Tweet
Hints of a new chapter
Nov 12th 2009 | ABUJA, KANO AND YENAGOA
From The Economist print edition
As militants lay down their arms in the Niger Delta, the battle is on to tackle Nigeria’s other massive ills
AP
IN YENAGOA, the capital of Bayelsa state in the Niger Delta, giant billboards in the centre of town proclaim the dawn of a “walking, talking ideology”—Sylvanomics. Some new fad, perhaps, from the IMF or the World Bank? No; the picture of a beaming, youngish-looking man in a jumpsuit and bowler hat shows that this is all about the new state governor, Timipre Sylva.
The man in person enthusiastically explains more in the opulent surroundings of Gloryland, the governor’s mansion. Bayelsa is the first of Nigeria’s 36 states to invite in outside accountants and advisers for a thorough audit of its finances. They are now going over the state’s payroll and procurement policies, as well as the revenues from the federal government, which (as in all states) supply most of Bayelsa’s income. Vitally, the bean-counters will also audit the deeply obscure flows of money that go out again from the state coffers to the Local Government Authorities (LGAs). These are supposed to spend the money on the wretched people who live in deep poverty in the swamps and creeks of the Delta. If waste and corruption are cut out, they should benefit. “Transparency has a direct link to development,” says Mr Sylva.
Nigerians, particularly in other statehouses, are looking on with a mixture of awe and horror at Mr Sylva’s audacity. The statehouses are the biggest source of the corruption and mismanagement in Nigeria’s political system. Some of the governors in the oil-rich Delta command budgets bigger than entire west African countries, yet traditionally, after they have spent most of the money on their own helicopters, limousines and Glorylands, together with gangs of hired thugs at election time, there is little left over for anything fancy like schools or hospitals. Nuhu Ribadu, a former head of Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency, has said of this violent patronage system: “It’s not even corruption. It’s gangsterism. It’s organised crime.”
Not surprisingly then, Bayelsa’s audit is uncovering some impressive anomalies. Just down the road from Gloryland is the self-styled “Transparency House”, where Dimieari Von Kemedi, the head of the state’s new Due Process and e-Governance Bureau, explains what he has uncovered of the state’s “ghost” economic system. Take the payroll, for instance. A new biometric verification exercise, which fingerprints and photographs real employees and matches them against the paper payroll, has already shown up about 4,000 fake workers against 25,000 real ones. A particularly large number of false names were found in the finance department. At the local office of the federal Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), 70 people claimed to work there who didn’t. Another person employed ten members of his family, including his under-age children, in a local education authority. Such are the rewards of political office. In light of his discoveries, Mr Kemedi hopes to reduce the state salary bill by 20%. In 2008, after a preliminary audit, he was able to cut the procurement budget by 24%.
Alamy
As well as Sylvanomics, other unusually hopeful things are happening in the Delta. As a direct consequence of the corruption and waste now being exposed in Bayelsa and other Delta states, a violent insurgency has wracked the region since 2004. Dozens of heavily armed gangs started attacking the oil industry, sabotaging installations and pipelines and kidnapping foreign oil workers. The militants claimed to be acting on behalf of neglected, disfranchised local communities, whose lands had been polluted by the oil companies and who received almost no money from the rich state governors. The militants were joined by criminals interested merely in a quick return from kidnapping.
Yet over the past three months the militants have been giving up both themselves and their guns in unprecedented numbers. The federal government has promised them an unconditional pardon for past crimes, a small stipend to live on and the promise of retraining in order to “reintegrate” into society. A couple of similar amnesty programmes were tried before, and failed, but this one seems to be working. In Bayelsa alone, by the end of October, more than 6,000 former guerrillas had turned themselves in. In Rivers state, the heart of the insurgency, another 6,000 had given up. Across the whole of the Delta region, the total may exceed 15,000. No one knows for sure how many militants are still in the creeks, but Nigerian officials claim that these numbers mean the end of the insurgency. Their optimism seemed to be justified when the Movement for the Emancipation of the Delta (MEND), the main umbrella group for the insurgents, declared an indefinite ceasefire on October 25th.
