106 - Out of Africa: Unexpected Good News from Nigeria
The good news is hardly trivial. Last week, the High Court of Nigeria (its central appeals tribunal) freed Nnamdi Kanu, the originator and secessionist leader of the banned Indigenous People of Biafra. The Federal Government had been prosecuting Kanu for fifteen illegal acts, including treason and terrorism. Essentially, the Federal government said that Kanu and his followers were trying to resume the 1967-1970 war between the Federal government and “Biafra,” the homeland of the Igbo people of eastern Nigeria -- roughly nearly a third of the 220 million people of Africa’s most populous nation.
Among the five or six civil conflicts that roil today’s Nigeria and have transformed it into a failed state (see “35- Nigeria: A Failed State Where Things Fall Apart,” April 21), the recrudescence of a struggle for Biafra’s secession and “freedom” is hardly the most troubling. But Kanu’s agitations (along with a limited number of committed believers) naturally worried the massive nation, especially on the eve of a presidential and legislative election early next year. Kanu and his followers had and now have the potential to mobilize millions of Igbo to take to the streets against President Muhammadu Buhari’s already troubled government and to arouse countervailing ethnically particular movements among the rival Yoruba, Hausa, or many other Nigerian ethnicities.
For such reasons, it was unexpected that the High Court judges exonerated Kanu. His separatist endeavors are well-known and uncontested. His long years of advocating and encouraging fellow Igbo to remove their homeland from today’s Nigeria are not in doubt.
But the High Court declared that Kanu was unlawfully before it, and had been arrested illegally. Few African judges have paid such strict attention to the fine points of the law. Kanu, like Paul Rusesabagina’s abduction to Rwanda in 2020, Kanu had been spirited out of Kenya (captured at the airport in Nairobi) by Nigerian secret service agents in 2021 and forcibly brought back to Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.
A three-man panel of the High Court declared that Nigeria could not try him because he had been abducted from Kenya; his “extraordinary rendition” violated African Union protocols and international treaties. Moreover, the Nigerian government refused to disclose where Kanu had been arrested. Abduction and rendition “without due process is a violation of [a subject’s] right.”
The Court made it clear – in a striking first for Nigeria and for Africa – that the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights were part of the laws of Nigeria and must be respected. Courts must not, it said, “pander” to the executive. The last dictum is a jurisprudential shot across the bow of Nigerian and most other African rulers. Judicial independence, when it occurs, upholds rule of law and secures human rights.
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Nigeria’s Election
Nigeria’s February election pits three contenders against each other for the presidency and is producing additional surprises.
Atiku Abubakr, who has been vice-president and has run before for high office, is the candidate of the People’s Democratic Party, the country’s main opposition party, and a Muslim. Bola Tinubu, former governor of Lagos State and another Muslim, is running as the head of the All Progressives Congress, which now rules Nigeria. Peter Obi, an Igbo and a Christian (only Nigeria’s very first president in 1960 was also an Igbo) decided at the last minute to contest the election on behalf of the Labour Party.
That last party only holds single seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate, the two chambers of Nigeria’s parliament. The parties of Abukakr and Tinubu dominate Parliament. Obi has been a two-term governor of Anambra, in Nigeria’s southeast; it is one of thirty-six Nigerian states and is mostly peopled by Igbo – by Biafrans.
A very recent opinion poll of Nigerians indicates that 75 percent of respondents believe that Nigeria is going in the “wrong direction.” About 88 percent said that they were most worried about jobs and the economy, corruption, and security. Nigeria has always been wildly corrupt; now it is pervasively insecure with an ongoing civil war in the northeast, petroleum pillage by politicized gangs in the Niger Delta, battles between herdsmen and farmers in the center of the country, and frequent kidnappings for ransom by marauders in major states in the Muslim north. Crime is rife in the cities of the south, too.
Those opinion poll answers were hardly a surprise. But what surprised the poll takers and has excited a proportion of the Nigerian population, is that Obi was the clear favorite of respondents. He was backed by 72 percent of the prospective voters who were decided and the preferred victor of 45 percent of undecided voters. Unexpectedly, only 16 percent of decided voters backed Tinubu and a mere 9 percent opted for Abubakr.
The last, known everywhere as Atiku, lost ground in the south over the weekend when he spoke divisively of the two other candidates: Northerners don’t need “a Yoruba candidate or an Igbo candidate. This is what the northerner needs. I stand before you as a pan-Nigerian of northern origin.”
Obviously, the national election only takes place in late February, so the poll preferences may lose relevance closer to real decision-making. But poll respondents appear to be opting so far for a fresh national face with known managerial accomplishments. If Obi were to become president, his accession would constitute a sharp break with two decades’ of corrupt and desultory rule on the part of sometime generals, closet autocrats, and weak (or overwhelmed) executives — many Muslims (in line with their preponderant position in Nigeria). Under an Obi presidency, Nigeria could be ready to resume its much deferred progressive leadership of sub-Saharan Africa.
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