling stations, it will be Africa's biggest democratic election ever and a key test of the continent's progress towards truly representative government.
Despite aspirations towards democracy, Nigeria's military men are still at the forefront of power. The presidential election will be a hard-fought battle between four former army generals. The two main contenders are Obasanjo and General Muhammadu Buhari, who have both previously seized absolute power -- Obasanjo in 1976 and Buhari in 1984. Obasanjo voluntarily relinquished power in 1979 before being elected as a civilian president in 1999. General Buhari was forcibly removed from office after 18 months.
Buhari is the presidential candidate of the main opposition All Nigeria People's Party. Buhari is a Muslim Hausa-Fulani from the Islamic north. Obasanjo, of the ruling People's Democratic Party, is a Yoruba Christian from the southwest, where various groups are calling for a sovereign state for the Yoruba, the country's second biggest ethnic group. Breakaway Yoruba nationalists say independence has become imperative because the Yoruba have been held back by Nigeria's Muslim and conservative north.