Oil-rich, but enfeebled
It is rare to have any reasons to be cheerful about Nigeria, let alone two at once. This is a country where so much money is wasted, greasing the wheels of a corrupt political system, that despite its oil wealth about 70% of people still live on the equivalent of less than $1 a day. This, in turn, makes Nigeria much weaker and less stable than it should be. An American intelligence report from 2005 speculated that Nigeria might be on its way to becoming a failed state, a bigger version of Congo or Somalia.
Such forecasts are all the more worrying because, merely by virtue of its size and its natural resources, Nigeria is Africa’s giant. If the state failed, it would do so on a massive scale. It is the continent’s most populous country, with about 160m people. It vies with Angola as sub-Saharan Africa’s largest oil exporter, mainly to America, and is the eighth-biggest oil exporter in the world, with stated reserves of 38.5 billion barrels. It is Africa’s second-biggest economy, after South Africa, and the leader of the regional Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), accounting for roughly half of its GDP.
Nigeria, together with South Africa, has naturally taken the lead in African diplomacy and politics in recent years. The previous president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, worked with South Africa to reform the African Union (AU) in 2000. Nigeria contributed most of the troops to the AU’s first peacekeeping force, in the Darfur region of Sudan, and has sent troops to Burundi and Sierra Leone. Last month it took up a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council; in a reformed council, Nigerians think their country would be an obvious candidate for a permanent seat.
Yet for all this, while other African countries such as Ghana, Mali, Mozambique and Rwanda have been improving in the past decade, Nigeria has, in many ways, gone backwards. Most obviously, it has been beset by civil strife. At times in the Delta MEND’s insurgency was so intense that it shut in as much as a third of Nigeria’s oil production, pushing up the world price of crude and enfeebling the Nigerian government, which depends on oil for about 80% of its revenues. America worried most about this; it already gets 8.2% of its imported oil from Nigeria, and wants to increase this figure in order to diversify its sources of supply away from the Middle East.
In the mainly Muslim north of the country, the story—gross inequalities of wealth, abuse of power, insurgency—is much the same. After the first post-dictatorship democratic elections in 1999, 12 of the northern Muslim states adopted sharia law, putting an enormous strain on the unity of a Nigerian state that had previously been run only under the secular, civil law bequeathed to it by British colonial rulers. The imposition of sharia was partly inspired by the success of the Iranian revolution in 1979. But it was also a reaction against the perceived corruption of the country’s Western-influenced ruling elites. Sharia was meant to change (or purify) the moral basis of politics among Muslims and raise standards of governance.
In that particular goal it has only partly succeeded. But its introduction has contributed to outbreaks of violent conflict between Muslims and Christians, especially evangelicals, in the middle belt of the country where the two communities rub up against each other, in cities like Kaduna and Jos. Thousands have been killed and injured in sectarian clashes in recent years.
Even worse, those Muslims who feel that sharia has achieved little have been joining more extreme cults and sects. The cults are made up of the same sort of disillusioned, unemployed and ill-educated young men who joined the insurgency in the Delta. Boko Haram (a local Hausa term that means “education is prohibited”) is the most famous of these groups; its followers were involved in a five-day gunfight with the police in July after some of them were arrested. The leader of Boko Haram, Sheikh Muhammad Yusuf, was captured and then shot after a siege of the group’s headquarters in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state.
Ismaila Zango, director of the Centre for Research and Documentation in Kano, says that there are “possibly many other sects” like Boko Haram, particularly in the deeper rural areas: “We only hear about them when they move to the towns.” These sects, Mr Zango explains, argue that the larger society is corrupt and polluted; their response is to “withdraw into themselves”. Thus Boko Haram is another expression of deep dissatisfaction with the way Nigeria is being run. Any conversation in Kano has to be conducted over the noisy chug of a diesel-fuelled generator; lack of electricity means that power cuts can last for more than five hours there, in the north’s biggest and most sophisticated city. “Even the people in the Gaza Strip have electricity,” exclaims Mr Zango.
Terrorism-watchers are also concerned that al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups from across north Africa may have attached themselves to some of these Islamic sects to mount attacks on the government. There is little real evidence that such links exist. But what is not in dispute is that groups like Boko Haram, or even al-Qaeda, will feed off the anger, bitterness and frustration of young men until something changes in the way Nigeria is governed. The average age of Nigerians is 19, so combustible young men are in bountiful supply. Unemployment, or underemployment, is the norm, so they have little to do.
