Joshua Idehen
The president's missing? Whatever.
Umaru Yar’adua, the president of Nigeria, has been in a hospital in Saudi Arabia for a heart condition since November 2009—and he forgot to tell anyone. For six whole weeks. No phone, email, wave from the balcony, or blog. Not even a simple tweet, which is downright rude. 150m plus Nigerians, united only through football and skin colour, did not have a leader to tuck them into bed and tell them this it’s all going to be okay. Previous to now, I didn’t know much about him—Nigerian politicians are about as interchangeable as Blair and Cameron. I didn’t even vote—I’m in Britain, and Nigeria didn’t ask for my opinion on the guy. I guess that’s why, when I found out, my response was “huh.”
Not “huh?” mind, but “huh.” Like it’d started off as a serious question but felt a little man-flu-ey and went back to bed. More like “meh.”
I asked my brother what he thought. His first response was “What?” but then his eyes and thoughts went back to his computer screen and Modern Warfare 2. Better than “huh,” but still nowhere near the level of emotion this momentous event deserved. We’ve lost a president for god’s sake! He’s locked himself in his room and won’t answer the door! My brother and I have had longer, more satisfying discussions about computer games. “What” is only “meh” with more wind.
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Jonathan Power
Discuss this article here
Nigeria contains one quarter of the world’s black population. So it is not surprising that—apart from being crazy about Barack Obama—they tend to think the world begins and ends with their country.
But this inward focus seems to have produced results. In the eight years of the last administration of Olusegun Obasanjo, who stepped down as president last May, Nigeria paid off its huge debt, stabilised its currency, cut inflation and established effective macroeconomic and fiscal policies. Economic growth is now at 9 per cent a year. I have been a frequent visitor to Nigeria over the last decade, usually meeting up with Obasanjo, a long-time friend of mine, and seen it change for the better myself.
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Christopher Albin-Lackey
Nigeria’s elections—for governors on 14th April, and for the country’s president on the 21st—were heralded by President Olusegun Obasanjo, who is stepping down after two terms, as the first in the country’s history to have successfully transferred power from one civilian head of state to another. But voting was so undermined by open displays of rigging, intimidation and violence by the ruling People’s Democratic party (PDP) and its armed thugs that the elections’ real significance may be to illustrate just how far Nigeria is from accountable, democratic government.
Official results show a stunning success for the PDP. The party’s presidential candidate, Umaru Yar’Adua, received 70 per cent of the vote, according to the electoral commission, and its gubernatorial candidates won at least 29 of Nigeria’s 36 states. But condemnation of the polls has been unanimous. EU observers said they fell “far short of basic international and regional standards,” and the US pronounced itself “deeply troubled.” More than 300 Nigerians lost their lives in election-related violence.
To judge by our experience, observing the polls in four Nigerian states, these conclusions understate the situation. In many places there was no voting at all, in either election. In many rural areas we visited, polling stations did not open because election staff removed ballot boxes and voting papers to government offices or the homes of ruling party officials, in order to fabricate results in secret.
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Jonathan Power
The air is hot here in the busy market town of Awka in the far backyard of Nigeria. So is the talk, as happens at election time. Olusegun Obasanjo, the retiring president, and his chosen, would-be successor, Umaru Yar’Adua, are on a podium, surrounded by banner-waving enthusiasts. The crowd has been bussed in by the local churches, even though Yar’Adua is a devout Muslim from one of the ruling families of the north. Indeed, he is younger brother of the late Shehu Yar’Adua, a northern power-broker and deputy to Obasanjo when the latter was briefly military ruler in the late 1970s.
We are in the heartland of old Biafra, the province of the mainly Christian Igbo people, who in the 1960s tried to break away. The Nigerian general who secured the Biafran capitulation after a bloody defeat was Obasanjo. That was before his days as an earnest Christian, which began in 1995 when the military dictator, Sani Abacha, imprisoned him. (In 1998, Abacha died of a heart attack while in bed with three prostitutes, thus giving Obasanjo his liberty and the country the chance to return to democracy.) Now, given what he has learned about life—and after two four-year terms as elected president from 1999-2007—Obasanjo says that he would have tried to end the Biafra secession without violence, just as last year he accepted a ruling of the International Court of Justice on the disputed oil-rich peninsula of Bakassi, giving it to Cameroon rather than fighting for it, as popular opinion and his defence minister wanted him to.
