Modeled after the U.S. presidency, the office of the president of Nigeria is easily the most powerful position in the land. The president is both the chief of state and the head of government. The authority of the nation’s chief executive expanded greatly during the patrimonial regimes of General Ibrahim Babangida and General Sani Abacha. Indeed, not only was power concentrated in the hands of these despots, its exercise was also marked by massive corruption, brazen nepotism, and sustained brutality. Against this background, it was perhaps natural that the presidential election of February 27, 1999, would excite keen interest among the Nigerian populace, elite groups, ethnoregional blocs, and the international community. This article highlights some of the ethnoregional forces and elite interests that influenced the election and examines their possible implications for the sustenance of democracy and good governance in Nigeria.

With the declaration of former military ruler, General Olusegun Obasanjo, as the president-elect, the long process of choosing Nigeria’s next civilian leadership finally brought to an end what had been a veritable “transition without end.” Although the elections have been successfully concluded, serious doubts remain concerning the survival and stability of the incoming civil order. It is one thing to hold elections, but establishing an enduring democratic order is a totally different and more challenging task.

On at least two grounds, the ongoing transition differed from earlier attempts. First, unlike General Ibrahim Babangida’s model of “guided transition”—in which the government formed the two political parties, wrote their manifestos, provided their funding, and appointed their officials—the current political parties were formed entirely by the political elite through the coalescence and structuring of the different political tendencies that survived General Sani Abacha’s reign of terror.

The Nigerian military has been engaged in a program of transition to democratic rule since 1985. The country’s military rulers developed “transition politics” into a strategy of transitions without end, a ruse to prevent democratization. Hopefully, Nigeria is now at the crossroads. One of the most important issues posed in the transition has been the ethnoregional one: Would entrenched ethnoregional forces allow political power to shift from the North to the South? It is not a new question in Nigerian transition politics.

Two broad issues surface when ethnoregional domination emerges as a political issue in Nigeria: control of political power and its instruments, such as the armed forces and the judiciary; and control of economic power and resources.

At the Azikiwe memorial conference held at Lincoln University near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in late April 1998, a longstanding observer of Nigerian politics pointedly informed the Nigerian ambassador to the United States that the so-called Federal Republic of Nigeria was in fact neither federal nor a republic. The remark was met with rowdy applause from the migrant/exile audience. It was certainly accurate at the time, but not even the audience could know for how much longer. While it is perhaps still premature to celebrate, by virtue of the recent elections Nigeria is once again at least nominally a republic in the Latin sense—res publica —a thing of the people. As for Nigerian federalism, Ali Mazrui’s characterization seems accurate: It is “alive, but not well,” and the recent elections do not augur well for its recovery.

To all appearances, the transition program of General Abdusalam Abubakar has, from the beginning, been torn between two contradictory policy and strategic choices. The first is whether to appease the prodemocracy and human rights groups by accepting the convocation of a sovereign national conference, with all this entails, including a postponement of the disengagement date. The second is whether to ignore these groups, and organize a rapid, short, and sharp transition program, even if fundamental issues, such as the “National Question,” and restructuring the federation and the military, are sidetracked. By choosing the latter, the Abubakar junta demonstrated first that it would undertake the transition mainly on its own terms and with its own ideas.

This article is based on the premise that the aid establishment views Africa as probably the world’s last backwater. Simply put, bureaucrats, politicians, and other policymakers in the western world are rather content with Africa’s present status, an attitude that not only accords with their career aspirations, but also spawns a certain amount of sybaritic pleasure about the inclement condition of the continent. It is against this background that this article examines the motives and aspirations of the international observers in the Nigerian electoral process, focusing on the attitudes and the impact of the observers in the 1998 local government elections.

International electoral observation and monitoring are an integral part of the global dimensions of democratization. Many writers have averred that one major reason for the upswing in Africa’s quest to democratize is the cessation of the power play between Moscow and Washington.

In many respects, the least important part of the 1999 elections were the elections themselves. From the beginning of General Abdusalam Abubakar’s transition program in mid-1998, most Nigerians who were not part of the wealthy “political class” of elites—which is to say, most Nigerians— adopted their usual politically savvy perspective of siddon look (sit and look). They waited with cautious optimism to see what sort of new arrangement the military would allow the civilian politicians to struggle over, and what in turn the civilians would offer the public. No one had any illusions that anything but high-stakes bargaining within the military and the political class would determine the structures of power in the civilian government. Elections would influence this process to the extent that the crowd influences a soccer match.

The end of the cold war has made democratization, and its barest essential component elections, imperative for all nondemocratic forms of government. This is to be expected, given the dismal failure of the socialist alternative even in the first socialist country, the former Soviet Union. The United States, which is not only the foremost democracy in the world but also the only superpower, has been in the vanguard of democracy salesmanship. Africa, the continent with the least democratic space, has not been left out, as witnessed by President Bill Clinton’s unprecedented tour of the continent in March 1998.

Understandably, Nigeria, arguably the most important country in Africa, was left out of the tour, since it was then under the obnoxious, undemocratic, and oppressive military regime of the late General Sani Abacha.

In only four years, Nigeria has experienced two successive transition-to-civil-rule programs. The first, implemented with shocking inconsistency by the regime of General Sani Abacha, came to an abrupt anticlimax with the late despot’s unexpected death. The second appears to have been, judging by the country’s recent political history, unusually successful, culminating in the election of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) aspirant, General Olusegun Obasanjo, as presidentelect. While various reasons have been adduced for the apparent failure of one and the relative success of the other, political analysts in the country seem to agree that the main reason has to do with the fact that the programs differed profoundly in terms of motives, methodologies, and even ends.