The easy gains to be made from oil have led to a catastrophic over-reliance on the black stuff to provide the country’s wealth, while successive governments have left the rest of the economy to wither and decay. Even though Nigeria is such a big oil producer, for instance, its few refineries are so old and inefficient that it now has to import the bulk of its petrol and kerosene, a huge extra cost to business. Diesel fuel for all those generators is exorbitantly expensive and can easily nullify any profits. Kano’s textile industry, once the biggest in west Africa, has all but disappeared in the face of cheap Chinese imports.
The silent achiever
Given this catalogue of woe, a breakthrough like the amnesty in the Delta is welcome. Peace there would greatly improve Nigeria’s economic health and international standing. But the government will have to move fast to prove its good faith. If the promises of retraining, counselling, monthly stipends and the like are not fulfilled, the militants say they will simply continue their deadly campaign. Too often in the past the government’s words have not been translated into deeds.
AP
Yar’Adua, man of caution
Much rests on the enigmatic figure of the country’s president, Umaru Yar’Adua. Mr Yar’Adua can claim a good deal of credit for the Delta amnesty. He personally invited some of the former rebel leaders to Abuja to persuade them to give up, and he has spoken sympathetically of the plight of the Delta’s citizens. He has promised specific development projects—a new east-west highway, new schools—to try to improve the lot of those living in the region, thus meeting some of MEND’s longstanding demands. He has also created a Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs to try to co-ordinate state and federal spending there. Just possibly this new bureaucratic structure, with presidential impetus behind it, will be able to make a difference.
On corruption and governance too, Mr Yar’Adua has made all the right noises. He was the first Nigerian president to declare all his assets on coming to office: $5m, a paltry sum by Nigerian standards. He has given firm backing to state governors, like Mr Sylva, who want to clean up their financial systems. And the reform movement is rippling through other states, such as Rivers, once the most corrupt in the Delta, and Lagos, farther west. Babatunde Fashola, the governor of Lagos state, has begun to make a modest impression on his chaotic capital city. Remarkably, he has persuaded people to pay their taxes, for they can now see the improvements that their money has brought to the place. Accountability has been restored.
Mr Yar’Adua has also backed the reforming governor of Nigeria’s central bank, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who took office in June. He has taken tough action to restore confidence in the country’s banks after a big fall in the Nigerian stockmarket, caused mainly by the onset of the world recession, left several of them badly exposed. Mr Sanusi used his powers to dismiss the heads and executive directors of eight banks, just under half of the total of Nigerian-owned banks in the country. Some of those sacked face charges of fraud and share-price manipulation. In the new spirit of transparency, the central bank also named the biggest individual borrowers, who between them owed about $8 billion to the banks. Those publicly shamed included a former vice-president.
All this is shaking up the cosy, craven world of Nigerian business and politics a bit, and confounding the president’s critics. Mr Yar’Adua, a former state governor of Katsina in the far north of the country, was expected to be merely a cipher for the ruling clique around his predecessor, Mr Obasanjo, who handpicked Mr Yar’Adua to succeed him. He was unknown and uncharismatic. The most inspiring slogan that his team could come up with for the 2007 election campaign was “the silent achiever”. So unimpressive and invisible was he in his first year in office that he earned the nickname “Baba Go-slow”. But now, just over halfway through his four-year term, his political adviser, Polycarp Nwite, argues that the president is “careful and thorough, not slow”. Mr Yar’Adua’s supporters argue that this is exactly the approach that Nigeria needs to entrench reforms after decades of high-handed, capricious military rulers. The Delta amnesty, the argument goes, is a vindication of his serious and unfussy style.
Yet Mr Yar’Adua’s modest successes may count for nothing, yet again, if the political system itself is not reformed and the link restored between Nigeria’s politicians and those who are supposed to elect them. As well as the economic failures, the endemic corruption, the religious tensions and the venality of the political class, Nigeria’s record on democracy is appalling. Since 1999, each general election has been worse than the last. Fraud and rigging at the elections in 2007 were so pervasive that some seasoned foreign observers declared them the most awful they had seen anywhere in the world. But on this point, Mr Yar’Adua appears far less exercised.
