Nigeria's Rigged Democracy

Jean Herskovits

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007

Summary:  Nigeria's elections last April were among the most seriously flawed in the country's history, thanks largely to the manipulations of the U.S.-backed ruling party. With Nigerians increasingly clamoring for accountability, Washington's continuing support could generate more unrest -- and could pose a risk both to oil supplies coming out of Nigeria and to the stability of West Africa.

Jean Herskovits is Research Professor of History at the State University of New York, Purchase.

The United States, recognizing Nigeria's potential and importance on the African continent, has long cultivated largely cordial relations with the Nigerian government. Since its independence in 1960, Nigeria has participated in virtually every one of the United Nations' peacekeeping missions. Even in the days of its worst relations with the United States, when General Abacha was head of state, in the 1990s, Nigeria was taking on regional problems, thus allowing the U.S. government to sidestep what many saw as its historic responsibility to help.

Under Obasanjo, Nigeria continued to play that role. The president intervened to reverse military takeovers in tiny states such as Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe. He made efforts, although he achieved little headway, with Zimbabwe and Sudan. He provided a refuge for Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, buying time for war-weary Liberia to prepare for elections and staving off a new conflict that might have required U.S. intervention. He played a key role in helping to transform the ineffectual Organization of African Unity into the more promising African Union.

Because of Washington's ongoing praise for these efforts and for Obasanjo's macroeconomic reforms, Nigerians once believed that Washington could influence Obasanjo in ways they could not. But when they looked for signs that Washington would try to affect Obasanjo's political agenda, they saw only unquestioning approval. In 2003, the Bush administration ignored reports from the European Union, Human Rights Watch, the International Republican Institute, and Nigerian civil-society groups that said the elections fell well below international standards. President George W. Bush's visit to Abuja just weeks after Obasanjo's inauguration reinforced Nigerians' view that their president had unwavering U.S. support -- and that when it comes to African elections, Washington applies a double standard. In the lead-up to the elections this year, the U.S. embassy in Abuja issued a few warnings against election fraud, but the White House and the State Department were mostly silent. It was only after the voting that they issued critical statements.

In the past, Washington has promoted democracy in Nigeria only as far as doing so has served its immediate purposes. Nigeria's stability has mattered to the United States partly because the country is the key to stability in West Africa but mostly because multiplying political uncertainties in the Middle East make Nigeria's oil increasingly important to Washington. The most obvious nonhuman casualty of Nigeria's electoral crisis could be crude oil supplies. Production declined by over 20 percent last year because of violence in the Niger Delta. And as the flurry of postelection kidnappings suggests, there is no reason to think that the militants will stop their attacks, especially not if they see more of the same coming from a new government with questionable legitimacy.

If only to protect its own interests, the U.S. government needs to state more clearly that what transpired during the April elections violated democratic standards, and it should publicly place blame where it belongs. Washington must make clear that it does not approve of strong-arm practices such as crackdowns on protesters by security agencies. If Washington wants to see real democracy in Nigeria, it must urge the creation of strong, alternative parties. Yar'Adua's initial statements about bringing opponents into a government of national unity sounded like an offer to draw them into PDP's one-party rule. U.S. officials should instead press for laws that create electoral commissions independent of the executive branch and simplify voter registration. And assuming that a Yar'Adua government settles in, the United States must resist the temptation to use Obasanjo as a conduit for negotiations and deal directly with the new president. Given Yar'Adua's lack of international experience and Obasanjo's clear intention to continue to control policy, this problem will surely arise.

For its part, the new Nigerian government will have to move quickly and creatively to prevent violence in the Niger Delta from escalating further. Washington should press for it to develop a program that can quickly and effectively distribute resources at the local level, where they are needed the most. The U.S. government is hoping that Nigeria's oil production will increase beyond current capacity (the United States now gets 1.1 million barrels from Nigeria every day). Yet Washington must make clear that it opposes the use of military action to ensure that flow. A military solution has not worked in the Niger Delta in the past, and there is no reason to think it would work in the future.

Washington is now preoccupied by global terrorism. And Nigeria, with a Muslim population in the tens of millions, many of them poor, is sometimes seen as a potential base for Islamic extremists. No evidence of organized terrorist activity has surfaced, and no one is more eager to prevent radicalism than Nigeria's own Muslim leaders. Thus, rather than turn to military solutions -- Nigeria has already signed on to the U.S.-driven Trans-Saharan Counterterrorism Initiative -- Washington should encourage the new Nigerian government to formulate policies that use the country's sizable resources to alleviate Nigerians' suffering, taking special care of the north, some parts of which are even poorer than the Niger Delta. In this area especially, Washington needs to listen to its knowledgeable foreign service and intelligence professionals; it has often not done so in the past.

Many Nigerians say that in the wake of the discredited elections, nothing is off the table. Although coups are said to be out of fashion in much of Africa, in Nigeria they have repeatedly been used against a misbehaving political class. Such military intervention would not, of course, be the preference of most Nigerians -- or of the U.S. government. But the flagrantly rigged elections were not either, and in the event of a coup carried out by leaders committed to returning the country to democracy within months, Western governments should pause before imposing sanctions. The notion that a coup could lead to democracy may seem counterintuitive, but if nothing is done to redress the 2007 electoral travesty, many Nigerians would welcome a short-lived military regime whose goal was to arrange legitimate elections. Nigerians have again shown their commitment to democracy, and nothing should be done by people far away to further dim their prospects for eventually achieving it, however they can.

Clearly, the best hope for the country's future lies with Nigerians themselves. Millions waited patiently at polling stations in April, despite danger and previous disillusionment, to try to exercise their democratic rights. If Yar'Adua proves to be a "servant-leader," not a ruler, as he claims he wants to be, Nigerians can finally begin the transition to a stable and just democracy that should have started eight years ago. And Nigeria will then stand a chance of becoming the model for Africa that it should be.