Nigeria’s recent
presidential elections saw significant fraud and widespread violence.
Despite this, the recent elections have been widely hailed as
Nigeria’s first real “free and fair” elections. While the
National Assembly elections did show lower levels of fraud, the
widespread fraud in the presidential contest and the deadly clashes
that followed have shown once again that Africa’s most populous
nation is wracked by intense social and economic conflicts.
The elections,
which took place in stages throughout April and early May, saw the
sitting president, Goodluck Jonathan, win a seemingly decisive
victory with 58 percent of the vote. Jonathan’s candidacy was
considered controversial both inside and outside his own party, the
Peoples Democratic Party, because of his geographic origins. Jonathan
hails from the South of the country; Nigerian presidents typically
come from the North.
Despite winning
millions of votes in the North, the election split clearly along
North-South lines, with Jonathan winning essentially all the southern
states, and his principal opponent, former military leader Muhammadu
Buhari, winning the northern states with 35 percent of the overall
vote. Buhari has alleged that voting machines were rigged and across
the country there were widespread irregularities, including fake
ballots and stolen ballot boxes.
After the close of
the polls in the presidential race, Buhari supporters took to the
streets. All across the North, bombings, burnings and looting were
widespread. Hundreds were killed and wounded in several days of
violence, while tens of thousands were displaced. A curfew and
heavy-handed military intervention brought the violence mostly to an
end, although occasional attacks have continued. President Jonathan
has declared his intention to create an “all-inclusive”
government taking sectional and other grievances into account. Buhari
has taken his claims to court in an attempt to challenge the election
results.
Extreme poverty
widespread
Understanding the
underlying factors to Nigeria’s turbulent elections requires going
beyond the typical “Muslim North versus Christian South”
narrative that is continually hammered home in the U.S. media.
Nigeria, like essentially all African nations, was a country created
with arbitrary boundaries based on colonial divisions. This has
created a complex of ethnic and religious divides underpinned by an
uneven distribution of the benefits from the nation’s massive oil
wealth.
On a national
scale, poverty is extreme in Nigeria. According to the World Bank, 92
percent of the population lives on less than two dollars per day.
Life expectancy stands at 48 years, and less than half of the
population has access to clean water. It is estimated that 80 percent
of the oil wealth flows into the hands of roughly 1
percent of the population.
There is also a
regional dimension to wealth disparities. In a relative sense, the
South has seen far more benefits than the North. Negative social and
economic indicators find their greatest concentration in the northern
states.
Nigeria’s ruling
class, while including capitalist owners of businesses, is
significantly made up (with some overlap) of technocrats who use
their government positions to siphon off large portions of the
country’s massive oil wealth to enrich themselves and operate
patronage networks. This de facto status quo has given the
northern portion of this tiny elite control over the presidency and
other governmental roles as a counterbalance to the concentration of
oil wealth and business and financial centers in the South—providing
geographic balance of a sort to ruling-class control of the national
wealth.
In the North,
politicians often attempt to exacerbate religious and ethnic tensions
to advance their own prospects. This gives any number of essentially
economic conflicts, such as those between nomads and farmers, a
strongly religious character. This problem is further inflamed by the
classifying of citizens as either indigenes or settlers. “Settlers”
are banned from holding certain government posts, denying them any
governmental levers of power.
Additionally, there are hard-line
Islamic groups seeking to establish a strict version of Sharia law
that engage in violent attacks on Christians and other Muslims.
Thus, complex economic conflicts and political marginalization are
overlaid by religious and ethnic differences.
The North-South
divide
Buhari’s
candidacy struck at the central theme of the North-South divide,
disparity in levels of development, promising to end this traditional
marginalization. The risings after Jonathan emerged victorious were
expressions of frustration at what was perceived as a continued
marginalization of the northern areas of the country. The support of
some important northern elites for Jonathan’s campaign only served to
reinforce a sense of political impotence on the part of impoverished
northerners.
As long as the
political process in Nigeria is simply a competition between which
collection of elites will take pride of place in the state apparatus,
“democratic” elections mean little. It is quite clear that until
the tiny clique of capitalist exploiters and corrupt politicians is
removed from the scene, economic and social progress for the popular
classes in Nigeria will remain an elusive concept.