Reform in jeopardy
Mr Obasanjo introduced a team of technocratic reformers during his second term of office; they made some gains combating corruption and sorting out the public debt. But these men and women were brutally purged as the 2007 elections loomed and needed to be rigged. Their reforms had got too close to the top of the political system.
The ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) ruthlessly deployed both money and violence to hang on to power at the state and federal level in 2007. In the process, it undid many of the gains of the reformers. Not all its candidates were corrupt or incompetent: Mr Sylva is from the PDP. But since Mr Yar’Adua was the principal beneficiary of all the rigging, his position is ticklish. How far is he willing to transplant the qualities of transparency and competitiveness that he is pushing in some areas of public life into the political and electoral system, whose venality has helped him?
The omens do not look good. A commission set up in the wake of the 2007 elections to examine electoral reform made several obvious recommendations. One was the creation of a truly independent electoral commission, with a chairman appointed not by the president but by a National Judicial Council and the Senate. In 2007 INEC was not only incompetent, but was also held to be complicit in fixing the election for the PDP. Yet the government has already rejected even this basic reform, as well as others. The PDP has also failed to hold proper primaries to make the party itself more democratic, something else that was promised after 2007.
Jibrin Ibrahim, a political scientist who sat on the commission, thinks that “the prospects of electoral reform look very bleak”. For many, the elections in 2011 are a last chance for Nigeria to get it right. The anger unleashed by the blatant cheating and thuggery last time sparked isolated incidents of violence, but no general conflagration. In 2011, argues one analyst, people will be readier to stand up for themselves and resist the PDP’s rigging and intimidation. There could be a popular revolt.
So the stakes are high for Mr Yar’Adua. He is, to a large degree, a creature of the system. Yet if he could follow his better instincts and reform the way elections are held, the quiet man of Nigerian politics may just secure himself a place as his country’s most successful leader.
Nov 12th 2009 | ABUJA, KANO AND YENAGOA
From The Economist print edition
As militants lay down their arms in the Niger Delta, the battle is on to tackle Nigeria’s other massive ills
AP
IN YENAGOA, the capital of Bayelsa state in the Niger Delta, giant billboards in the centre of town proclaim the dawn of a “walking, talking ideology”—Sylvanomics. Some new fad, perhaps, from the IMF or the World Bank? No; the picture of a beaming, youngish-looking man in a jumpsuit and bowler hat shows that this is all about the new state governor, Timipre Sylva.
The man in person enthusiastically explains more in the opulent surroundings of Gloryland, the governor’s mansion. Bayelsa is the first of Nigeria’s 36 states to invite in outside accountants and advisers for a thorough audit of its finances. They are now going over the state’s payroll and procurement policies, as well as the revenues from the federal government, which (as in all states) supply most of Bayelsa’s income. Vitally, the bean-counters will also audit the deeply obscure flows of money that go out again from the state coffers to the Local Government Authorities (LGAs). These are supposed to spend the money on the wretched people who live in deep poverty in the swamps and creeks of the Delta. If waste and corruption are cut out, they should benefit. “Transparency has a direct link to development,” says Mr Sylva.
document.write(''); 
Nigerians, particularly in other statehouses, are looking on with a mixture of awe and horror at Mr Sylva’s audacity. The statehouses are the biggest source of the corruption and mismanagement in Nigeria’s political system. Some of the governors in the oil-rich Delta command budgets bigger than entire west African countries, yet traditionally, after they have spent most of the money on their own helicopters, limousines and Glorylands, together with gangs of hired thugs at election time, there is little left over for anything fancy like schools or hospitals. Nuhu Ribadu, a former head of Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency, has said of this violent patronage system: “It’s not even corruption. It’s gangsterism. It’s organised crime.”
