Banned by ’87 Decree, Ex-Officeholders Still Playing Role in Nigeria Campaign : Africa: The country is headed for elections in 1992. The hope is that fresh faces will wean it from a corrupt past.

The offense that landed Arthur Nzeribe in a Nigerian prison for 20 days recently would not be unusual in most of Africa’s one-party states and military dictatorships: He was caught addressing a political rally in his own home.

But it was something special in Nigeria, where the military government has opened up the political process in preparation for handing over rule to a democratically elected civilian government in 1992.

Nzeribe, a former federal legislator in Nigeria’s Second Republic and a millionaire businessman, falls into an odd category of “banned” politicians.

As part of his program to wean Nigeria from its corrupt and divisive politics and start anew, President Ibrahim Babangida--the latest of a long line of military rulers of this 30-year-old West African nation--has barred most former officeholders from participating in the latest round of politicking.

The ban, embodied in a 1987 military decree, covers anyone who served in electoral office during Nigeria’s two brief periods of civilian rule, 1960-66 and 1979-1983, as well as former government ministers and anyone convicted of an economic crime.

Most participants in the seven military governments of post-independence Nigeria are also banned.

Babangida has said he has no plans to run for office as a civilian. (Most observant Nigerians still expect him to play an important behind-the-scenes role after the military hand-off in 1992.)

The problem, however, is that in this as in almost all things, rules and regulations do not work in Nigeria.

The decree has been so routinely flouted that at least one “banned” politician is openly running for president, and a dozen more make no secret of their interest in the fortunes of Nigeria’s two newly legalized political parties, the National Republican Convention and the Social Democratic Party.

One recent cover of TimesWeek, a Nigerian magazine, was adorned with photographs of five of the most prominent banned politicians, including Nzeribe, former military ruler Olusegun Obasanjo and former Lagos state Gov. Lateef Jakande.

Younger, theoretically unsullied politicians still habitually pay homage to the elders, many of whom are openly financing the two parties, established by the military government to fight it out in the civilian elections.

In the last month, Babangida has appeared so concerned about the re-emergence of banned politicians that he has stepped up his threats against their “covert politicking.”

“Nobody is above the law,” he told a recent press conference. “Don’t forget we have a lot of options. Some could be drastic, some magnanimous.”

Babangida, who seized control of the government in a 1985 coup, may have good reason for concern: The ban on former politicians is a key part of his transition program.

Since it gained independence in 1960, Nigeria has oscillated between a great democratic hope for Africa and seemingly inevitable failure. With more than 150 million people, the sprawling country would be the world’s third-largest democracy, after India and the United States.

But instead of democracy, Nigeria’s post-independence political history has been one of corrupt civilian regimes alternating with equally corrupt, if somewhat more disciplined, military juntas. In Nigeria’s 30 years of independence, there have been seven military coups and two civilian regimes.

This has happened against a backdrop of ceaseless division between the Muslim north and the largely Christian south, and among the country’s three major tribal groups: the Yoruba of the southwest, the Ibo of the east and the Hausa-Fulani of the north.

The economy has been a parallel disappointment: As an oil-producing country and member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Nigeria could be an African economic powerhouse. But it ended the oil-boom years of the 1970s with the continent’s largest foreign debt.

“Babangida remembers the past,” a leading Nigerian news weekly remarked in a recent editorial. “But he is not proud of it. The four-star general is confronted with a nation latched to a nightmarish history of political upheavals.”

With an eye toward breaking Nigerian leadership of its bad habits, Babangida has tried hard to create what amounts to a cult around what he calls the “new breed,” a term that has quickly infiltrated Nigerian argot. The government promotes the notion that the youthful businessmen, university professors and professionals taking leadership roles in the new parties are exemplars of a potent, honest new Nigeria.

But that vision has proved less than universal. Consider the opposing viewpoint of Nzeribe: “I’ll tell you who the new breed is. He’s a known crook and vagabond, he has no background, he is a wheeler-dealer and he is a politician. Ever since independence, he has been going for election and losing. Today, he is a new breed.”

By no means has the new breed shown itself to be entirely immune to the venality of the past. After a group of National Republican Convention officials were shown to have diverted a $27-million federal party subsidy to a bank in which they held an interest, the Sunday Concord newspaper remarked: “How credible is the crop of new breed leaders? On the question of money, they have shown acute self-interest.”

In any event, most Nigerian political leaders believe that eliminating the influence of elders from the political process is a pipe dream. Nigeria’s politics has always been based on the interplay of strong personalities and oiled by great personal fortunes and followings, some of them based on tribal and religious loyalties. None of this is easily suppressed.

“Making a ‘clean break’?’ That’s purely academic,” says Sule Lamido, chairman of the Social Democratic Party in the key northern state of Kano. “It’s only normal that one bows to the people, resources and expertise of the older people. You rely on the connections of the old order.”

Others say that the new parties, whose nearly identical political manifestoes were written by the central government in Lagos so that one would appear slightly left of center and the other slightly right, have become reincarnations of the established parties and power centers of previous governments, both civilian and military.

By eliminating any substantive differences between the two parties and prohibiting political debate on the most important national issues, such as its economic future, Babangida may have inadvertently strengthened the pull of personalized politics, many people say.

In truth, many Nigerian politicians, new and old, feel the ban is a mistake. For one thing, by covering only former officeholders, it fails to touch the back- room manipulators who may have played an even more corrupt role in republican Nigeria than officeholders.

Others argue that by penalizing equally the corrupt and the innocent, Babangida has signaled that honesty carries no reward.

“The guilty, the not guilty and the untried all receive the same punishment,” says Lateef Jakande, the banned but still powerful former governor of Lagos state.

Hiltzik was recently on assignment in Nigeria.