Nigeria has witnessed civilian rule for just over eight of nearly 39 years of self-rule. Incessant military incursions into the political terrain have led to several transition programs aimed at instituting democracy. This article focuses on the nature and operations of political parties in the recent transition and their implications for a stable democratic polity. The purpose of this focus is to recognize the enormous potential with which political parties are endowed for fostering or impeding the creation and sustenance of a cohesive, stable democratic system.

This article is a tentative incursion into the making and workings of collective memory in the recent Nigerian elections. The crisis of memory—construction, distortion, exploitation, and suppression—is evident in the Nigerian “transmutation” process—the perpetuation in power, through civilianization, of a military regime. The term “transmutation” is used here to convey the sense of a political mutation, a process of uncertain nature or progeny, certainly a transition, but one emanating from an unlikely parentage, a brutal and militarized past.

Among the more pressing and enigmatic challenges for Nigeria’s new civilian regime is the reconstruction of the nation’s benighted economy. The long-standing distortions of the petroleum-led economy have been exacerbated by more than a decade of misrule, international isolation, and economic decline. The current political transition offers Nigeria an opportunity to rejoin the global economy while establishing new foundations for economic revival. The legacy of decay from recent dictatorships weighs heavily on this process. The burdens of political repression and unaccountable governance have been compounded by stagnant economic performance, deepening popular immiseration, widening inequalities, and spiraling corruption.

The victory for democracy resulting from General Olusegun Obasanjo’s election in February 1999 is as hollow as it is contrived. For many analysts and political aspirants, Obasanjo’s victory is not a triumph for democracy but merely a eulogy to formal military rule. Obasanjo is viewed as the “ordained” military successor with more continuity to the tradition of authoritarian rule than to genuine democracy. His known autocratic leadership style and his less-than-progressive stance on the media and women make him difficult to accept as a champion of democracy. Furthermore, the legality of his victory is challenged by his alleged contravention of the qualification regulations of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), a factor that has led his opponent to contest the election results.

Given this imperfect situation, this article considers how Nigeria can build on the gains of the transition and consolidate democracy. The evidence from the new wave of democracy sweeping through the developing world suggests that “democracy makes sense” when civil organizations are prepared to challenge the right of autocratic regimes to rule.

One can say with certainty that all the contradictions that had bedeviled previous democratic experiments in Nigeria were present and magnified in the February 27, 1999 election: divided loyalties, manipulation of primordial identities and loyalties, corruption and other election malpractices, lack of political discipline, and limited attention to serious structural questions.

Why did Chief Olu Falae lose the election to General Olusegun Obasanjo? Several reasons can be advanced. First, Obasanjo’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) clearly had more money. Obasanjo was able to donate N 130 million and several cars to his party.

Nigeria has had three programs of transition from military to civil rule in the last 13 years. Despite the enormous resources wasted on the first two programs, by Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha, democracy remains a mirage in Nigeria. The demise of the two programs was not just a monumental failure on the part of the two leaders; it also vividly demonstrates the military’s inability to effect a lasting transition to civil rule. In addition, the utter failure of both programs has exposed the political brinkmanship to which the military is prepared to go to subvert democracy. Babangida’s brazen annulment of the June 1993 presidential election and Abacha’s repressive, dictatorial, and corrupt governing style brought Nigeria closer to the edge of the precipice than any other crisis since the civil war of the 1960s.

The Conference of Nationalities organized in Nigeria by the Campaign for Democracy, and held on December 17-19, 1998, has come and gone with little impact either on the national consciousness or on the process of transition to democracy. At the outset, I should state that I have never been convinced that the type of national conference planned in Nigeria after the expiration of the regime of Sani Abacha was going to be as useful as the most successful Conferences Nationales pioneered in francophone Africa. From the particular example of a similar conference in the Republic of Benin, the weaknesses of the Nigerian parley can be crystallized. The choice of Benin is quite easy. The Conference Nationale there was a resounding success. That triumphant experiment is a much better yardstick for measuring the Nigerian effort than, say, the failed one in Togo, although the Togo case is not without humbling lessons for the Nigerian organizers of the Conference of Nationalities.

This article cautions that the democratization process in Nigeria is not a foregone conclusion. Given the nature of the competing interests within Nigeria’s military hierarchy, there is nothing to suggest that every officer within the ruling military elite has embraced this transition project. This article focuses on the place of the military in the transition program.

Although entrenched military interests are not the only threat to the transition program, there is no doubt that the prominent role played by retired and serving military officers in the whole process of party formation and selection of presidential candidates has exacerbated concerns about the specter of militarism. While some in Nigeria simply see the military as the armed wing of the dominant oligarchy, others conclude that the military actually is the oligarchy.

The foundations of modern Nigerian politics were laid in the 1950s. That decade began with the Ibadan constitutional conference of 1950, at which leaders of northern and southern Nigeria met for the first time in a common political forum since the amalgamation of these two separate British colonies in 1914. It ended with the attainment of independence in 1960. In the course of that fateful decade, Nigerians, previously estranged from one another by the circumstances of colonial rule, not only got to know themselves but worked together to produce a blueprint for the country’s political future. In essence, they rejected British as well as nationalist proclivities toward centralization. Instead, they forged a consensus that federalism was the appropriate vehicle for resolving political problems created by the nation’s deep-seated diversity.