Okello Oculi
4 January 2008
analysis
Abuja — In the wake Kenya's political crisis, the country could learn valuable lessons from past Nigerian attempts to solve post-election crises. The virus of election fiasco that hit Kenya on December 30, 2007 could have as well have came from Algeria via Nigeria.
When Islamists swept the polls in 1992, the military -- with active encouragement from their western allies -- cancelled the election.
In 1993, Nigeria's military rulers played the same political hand, causing a political crisis. Out of this, emerged statesmanship from both the north and the south reaching out for a compromise that would save the country from disintegrating like Yugoslavia did.
In the context of Kenya's political crisis, similar statesmanship could apply.
It would consist of power sharing between the Party of National Unity, PNU and the Orange Democratic Movement, ODM. In mathematical terms, President Kibaki would rule till 2011 and hand over to ODM's Raila Odinga, thereby entrusting him with the responsibility of conducting the election of 2012. The benefits of this historical arithmetic are several. First, it would allow the healing of post-election violence with the main victims feeling that they have not abandoned by a Kibaki government.
This way, the government would have the chance of implementing policies that would improve its image in the eyes of critics who blame the president for succumbing to his friends' influence.
Nigerians continue to lament how far their country has fallen behind India, Singapore and Malaysia due to short-sighted feudal, selfish and corrupt governance from 1970 to 1999.
The promise of 2011 would offer Raila's followers the symbolic satisfaction that their efforts were not in vain.
At the same time, it would enable the police to prosecute perpetrators of arson without attracting suspicions of vengeance.
Raila would also have time to build his movement into one run on ideological discipline, including that of swallowing the vital notion that democracy must honour the human dignity and rights of others. The same applies to the other camp.
This is not an easy affair as the American example of running a democracy tarnished by entrenched racism shows.
Finally, Raila would have one year to use the performance of his government as an election campaign tool while enjoying the advantage of supervising the conduct of the 2012 elections from the strategic vantage of being in office.
In this scenario, Kibaki would need to give incentives to ODM to take up his offer. One such incentive could be respecting the rejection of his cabinet ministers by keeping them out of parliament by using his quota of nominated MPs to bring in potential high quality youthful leaders from PNU, especially those from smaller parties outside PNU and ODM; civil society activists, youth and women.
In particular, promising elements from among those that may have been rigged out should not be thrown into bitter alienation. This doze of goodwill and positive leadership would assure ODM's leaders of Kibaki's commitment to building a new and politically healthy Kenya. Kibaki would also have to assure ODM's leaders that vital publicly-owned assets would not be rushed away into hands of his allies thereby creating a situation similar to post-1994 South Africa in which black political power remained hollow because real economic power remained in the grip of the minority white ethnic group.
On its part, ODM would spend the next four years ensuring that its MPs effectively use resources, such as the Constituency Development Fund for showing the new road to human development that it has dangled to its followers. It would also have to vigorously show concern for the alleviation of non-development of human and material resources in areas that are uneasy with the idea of a Raila presidency.
Also to be reassured are critics who fear that the ODM leadership carries within it as much influence of former President Daniel Arap Moi as several of its luminaries are one-time Moi supporters.
However, there are those who would claim that Nigeria's experience is different from the situation in Kenya. In response to that it is useful to retell the Nigerian story of handling election complications.
As a point of departure, on June 12, 1993, Nigeria's military ruler, General Ibrahim Babangida, erected a huge screen on which results were projected for a crowd of anxious party supporters to follow swings and dips in victories and losses, as presidential election results from 21 States came in.
Chief Mushood Abiola of the "A Little-to-the-Left" Social Democratic Party, was running on an all-Muslim ticket with Babagana Kingibe.
Abiola was from the Yoruba ethnic group in the south-west of the country; and Kingibe from the Kanuri group in the north-east corner of the country.
Standing against them in the National Republican Congress, was Bashir Tofa a native of Kano State (in Hausa heartland in the northwest), with Sylvester Ugwu from the Igbo ethnic group in the south-east, as his vice-presidential running mate.
Tofa was a Muslim from the North, and Ugwu a Christian from the South. They followed the conventional formula for seeking electoral support in a complex mixture of geographical, ethnic and religious considerations. Abiola and Kingibe had defied this formula and were winning, upsetting the political form book.
The game of power had been rigged by the British to give power in 1960 to the Hausa-Fulani-based Northern Peoples Congress, NPC.
When indignant Igbo military and civilian elite mounted a coup against them in 1966, it took a civil war in which the Yoruba took sides with the northerners to defeat the Igbo-anchored Biafra Republic.
From 1967 to 1993 power would be held by northern military officers and one civilian ruler, Shehu Shagari (1979-1983).
Along with that longevity of tenure came the lure of using ethnicity to monopolise lucrative contracts, recruitment into the civil service, top management of parastatals and promotions as well as top leadership in the uniformed forces.
Among the northerners, the Hausa-Fulani elites would create a widening gulf between them and the other over 150 ethnic groups in their region.
That combination might have remained harmless had the beneficiaries invested in local manufacturing and agricultural production that created jobs, besides putting the money in education while pursuing a non-tribal policy when recruiting civil servants and besides shunning corruption.
Easy money from the oil in the Niger Delta bred a ruling group that imported beef from Brazil and chicken from Israel. To protect itself from the poor, the ruling group fanned ethnic and religious contempt for other groups and silenced critics.
The combination of the national resource base and hostility was the root cause of the generalised anger and hunger for change in Nigeria's leadership.
It made Muslims and Christians from over 240 ethnic groups to support Abiola and Kingibe, each of whom had independently built vast political networks nationwide that saw Abiola win the 1993 elections.
It is that fury and anger that made the Hausa-Fulani military leadership to cancel the elections after releasing the results from Nigeria's states until it was clear that the Abiola-Kingibe team had won in 16 of them. At the most elementary level that timing was an exhibition of the impunity of gun-power by the military against vote-power.
The fury that erupted would claim hundreds of lives as Abiola's supporters immediately went for secession as the way to assert their dignity and self-respect. The violence that General Sani Abacha threw at the Abiola supporters only bred more creative combat from them, including exploiting novel international diplomatic, journalistic and economic openings. More importantly, it forced a more accommodative social engineering by a combination of statesmanship from the south and the north.
By 1998 that creativity had started to roll its momentum. In June 1998 General Abacha died suddenly under unclear circumstances. So did Abiola a few months later.
By May 29, 1999, the military not only dug out Olusegun Obasanjo from Abacha's dungeon, but also ensured his coronation by making sure that his chief contender was a fellow Yoruba man (Olu Falae), thereby ensuring that whichever party won that election, a Yoruba man would be president of Nigeria.
This challenge of political engineering would, in 2007, see Obasanjo getting Nigerians to endorse the combination of letting an ethnic minority and an indigene from the oil-rich Niger Delta as Nigeria's Vice President, thereby giving the region hope that power could be theirs after the 2015 elections.
Here in lies a political lesson for Kenya from Nigeria's mistakes and attempts to correct them.
Okello Oculi is a commentator based in the Nigerian capital Abuja
Africa Insight is an initiative of the Nation Media Group's Africa Media Network Project.
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