Not surprisingly then, Bayelsa’s audit is uncovering some impressive anomalies. Just down the road from Gloryland is the self-styled “Transparency House”, where Dimieari Von Kemedi, the head of the state’s new Due Process and e-Governance Bureau, explains what he has uncovered of the state’s “ghost” economic system. Take the payroll, for instance. A new biometric verification exercise, which fingerprints and photographs real employees and matches them against the paper payroll, has already shown up about 4,000 fake workers against 25,000 real ones. A particularly large number of false names were found in the finance department. At the local office of the federal Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), 70 people claimed to work there who didn’t. Another person employed ten members of his family, including his under-age children, in a local education authority. Such are the rewards of political office. In light of his discoveries, Mr Kemedi hopes to reduce the state salary bill by 20%. In 2008, after a preliminary audit, he was able to cut the procurement budget by 24%.
Alamy
As well as Sylvanomics, other unusually hopeful things are happening in the Delta. As a direct consequence of the corruption and waste now being exposed in Bayelsa and other Delta states, a violent insurgency has wracked the region since 2004. Dozens of heavily armed gangs started attacking the oil industry, sabotaging installations and pipelines and kidnapping foreign oil workers. The militants claimed to be acting on behalf of neglected, disfranchised local communities, whose lands had been polluted by the oil companies and who received almost no money from the rich state governors. The militants were joined by criminals interested merely in a quick return from kidnapping.
Yet over the past three months the militants have been giving up both themselves and their guns in unprecedented numbers. The federal government has promised them an unconditional pardon for past crimes, a small stipend to live on and the promise of retraining in order to “reintegrate” into society. A couple of similar amnesty programmes were tried before, and failed, but this one seems to be working. In Bayelsa alone, by the end of October, more than 6,000 former guerrillas had turned themselves in. In Rivers state, the heart of the insurgency, another 6,000 had given up. Across the whole of the Delta region, the total may exceed 15,000. No one knows for sure how many militants are still in the creeks, but Nigerian officials claim that these numbers mean the end of the insurgency. Their optimism seemed to be justified when the Movement for the Emancipation of the Delta (MEND), the main umbrella group for the insurgents, declared an indefinite ceasefire on October 25th.
Oil-rich, but enfeebled
It is rare to have any reasons to be cheerful about Nigeria, let alone two at once. This is a country where so much money is wasted, greasing the wheels of a corrupt political system, that despite its oil wealth about 70% of people still live on the equivalent of less than $1 a day. This, in turn, makes Nigeria much weaker and less stable than it should be. An American intelligence report from 2005 speculated that Nigeria might be on its way to becoming a failed state, a bigger version of Congo or Somalia.
Such forecasts are all the more worrying because, merely by virtue of its size and its natural resources, Nigeria is Africa’s giant. If the state failed, it would do so on a massive scale. It is the continent’s most populous country, with about 160m people. It vies with Angola as sub-Saharan Africa’s largest oil exporter, mainly to America, and is the eighth-biggest oil exporter in the world, with stated reserves of 38.5 billion barrels. It is Africa’s second-biggest economy, after South Africa, and the leader of the regional Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), accounting for roughly half of its GDP.
Nigeria, together with South Africa, has naturally taken the lead in African diplomacy and politics in recent years. The previous president of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, worked with South Africa to reform the African Union (AU) in 2000. Nigeria contributed most of the troops to the AU’s first peacekeeping force, in the Darfur region of Sudan, and has sent troops to Burundi and Sierra Leone. Last month it took up a temporary seat on the United Nations Security Council; in a reformed council, Nigerians think their country would be an obvious candidate for a permanent seat.
Yet for all this, while other African countries such as Ghana, Mali, Mozambique and Rwanda have been improving in the past decade, Nigeria has, in many ways, gone backwards. Most obviously, it has been beset by civil strife. At times in the Delta MEND’s insurgency was so intense that it shut in as much as a third of Nigeria’s oil production, pushing up the world price of crude and enfeebling the Nigerian government, which depends on oil for about 80% of its revenues. America worried most about this; it already gets 8.2% of its imported oil from Nigeria, and wants to increase this figure in order to diversify its sources of supply away from the Middle East.
