The return of Nigeria's long-absent President Umaru Yar'Adua to the capital city of Abuja in late February has thrown the West African country into a dangerous existential crisis. The president is still apparently incapacitated, but his cadres are certainly not -- and they are doing all they can to remain in power. Yar'Adua's henchmen now threaten not only the constitutional succession process, which had placed provisional powers in the hands of Vice President Goodluck Jonathan, but also Nigeria's very stability. Ethnic violence in the city of Jos broke out in early March amid the current governance vacuum, leaving hundreds dead; worse could follow if the political stalemate isn't resolved soon. The stakes for the country's 150 million people couldn't be higher.
Yar'Adua's inner circle has shown itself quite adept at spreading falsehoods -- misinforming and misleading Nigerians into mass violence if necessary -- to preserve its hold on power. Since the crisis began, the presidency has been framed as if it were a rotating office, traded every eight years between the supposedly Christian South and Muslim North. Yar'Adua's cabal has used this idea to whip up primordial sentiment, persuading the country and the international community of an invented North-South chasm and concealing a selfish agenda under the aegis of preventing a Muslim vs. Christian religious divide. It is a clever ruse to prevent Jonathan (who is from the South) from succeeding Yar'Adua (who hails from the North). And the reduction of Nigeria's complex political problems to such clichés and sound bites, obediently repeated by diplomats and media helps propagate the myth that politics has to be governed by regional rivalries. According to that false tradition, Yar'Adua (or someone from the North) must remain in power.
This is not only disingenuous but dangerous. Since Yar'Adua's return, Jonathan, who became acting president in early February, has faced constant obstruction and undermining by the Yar'Adua cabal. The president's press secretary, for example, has continued to issue his own statements, referring to the acting president not in that role but as vice president. And until their firing last week when Jonathan dissolved the cabinet, Yar'Adua's ministers were fighting tooth and nail to stay in office, clinging to the rents and patronage that came with their posts. Knowing that the law and the Nigerian Constitution were not on their side -- in Nigeria, an ill and incapacitated president must be formally and permanently removed from office through the constitutional process -- their only recourse was the age-old yet often effective strategy of playing off North-South tensions.
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As a result, politics in Nigeria have come to a dangerous standstill. The nascent amnesty deal in the Niger Delta has failed to progress, and the rebel group the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta has carried out several "warning" attacks. The 2010 budget was delayed three months and only recently passed. Civil servants are threatening to go on strike. And electoral reform, promised three years ago after flawed 2007 elections has hardly budged. Protesters marched in Abuja March 31 to demand the current electoral commission chairman not be reappointed. Things have gotten so bad that Nigerians are finally taking to the streets, demanding an end to the succession battle and a return of attention to the business of actually governing Nigeria. (Finally, the Senate just approved Jonathan's cabinet nominees.)
There is also a more direct human cost to all this; look no further than Jos, where the perpetrators of the recent violence took advantage of the power vacuum presented by the current political struggle. These ethnic militias, like much of Nigeria, assume that the president is permanently incapacitated; were he not, would he have snuck into Abuja as he did? Yar'Adua returned not with a homecoming parade, but with an unauthorized military deployment in the middle of the night.
The political mayhem and the ethnic tensions fomented by the Yar'Adua faction have pushed Nigeria closer than ever either to a repeat of the country's 1967-1970 civil war, in which the southern Biafra region sought to secede, or the return of military intervention. In pushing so hard on the North-South divide, Yar'Adua's supporters risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy; if regions are told they will be the "losers" of a constitutional transition, they might pick up arms to defend their position. Military leaders resolutely believe in the integrity of the Nigerian state, so if the country were to approach the brink of disintegration, they would likely step in. Goodbye, Nigerian democracy.
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