Photo Credit: Flickr user World Economic Forum
On February 9, Nigeria’s presidential crisis reached its denouement, at least for now, when the National Assembly voted to install Vice President Goodluck Jonathan as acting president. Nigeria has effectively lacked a president since November, when President Umaru Yar’Adua left to seek medical treatment in Saudi Arabia. Yar’ Adua’s departure spurred a heated debate over the constitutional provisions regulating the matter, with some arguing that Yar’Adua violated the constitution by failing to hand his power over to the vice president, others (including the majority of the cabinet) countering that the president enjoyed a legal right to carry out his presidential duties abroad, and increasing numbers of Nigerians clamoring for his resignation. In the face of increasing unrest, with citizens taking to the streets with calls of “Umaru Where Are You” and rumors circulating of impending coup attempts, the National Assembly voted to empower Jonathan in the name of “peace, order and good government.” Unfortunately, it is unlikely that this ruling will achieve a lasting resolution of the matter, and the current turmoil is not an aberration, but rather a symptom of Nigeria’s unresolved institutional issues.
For one thing, informal understandings play a key role in the stability of the country’s democracy. In this case, contentious ethno-religious issues surrounding the presidency could be exacerbated as the ascendancy of Jonathan, a southern Christian, to the presidency in place of Yar’Adua, a northern Muslim, could throw a wrench in the tension-reducing system of alteration of power between members of the two faiths. In addition to the presidency, other institutions remain either frail or politically compromised, limiting the country’s ability to follow good governance practices. Political parties are feeble, with competitive politics rendered extremely difficult by the increasing dominance of the ruling People’s Democratic Party, which has been ensured through the manipulation of the state machinery, especially in the fraudulent 2007 elections. In a related vein, the country’s electoral institutions remain underdeveloped; the primary institution in charge of overseeing elections, the Independent Electoral Commission, has been accused of being a tool of the executive branch and implicated in several scandals. Promised electoral reforms geared toward addressing these issues have yet to arrive. In addition, the country’s new anticorruption institutions, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission, have handed down few convictions, especially in cases implicating politicians with links to Yar’Adua. Finally, the government security apparatus continues to commit rampant abuses with impunity despite increased civilian control over the security sector.
The dilapidated nature of these institutions is inextricably linked to Nigeria’s political and social problems. Institutional ineffectiveness has paralyzed Nigeria’s response to serious internal challenges, most notably the presence of ethnic and religious tension between Muslims and Christians, which has claimed 13,500 lives since 1999, and the precarious peace in the Niger Delta, where the conflict over oil continues to simmer. Due to the institutional failure to address the root causes of these problems, they have persisted, with positive steps made towards resolution consistently impossible to maintain. Moreover, in some cases, the state’s incapacity to effectively provide basic services, an equitable distribution of resources, and the establishment of the rule of law directly contributed to the creation of the problems in the first place. It becomes a vicious circle: by fueling the most
severe crises, institutional weaknesses has stymied efforts to address
baseline governance concerns including electoral reform and corruption.
The eruption of violence in the months since Yar’Adua’s departure serves as an extreme example of the link between institutional failure-in this case the failure of the executive institution- and the country’s internal struggles. In the North, sectarian strife claimed more lives on January 19, when armed men, believed to be Christian, attacked the predominantly Muslim population of Kuru Karama, killing 150. The violence then spread to neighboring communities, where additional attacks brought the death toll up to at least 364.While this outbreak of violence was not the direct result of Yar'Adua's absence, the ethno-religious facet of presidential crisis, namely the alteration of power issue, has undoubtedly heightened tensions between the two groups during this time. The violence also illustrates that Muslim-Christian friction could stand to worsen if Yar'Adua cedes the rest of his term to a Christian. Following the attacks, Jonathan promised to immediately investigate the violence and bring the perpetrators to justice, although the halting pace of past investigations raises doubt over the probability of this taking place. This conflict was soon followed by an end to the truce in the Niger Delta. On January 30, Jomo Gbomo, declaring himself the spokesperson for a militant group known as the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), announced the end of the ceasefire in the region, citing a belief that the government would never empower the region’s inhabitants with control over its hydrocarbon resources. The demise of the ceasefire was partly the result of the stalling of the amnesty program on account of Yar’ Adua’s absence.
Until Nigeria’s struggling institutions are empowered with increased capacity and find mechanisms to decrease the perceived zero-sum nature of politics, severe governance deficits will remain. Although no one would expect a country a country with such a short history of elected rule to feature pristine institutions, the lack of progress is disheartening, and a lack of political will has been a contributing factor. Regardless of the cause, the recent saga has crystallized the ongoing challenges, and hopefully will spur the country’s political class to do something about it.