In the mainly Muslim north of the country, the story—gross inequalities of wealth, abuse of power, insurgency—is much the same. After the first post-dictatorship democratic elections in 1999, 12 of the northern Muslim states adopted sharia law, putting an enormous strain on the unity of a Nigerian state that had previously been run only under the secular, civil law bequeathed to it by British colonial rulers. The imposition of sharia was partly inspired by the success of the Iranian revolution in 1979. But it was also a reaction against the perceived corruption of the country’s Western-influenced ruling elites. Sharia was meant to change (or purify) the moral basis of politics among Muslims and raise standards of governance.
In that particular goal it has only partly succeeded. But its introduction has contributed to outbreaks of violent conflict between Muslims and Christians, especially evangelicals, in the middle belt of the country where the two communities rub up against each other, in cities like Kaduna and Jos. Thousands have been killed and injured in sectarian clashes in recent years.
Even worse, those Muslims who feel that sharia has achieved little have been joining more extreme cults and sects. The cults are made up of the same sort of disillusioned, unemployed and ill-educated young men who joined the insurgency in the Delta. Boko Haram (a local Hausa term that means “education is prohibited”) is the most famous of these groups; its followers were involved in a five-day gunfight with the police in July after some of them were arrested. The leader of Boko Haram, Sheikh Muhammad Yusuf, was captured and then shot after a siege of the group’s headquarters in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state.
Ismaila Zango, director of the Centre for Research and Documentation in Kano, says that there are “possibly many other sects” like Boko Haram, particularly in the deeper rural areas: “We only hear about them when they move to the towns.” These sects, Mr Zango explains, argue that the larger society is corrupt and polluted; their response is to “withdraw into themselves”. Thus Boko Haram is another expression of deep dissatisfaction with the way Nigeria is being run. Any conversation in Kano has to be conducted over the noisy chug of a diesel-fuelled generator; lack of electricity means that power cuts can last for more than five hours there, in the north’s biggest and most sophisticated city. “Even the people in the Gaza Strip have electricity,” exclaims Mr Zango.
Terrorism-watchers are also concerned that al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups from across north Africa may have attached themselves to some of these Islamic sects to mount attacks on the government. There is little real evidence that such links exist. But what is not in dispute is that groups like Boko Haram, or even al-Qaeda, will feed off the anger, bitterness and frustration of young men until something changes in the way Nigeria is governed. The average age of Nigerians is 19, so combustible young men are in bountiful supply. Unemployment, or underemployment, is the norm, so they have little to do.
The easy gains to be made from oil have led to a catastrophic over-reliance on the black stuff to provide the country’s wealth, while successive governments have left the rest of the economy to wither and decay. Even though Nigeria is such a big oil producer, for instance, its few refineries are so old and inefficient that it now has to import the bulk of its petrol and kerosene, a huge extra cost to business. Diesel fuel for all those generators is exorbitantly expensive and can easily nullify any profits. Kano’s textile industry, once the biggest in west Africa, has all but disappeared in the face of cheap Chinese imports.
The silent achiever
Given this catalogue of woe, a breakthrough like the amnesty in the Delta is welcome. Peace there would greatly improve Nigeria’s economic health and international standing. But the government will have to move fast to prove its good faith. If the promises of retraining, counselling, monthly stipends and the like are not fulfilled, the militants say they will simply continue their deadly campaign. Too often in the past the government’s words have not been translated into deeds.
AP
Yar’Adua, man of cautionMuch rests on the enigmatic figure of the country’s president, Umaru Yar’Adua. Mr Yar’Adua can claim a good deal of credit for the Delta amnesty. He personally invited some of the former rebel leaders to Abuja to persuade them to give up, and he has spoken sympathetically of the plight of the Delta’s citizens. He has promised specific development projects—a new east-west highway, new schools—to try to improve the lot of those living in the region, thus meeting some of MEND’s longstanding demands. He has also created a Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs to try to co-ordinate state and federal spending there. Just possibly this new bureaucratic structure, with presidential impetus behind it, will be able to make a difference.
On corruption and governance too, Mr Yar’Adua has made all the right noises. He was the first Nigerian president to declare all his assets on coming to office: $5m, a paltry sum by Nigerian standards. He has given firm backing to state governors, like Mr Sylva, who want to clean up their financial systems. And the reform movement is rippling through other states, such as Rivers, once the most corrupt in the Delta, and Lagos, farther west. Babatunde Fashola, the governor of Lagos state, has begun to make a modest impression on his chaotic capital city. Remarkably, he has persuaded people to pay their taxes, for they can now see the improvements that their money has brought to the place. Accountability has been restored.
