Africa's Star? New Hope for Nigeria

Benedicte Kurzen / VII Network
The incumbent A campaign event for Goodluck Jonathan

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That Old Curse Again
Quite how badly Nigeria's rulers blew the country's first half-century of freedom is evident in the northern city of Kano. A dusty crossroads on the trans-Sahara trade route and the capital of the Hausa people, Kano is the oldest city in West Africa. Just inside the old city walls are the Kofa dye pits, where for hundreds of years indigo, ash and urine have been mixed in 6-m-deep trenches in which great sacks of cloth are colored blue. History lives on in Kano's medieval levels of poverty too. Most Hausas scrape by on a dollar a day or less, and Hausa women, according to a March report by UNESCO, are the least educated on earth: 97% of those ages 17 to 22 have completed less than two years in school.

All three leading presidential candidates visited Kano in March and promised wholesale change. When the ruling President Goodluck Jonathan's caravan rolled into town, the city was hung with banners featuring his slogan, TRANSFORM NIGERIA. Nuhu Ribadu of the opposition Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) told a students' meeting the election was a chance to "make this a country we can be proud of." Muhammadu Buhari, who comes from the north and attracted the biggest crowd, actually named his party the Congress for Positive Change.

All promising. And indeed, if bad leadership was the source of all Nigeria's problems, a good leader might solve them. But there are also systemic reasons for Nigeria's rot. Economists use the term resource curse to describe the paradox by which countries blessed by a natural endowment are often less stable, less democratic and less developed than those without one. Nigeria is a prime example. Whereas governments are normally directly accountable to their people through elections and tax, in Nigeria the curse shatters those links. Oil accounts for nearly all exports by value and 80% to 85% of government revenue and the wealth it brings in is split among powerful politicians and officials.

The effect is to upend the normal dynamics of democracy. The oil industry has replaced the people as the government's constituency. The state exists to serve the industry, and oil revenues pay for the state's existence. The conventional popular demands of government service delivery, provision of infrastructure, business assistance, official competence go unheard or ignored. Politics is reduced to commerce, and political parties to competing businesses.

This subversive pattern is replicated throughout the state. Nigeria's police, army and customs services run smuggling rings, steal oil from pipelines and send cocaine from South America on to Europe. State sellers of products and services like electricity or petrol have their own rackets, squeezing supply and causing blackouts so they can hike prices or sell more generators. Traffic cops at roadblocks demand tithes from drivers, bureaucrats require bribes to process paperwork, teachers ask for gifts to turn up at school. And since the focus is on personal enrichment, not service delivery, incompetence reigns.

Tearing down such entrenched corruption would require a social revolution. And it's not clear that any of the presidential candidates are up to the job. Why? Because all are, to some degree, part of the system. Since 1999, Nigeria has been led by one party the People's Democratic Party (PDP) and, mostly, one man, Olusegun Obasanjo, 74, who led a military junta from 1976 to '79, then ruled as elected President from 1999 to 2007. Despite his reputation for clean dealing, Nigerians refused to change the constitution to give him a third term. So Obasanjo appointed the sickly Umaru Yar'Adua as his proxy, and on Yar'Adua's death in 2010, Jonathan, his Vice President, inherited the same role. Always in Obasanjo's shadow, Jonathan's first year has been unimpressive.

Ribadu is a more credible champion of change. He is 50, looks 30 and as head of the EFCC from 2003 to 2007 secured convictions against nearly 300 political figures. But Ribadu is compromised too. The ACN's party leader is Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos who is repeatedly accused of corruption. Exasperated, millions of Nigerians are turning to Buhari, 68. He may be the least progressive of the candidates the central selling point of his campaign is that he was military dictator, from 1983 to '85 but a firm hand is precisely what some Nigerians think the country needs. "Forget about commanding respect," says Ekundayo. "Buhari commands fear."