NIGERIA: Black African Vote for Democracy

After coups and chaos, trying out a U.S.-style system

It already has black Africa’s largest population (about 80 million) and most bounteous economy (1978 gross national product: $33 billion), as well as the clout that comes with being a rapidly emerging leader of the Third World. To those assets, oil-rich Nigeria may soon add another that is very rare in its part of the world: a democratic government.

In a key step in a methodical transition from 13 years of military rule, what Nigerian officials describe as an “impressive” number of the country’s 48.5 million registered voters went to polls this month to choose a President. Last week after ballots had been gathered from places as varied as the slums of the appallingly crowded capital Lagos, the minareted city of Kano in the Muslim north and steamy Enugu in the old Biafra area of the Christian and animist south, the name of Nigeria’s first popularly elected chief executive was announced. He is Alhaji Shehu Shagari, 54, a slight, soft-spoken veteran civil servant who wears the robes and beaded hat of the northern Hausa tribe and has been an outspoken Muslim nationalist. If all goes as planned, Lieut. General Olusegun Obasanjo, leader of the ruling Supreme Military Council, will turn power over to a government headed by Shagari on Oct. 1.

When that happens, Nigeria will have come full circle to the democratic system it inherited when it won independence from Britain in 1960. Since then, the country has had a shaky coalition regime, a short-lived parliamentary republic, three coups, a bloody civil war and the assassination of a head of state. Nigeria has simultaneously been afflicted by social and economic strains that have grown along with its wealth, which comes from its copious reserves of easily refinable “sweet” light crude oil. Largely because thousands of peasants have deserted their farms to seek bloated wages in booming Lagos, the country must now import much of its food; the capital itself has swelled to a sprawling, traffic-clogged metropolis.

Meanwhile, a succession of military regimes has failed to resolve the tensions between the Ibo, Yoruba and Hausa tribes that flared into a civil war in 1967 when Biafra, the Ibo homeland, tried to break away. The strongman in power then, General Yakuba Gowon, healed some of the scars by declaring an amnesty at the end of the war, in 1970, but he was toppled in 1975 by other soldiers who objected to his costly schemes, such as the building of a $20 million sports stadium in Lagos.

Obasanjo, a devout Baptist who became the military regime’s leader in 1976, has had only mixed success in persuading Nigerians to curb their big spending. The need is urgent because the country’s appetite for grandiose public projects, as well as for needed social welfare programs, far outstrips its oil reserves. But Obasanjo has had no trouble at all in selling his people on a return to democracy; Nigerians, as one Lagos official says bluntly, are “tired of dictatorship.”

In 1975, the Obasanjo regime began an elaborate process designed to install a U.S.-style federal democracy without exacerbating the tensions between the dominant tribes. By mid-1978, a constitution was adopted that included key features of the American system, such as a two-house legislature and a chief executive elected for a four-year term. To ensure that parties are national in character and not just tribal or religious groupings, the election procedures provide that to win the presidency, a candidate must show broad strength not only by finishing first in the overall vote but also by garnering at least 25% of the ballots in two-thirds of the country’s 19 states.

Last September Obasanjo ended the nation’s twelve-year-old ban on political activity, and more than 55 parties exploded into noisy life. But only five, among them Shagari’s National Party of Nigeria (N.P.N.), could generate a following wide enough to qualify their presidential candidates. The freewheeling and occasionally violent campaign that followed persuaded some Nigerians that the experiment with democracy was premature. Said a professor: “There are two kinds of people here, the pessimist who says civilian rule will fall apart before it begins in October, and the optimist who says that it will fall apart six months later.”

No spellbinder with crowds, Shagari, a chain-smoking, onetime science teacher, edged his two main rivals, who hinted after the election that they might challenge the results. The two were Yoruba Chieftain Obafemi Awolowo, a major architect of Nigeria’s independence, and Nnamdi Azikiwe, an Ibo leader who was the nonelected President during the brief parliamentary republic. In the campaign, Shagari emphasized his experience as a minister of finance, education and other departments in previous regimes. Though once a leader of an organization that advocated “national unity” under Hausa domination, he picked an Ibo running mate. Moreover, he managed to gloss over the corrupt reputations of many of the N.P.N.’s assembly candidates. Said he: “I am not a judge of morals. Our main preoccupation is to get votes.”

Shagari’s pragmatism could spell success for Nigeria’s reborn democracy, if he can curb the excesses of his party followers, who finished strongly in races for the federal senate and state assemblies. But it might also spell disaster if he permits the country to fall back into the fractiousness of the past. Says a Western diplomat in Lagos: “A lot of people have their fingers crossed on this.”