₦airaland Forum

(CNN)— The victory of a 72-year-old former
general, Muhammadu Buhari, in the Nigerian
elections represents a moment of maturity in
West African politics. Buhari, who some 30
years ago was Nigeria's harsh military leader,
could of course prove to be a disaster; so
many self-described reformers have been.
swath


But the peaceful transition of power from
President Goodluck Jonathan to President
Buhari is the first of its kind in history. And
the fact that the winner ran on an anti-
corruption platform suggests that ordinary
Nigerians have finally had enough of the
venality of their elites. For too long, Nigeria's
poor have been victims of their country's
enormous wealth. The cancer of corruption
has to be cut out.


I visited Nigeria in January and found a
country under siege. Abuja, the capital city, is
where the rich have always imagined
themselves making their last stand. Soldiers
guard the treacherous motorways; houses are
compounds covered in barbed wire. It's a
place where poor children rise at dawn to sift
through the trash cans for food and black
magic is practiced by the side of the road at
dusk.


Yet thanks to Nigeria's oil, there is also
tremendous wealth in Abuja. And when you
don't really make money but simply take it
from the soil and sell it, a crude kind of crony
capitalism develops in which who you know is
far more important than what you know.
Graft trickles down through the system;
through family, through patronage and
through shady deals done with foreign
businessmen at the 24-hour party palace at
the Abuja Hilton Hotel. The richest buy off
the anger of the poorest, and vast swaths of
society become complicit in the crime.
For a while, that system brought some
stability to the government of Jonathan. But
stability was contingent upon oil remaining
at $110 a barrel, and in recent months the
price has collapsed to below $50 a barrel.
Lacking funds, the government could no
longer promise jobs to voters and had to
start thinking creatively about serious
economic development.


One was the massive privatization of the
power system, a sensible idea that promised
to take energy provision out of the hands of
a broken state and give it to businessmen to
run. The problem is that costly investment
and redevelopment didn't come soon enough:
Millions were left without power and the
government's few bold attempts at reform
smacked of betrayal.


The problem of corruption went hand-in-glove
with the rise of terrorism. Nigeria is not a
natural, comfortable nation state; it's
composed of many ethnicities and two major
competing religions. The south is dominated
by Christians like Jonathan, the north by
Muslims like Buhari. And the north has
witnessed a brutal, bloody terrorist
insurgency led by Boko Haram, which
translates as "Western education is
forbidden."


Westerners might assume that Boko Haram's
major target is the Christian south but, in
fact, its war is as much against
nonfundamentalist Muslims as it is non-
Muslims, and its attacks have generally been
focused on Islamic population centers.
Failure to deal with this has not entirely been
due to Boko Haram's strategic ingenuity.
Previous administrations have simply been
too dysfunctional to fight a war on terror. In
2010, for instance, the government awarded
a $470 million contract to provide security in
Abuja. Few of the promised cameras were
installed, yet the money was still paid in full.
And soldiers sent to the front report being
poorly equipped.


The government is thought to have resorted
to trying to purchase arms on the
international black market, according to news
reports -- although this is the kind of story
that is hard to verify due to bans on granting
visas to foreign journalists (I was in Nigeria
as a consultant on a business visa). What is
directly observable is that while the
government proved capable of providing
security in some areas, in others it utterly
failed. And the Jonathan government might
have benefited from the Boko Haram terrorist
emergency continuing in Muslim centers, for
the Muslims were far more likely to vote for
Buhari.


For Buhari to win, he had to draw large
numbers of votes in Christian areas -- and
there, again, a Western prejudice is
challenged. The victory of a Muslim
candidate in Nigeria does not represent the
victory of Islamism, as we have so often been
told by those skeptical of the ability of the
Muslim world to govern itself.


On the contrary, Buhari is associated with an
earlier period in Nigerian history when the
army was relatively well paid and respected.
He ran the country in the early 1980s along
dictatorial lines, for sure. But he also ran a
War Against Indiscipline when in power in
which civil servants who were late to work
were ordered to do frog jumps, drug dealers
were publicly executed, and some 474
politicians and business were arrested on
charges of corruption. Buhari was removed in
a coup, and he left office with the rare
distinction of not having made very much
money from it.


Now he has won the presidency promising to
tackle those intertwined problems of Boko
Haram and corruption. Get the army
functioning properly again, Nigerians hope,
and it will be able to drive back the
fundamentalists.


Buhari has his critics, many of whom charge
him with misrepresenting his CV and being a
closet authoritarian. But they cannot deny
that he has won this historic victory because
he has touched a chord with a people
exhausted by years of misrule. You can only
bribe the voters for so long before the
squalor becomes too much to bear.


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http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/01/opinions/stanley-nigeria-election-results/

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So true.

Interesting write-up.

The smoke is going to clear soon, but still good riddance to inept and utterly corrupt GEJ. Personally, I'm not expecting anything from the old man cos it's still going to be the same recycled, mixed with new breeds, of intellectual frauds who would be occupying different positions - within the same structurally deformed space.

After looking at the names touted as ministers yesterday - I had a good laugh. Just the same vacuous noisemakers, who have no blueprint on how to solve the unique problems of that country - apart from unfitting experiments they'll most likely copy and paste from other climes, to further complicate things.

Anyway, the man can write his name in gold if he can do following:

- Modernise the naija military, and provide security.
- Reduce corruption and probe GEJ's government.
- Restructure the country by using APC's majority in the house/senate.
- Get someone decent to manage the country's economy.
- And maybe refineries and power sector.

SirShymexx:
Interesting write-up.

The smoke is going to clear soon, but still good riddance to inept and utterly corrupt GEJ. Personally, I'm not expecting anything from the old man cos it's still going to be the same recycled, mixed with new breeds, of intellectual frauds who would be occupying different positions - within the same structurally deformed space.

After looking at the names touted as ministers yesterday - I had a good laugh. Just the same vacuous noisemakers, who have no blueprint on how to solve the unique problems of that country - apart from unfitting experiments they'll most likely copy and paste from other climes, to further complicate things.

Anyway, the man can write his name in gold if he can do following:

- Modernise the naija military, and provide security.
- Reduce corruption and probe GEJ's government.
- Restructure the country by using APC's majority in the house/senate.
- Get someone decent to manage the country's economy.
- And maybe refineries and power sector.

Good one.