Teaching Comparative

Nigerian elections or crisis?

An "analysis" by Lydia Polgreen from the New York Times, Nigeria Frets Over How to Give Voters a Real Say, is a good lead in to the elections there.

Now that your students have studied about Nigeria, they ought to be able to critique Polgreen's analysis.

"The purple banner across the normally staid front page of The Guardian, a national daily newspaper here... [read] 'The election has brought Nigeria to the crossroads of an emergency... the options available to save the country from impending danger are now very few indeed. The usual, easy route is to advocate putting up with the charade, not rocking the boat. But Nigeria today is beyond such simplistic postulation.'

"The most likely danger is not the obvious -- the long-feared collapse of this vibrant nation of 250 ethnic groups into tribal and religious warfare.

"Indeed, eight years into its young democracy, Nigeria is in many ways a better nation than it was when President Olusegun Obasanjo took office in 1999. Some forms of corruption have been curbed. The national debt has been paid off, and the economy is growing. Nigeria’s role as a regional peace builder has also grown, and as The Guardian editorial demonstrates, it has a robust free press and a blossoming civic society.

"But that has not meant improvements in the way its leaders are chosen, nor in the way much of the country is run. The growing sentiment among international and local election observers is that electoral abuses are worse than ever...

"Nigeria has a reputation for going right to the edge of disaster and then suddenly pulling back. This tendency has kept the country from absolute crisis, with at least one exception — the Biafran civil war in the 1960s, which killed one million people...

"But Nigerians are beginning to wonder whether the national instinct for self-preservation that has bound them to their political elite, a bargain that has staved off disaster but also kept the majority in poverty, has been worthwhile, said Nnamdi K. Obasi, senior analyst at the International Crisis Group. 'All these masses of young, unemployed men we have in our streets, they have no stake in the current system,' he said. 'They have no hope, no future. They are not bound by the same sense of shared destiny of years past.'...

"In his essay the Trouble with Nigeria, written a generation ago, the novelist Chinua Achebe clearly says where the trouble lies: 'The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.'

"The lack of transparent elections is the reason, analysts say, that governance has been such a problem in Nigeria. 'The voters have almost no role at all in the system,' Mr. Nsirimovu, [a human rights advocate in the Niger Delta region], said. 'So how can we have good leaders?'

---

posted by Ken Wedding @ 9:24 AM