Mr Yar’Adua has also backed the reforming governor of Nigeria’s central bank, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who took office in June. He has taken tough action to restore confidence in the country’s banks after a big fall in the Nigerian stockmarket, caused mainly by the onset of the world recession, left several of them badly exposed. Mr Sanusi used his powers to dismiss the heads and executive directors of eight banks, just under half of the total of Nigerian-owned banks in the country. Some of those sacked face charges of fraud and share-price manipulation. In the new spirit of transparency, the central bank also named the biggest individual borrowers, who between them owed about $8 billion to the banks. Those publicly shamed included a former vice-president.
All this is shaking up the cosy, craven world of Nigerian business and politics a bit, and confounding the president’s critics. Mr Yar’Adua, a former state governor of Katsina in the far north of the country, was expected to be merely a cipher for the ruling clique around his predecessor, Mr Obasanjo, who handpicked Mr Yar’Adua to succeed him. He was unknown and uncharismatic. The most inspiring slogan that his team could come up with for the 2007 election campaign was “the silent achiever”. So unimpressive and invisible was he in his first year in office that he earned the nickname “Baba Go-slow”. But now, just over halfway through his four-year term, his political adviser, Polycarp Nwite, argues that the president is “careful and thorough, not slow”. Mr Yar’Adua’s supporters argue that this is exactly the approach that Nigeria needs to entrench reforms after decades of high-handed, capricious military rulers. The Delta amnesty, the argument goes, is a vindication of his serious and unfussy style.
Yet Mr Yar’Adua’s modest successes may count for nothing, yet again, if the political system itself is not reformed and the link restored between Nigeria’s politicians and those who are supposed to elect them. As well as the economic failures, the endemic corruption, the religious tensions and the venality of the political class, Nigeria’s record on democracy is appalling. Since 1999, each general election has been worse than the last. Fraud and rigging at the elections in 2007 were so pervasive that some seasoned foreign observers declared them the most awful they had seen anywhere in the world. But on this point, Mr Yar’Adua appears far less exercised.
Reform in jeopardy
Mr Obasanjo introduced a team of technocratic reformers during his second term of office; they made some gains combating corruption and sorting out the public debt. But these men and women were brutally purged as the 2007 elections loomed and needed to be rigged. Their reforms had got too close to the top of the political system.
The ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) ruthlessly deployed both money and violence to hang on to power at the state and federal level in 2007. In the process, it undid many of the gains of the reformers. Not all its candidates were corrupt or incompetent: Mr Sylva is from the PDP. But since Mr Yar’Adua was the principal beneficiary of all the rigging, his position is ticklish. How far is he willing to transplant the qualities of transparency and competitiveness that he is pushing in some areas of public life into the political and electoral system, whose venality has helped him?
The omens do not look good. A commission set up in the wake of the 2007 elections to examine electoral reform made several obvious recommendations. One was the creation of a truly independent electoral commission, with a chairman appointed not by the president but by a National Judicial Council and the Senate. In 2007 INEC was not only incompetent, but was also held to be complicit in fixing the election for the PDP. Yet the government has already rejected even this basic reform, as well as others. The PDP has also failed to hold proper primaries to make the party itself more democratic, something else that was promised after 2007.
Jibrin Ibrahim, a political scientist who sat on the commission, thinks that “the prospects of electoral reform look very bleak”. For many, the elections in 2011 are a last chance for Nigeria to get it right. The anger unleashed by the blatant cheating and thuggery last time sparked isolated incidents of violence, but no general conflagration. In 2011, argues one analyst, people will be readier to stand up for themselves and resist the PDP’s rigging and intimidation. There could be a popular revolt.
So the stakes are high for Mr Yar’Adua. He is, to a large degree, a creature of the system. Yet if he could follow his better instincts and reform the way elections are held, the quiet man of Nigerian politics may just secure himself a place as his country’s most successful leader.