Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

The professor in charge - but for how long?

This morning's report that President Yar'Adua has returned to Nigeria might negate the importance of this analysis of Vice President Jonathan from a few days ago. But who knows?

Ailing Nigerian leader returns home

Ailing President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua has returned home to Nigeria, though it was not immediately clear whether he was well enough to resume duties.,,

I can only second Adam Nossiter's theme in this New York Times profile. The situation in Nigeria is so unsettled that people there hope that an uncharismatic academic will become a political star. The fate of the republic probably depends on how well Goodluck Jonathan meets those expectations.

An Accidental Leader Stirs Hopes in Nigeria

The circumstances of Acting President Goodluck Jonathan’s accession to power are so odd that even he looks bewildered as he takes a self-effacing bow in this boiling, fractious nation.

He has not been elected. He has not exactly been appointed. He did not seize power in a coup, unlike many of his predecessors. And as a mild-mannered academic in a black fedora, he seems an unlikely fit in Nigeria’s tough-guy environment…

Is this the man who can pacify a country with simultaneous on-again-off-again rebellions in the north and south, startling disparities in wealth, a shaky Constitution holding together the biggest population in Africa and 36 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, but electricity output feebler than Puerto Rico’s?

That Mr. Jonathan, 52, a biologist with a doctorate in zoology and a former environmental official, is eliciting unusual hopes in Nigeria only a week into his tenure is testimony as much to the scale of the country’s neglected needs as to his relatively untainted biography...

“He’s not obsessed with power,” said Samuel Amadi, director of policy at the Good Governance Group, an activist lobby here. “He doesn’t have the usual swagger of Nigerian politicians.”…

SOME of his principal aides come from outside the traditional circles of wealth and power here, like Oronto Douglas, a leading environmentalist and former lawyer for Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Niger Delta activist whose execution by the military government in 1995 led to international protests and diplomatic isolation.

Early gestures also suggest a break with Mr. Yar’Adua’s hobbled presidency. Mr. Jonathan quickly demoted Attorney General Michael Aondoakaa, an official closely associated with backsliding on the president’s good-government promises. It was a “most important symbolic action,” Mr. Amadi said.

In his inaugural speech, Mr. Jonathan promised that “the war against corruption will be prosecuted more robustly,” and his aides suggested that the country’s top anticorruption official, Nuhu Ribadu, who was considered robust and effective until he was forced out by Mr. Aondoakaa and others, would be brought back…

Yet Mr. Jonathan’s biography, as described by aides and numerous accounts in the Nigerian press, raises questions about whether he will have the requisite toughness to negotiate the minefield that is political life here: 36 powerful state governors, some controlling immense oil-fueled budgets; a large military establishment that has spent much of Nigeria’s 50 years of independence meddling in politics; and factions of northern politicians resentful that one of their own, Mr. Yar’Adua, has been prematurely sidelined before the 2011 elections in favor of a southerner…