152 - Can Nigeria Save Itself and Save Africa?
Nigeria, the sick man of Africa, is destined to remain troubled, confused, and rife with corruption. As the continent’s most populous country, the election this week of Bola Ahmed Tinubu as president forecasts little fundamental change from the underwhelming, sclerotic, rule of Muhammadu Buhari, president since 2015. Tinubu won a third of the lower than expected total vote.
Much needs to be done to bring Nigeria and Nigerians well into the twenty-first century, and to fix its innumerable problems. But Tinubu, 70, a Muslim former governor of Lagos State and the candidate of Buhari’s ruling political party -- the All Progressives Congress -- promises to wield a limp duster rather than a stiff broom. One of the other candidates, former Anambra State governor Peter Obi, 61, campaigned for real change and became the favorite of younger Nigerians. But he finished third. Former vice-president Atiku Abubakar, 76, was second, conclusively behind Tinubu and ahead of Obi.
Buhari campaigned vigorously in 2015 to bring an inglorious end to Nigeria’s infamously rampant scourge of grand and petty corruption. But Nigeria is more dangerously and criminally corrupt now than in 2015. It is not clear that incoming President Tinubu will have the desire or ability to squelch the takings of the politicians and gangs who profit so readily from peculation, influence peddling, extortion, and large-scale criminalized procurement fraud -- all common in Nigeria. Tinubu forfeited $460,000 to the U.S Treasury in the 1990s, allegedly for depositing narcotics trafficking profits into American banks. He and Abubakar are very wealthy, even by the generous standards of Nigerian political elites.
. Tinubu’s Yoruba ethnicity, and his southernness, may have helped him win. (“It’s My Turn” was his slogan.) Abubakar, is from the north, and Obi the east. Obi was backed by the weak Labour Party, which hardly helped mobilize voters. But, most of all, Obi is of Igbo descent, and the reputation of Igbo as successful entrepreneurs and intellectuals appears to have done Obi little good with the wider electorate. Pollsters had predicted a greater following than he achieved.
Both losing parties are claiming rigged counting, fraud, and mismanagement by the electoral authority and its new computer system. Hundreds of polling places received ballots late, or not at all, some ballot boxes were stolen, and the sanctity of the official counting process was never assured. Hundreds of voting stations never opened to were attacked.
On the eve of the election, Buhari’s administration also invalidated larger denomination naira, the national currency, without ensuring that there were enough replacements available in banks and ATM machines. That massive glitch may well have prevented potential voters from paying bus or taxi fares to polling places. It also made much of the electorate angry.
Tinubu faces challenges much more ominous than shortages of naira. His country a is a third larger than Texas, with a massive population well over 220 million, and swelling. In twenty years or so, Nigeria will become the third largest country in the world, surpassing the United States in population.
Nigeria can no longer feed itself. It produces more petroleum than any other African nation and ranks as one of the largest producers in the world, but it has few refineries and imports nearly all its gasoline and diesel (some from Russia). It also subsidizes gasoline at the pump, worsening its balance of payments problems and encouraging the profitable smuggling of refined fuel into neighboring countries. On the eve of the election, urban Nigerians were pictured queuing for days at gas pumps.
As they go about their daily business, Nigerians are unsafe. They travel by road or rail, say, from Abuja, the capital, north to Kaduna State fearing attacks by bandits who kidnap for ransom. Many who traveled on that route last year are still being held or are dead. The big cities of the north and south, and many rural areas are afflicted by the same disease.
Nigerians are not secure, either. In addition to the decade-old Islamist Boko Haram insurgency, which has cost more than 10,000 lives, and numerous disappearances of children and women, there is an Igbo-led separatist movement that wants to re-create the breakaway Igbo state of Biafra. Further, criminal forces purloin oil from pipelines near the Gulf of Guinea; pirates in the Gulf hijack tankers carrying crude oil. There are ongoing battles for land between Fulani herders and settled agriculturalists in the Middle Belt and near Abuja. Given these many governance defects, Nigeria is a failed state that only the best leadership can save.
Whether Tinubu has the will or skills to give Nigeria back its greatness is the key question of his presidency, for his own bitterly divided people, and for all the rest of Africa.