Biafra today seems quite prosperous, although Awka is richer and less violent than other cities in the region, like Onitsha or Enugu, and the southeast still has the reputation for being the roughest and most corrupt corner of the country. Driving into Awka, we pass the rather grand Deeper Life Bible Church, the German language centre, dozens of cybercafés and the local synagogue—testament to the open nature of Nigeria’s current development. We also pass row upon row of well-built two-storey houses. Electric pylons dot the landscape and petrol stations without queues are on every corner. Nigeria seems to have shaken off the economic malaise of the 1980s and 1990s—a time of recession, declining incomes and rapid inflation—as well as at least some of its maladministration and corruption, and is moving forward with growth of 7 per cent a year (8 per cent in the non-oil sector). There is, according to the International Monetary Fund, a chance of achieving an “Asian miracle” growth rate of 10 per cent within five years, so long as there is no severe disruption to oil production in the Niger delta.
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Jonathan Power
My wife phoned me on the way to Heathrow and asked me to call her when I met Pierre San?, Amnesty International’s secretary-general, who was travelling on the same plane. After my last near-fatal incident at Lagos airport, when I was picked up by a would-be throat-cutter, she wanted to know that I was in safe custody. I told her that I wasn’t sure I’d recognise him among 400 Nigerian passengers on a crowded 747-it was eight months since my only encounter with him over lunch. In the event, he was hard to miss. As I walked towards the boarding gate I saw him on a bench, talking into his mobile, paper on his lap, elegant in powder blue shirt, pale yellow tie, dark jacket, immaculately polished shoes, brown leather briefcase and a rather expensive gold watch peeping from his shirt sleeve. I wondered how such appearances would hold up in the heat and dust of equatorial midsummer.
He handed me a paper on Amnesty’s mission to Nigeria. The “travel precautions” section was not reassuring: “Internal airlines have a high accident rate… Armed robbery on the roads is common…”
Both of us worked most of the time on the plane. Sitting in the empty row in front of him, my head turned round as questions came into my mind. “I see from the programme you’ve only got an hour with Obasanjo. Is that typical with heads of government?” “An hour is about right,” he replied, “otherwise the discussion wanders. I have a lot of points here,” he said, tapping his sheaves of paper, “and the Nigerian section will have their own points, but we must select the main three and focus his attention on those, otherwise it’s just a shopping list.”
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Adewale Maja-Pearce
“Everybody should try as much as possible to live an independent life and be proud of himself as an African. That’s all.” Fela Kuti
There were a number of things I admired about Fela Kuti, the Nigerian musician who died of Aids on 2nd August. First and most important was his music. Fela introduced a completely new sound, Afrobeat, which was at once non-traditional and recognisably African. It consisted of Fela himself, alternating between organ and sax, plenty of horns, a strong percussion section, bass and lead guitars, and a chorus of female singers. (When you hear the opening bars of any Fela song you know immediately whose it is.) He was also an intensely political man who hated injustice; he wanted to use his music “to change the whole system.” In order to reach a mass audience, he stopped singing in standard English and his native Yoruba in favour of pidgin English, Nigeria’s lingua franca.
I once saw for myself how successful Fela was in this. It was 10th November 1995, the day the current military government of General Sani Abacha executed Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fellow Ogoni activists in spite of near-universal condemnation. I was travelling by coach to Lagos from Port Harcourt, where the hangings took place. Someone asked the driver to play a tape of “Beasts of No Nation,” one of Fela’s pieces from the mid-1980s. The song was written in response to a previous military dictator’s claim that he had seized power to protect Nigerians’ human rights. Fela argued that human rights are not a commodity to be given or withheld by an “animal” in uniform, but the “property” of every person: “Human rights na my property/You can’t dash me my property.” More than three quarters of the passengers on the coach, all of them ordinary Nigerians, knew the words of the song from start to finish. That was why the authorities could never leave Fela alone.
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Mark Huband
Late one evening in November 1989 a confidential telex message arrived on the desk of the national assembly president in the Atlantic Ocean port city of Cotonou. Two pages of instructions laid out the future of the country to which the message had been sent-the tiny African state of Benin.
The telex had been tapped out in the heart of Paris, in the wing of the Elysée Palace reserved for the cellule Africaine, the bureau attached to the French presidency, not the French foreign ministry. From there, most important decisions regarding France’s Africa policy are made-at that time by former President François Mitterrand’s son, the then director of the cellule, Jean-Christophe.
The inspiration for the message was the political upheaval sweeping through eastern Europe. The reverberations for Africa would be enormous. Benin’s government, until then ruled by the pseudo-Marxist military dictator Mattheiu Kerekou, had been instructed to end one-party rule, allow opposition groups to form, and finally to hold multi-party presidential and general elections. By May 1990 these instructions had been carried out to the letter. Kerekou had retired to a villa on the outskirts of Cotonou and a former World Bank economist, Nicéphore Soglo, had been elected president.
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