Nigerian Campaigns for a Presidency He Already Won

Chief Moshood Abiola, wearing his finely pressed white robes, raced around this teeming city in an armed convoy the other night, kissing the bride at a wedding reception, pressing the flesh at cocktail parties and chatting privately with the British ambassador.

After an hour’s sleep, the chief was up for Muslim prayers, and by midmorning he was leading 2,000 Christians in Bible songs.

A politician on the hustings? Not exactly. The bearish, 56-year-old multimillionaire businessman won a democratic election for president of Nigeria--seven months ago. And the army is still in charge.

As Abiola’s campaign for the office he has already won suggests, Nigeria’s experiment with democracy has left Africa’s most populous nation reeling. Since Nigerians elected Abiola in a free and fair election last June, the country has endured one puppet civilian government and two military governments.

Now, eight long years after military rulers promised a return to civilian rule in Nigeria, the hopes for democracy treasured by so many here seem as distant as ever. And the nation, though still producing 2 million barrels of oil a day, has been virtually bankrupted by unchecked corruption and dictatorial mismanagement.

“It’s so unfortunate how things have turned out,” said Beko Ransome-Kuti, 53, a chain-smoking physician who heads the Campaign for Democracy, the country’s leading liberal coalition.

The new Nigerian head of state is Gen. Sani Abacha, who seized power about nine weeks ago amid angry street protests that many feared had brought Nigeria to the brink of civil war. In the time-honored tradition of Nigerian dictators, Abacha has promised to oversee a new transition to democracy, beginning with a national conference to write a new constitution.

Now, as the trek toward civilian rule begins anew, the country is mired in its deepest economic depression since the free-spending oil boom of the 1970s. Despite its still-substantial oil reserves, unemployment stands at 50%, inflation is running at 65% a year, the country owes $33 billion to foreign lenders, and the middle class that once thrived here has disappeared, leaving only the very rich and the very poor.

“We are hoping to be surprised by this regime,” Ransome-Kuti said. “But I have my doubts. In Nigeria, it is always the man who has eaten who tells the hungry man to be patient.”

The patience of Nigerians has been tested since June 12, when 15 million voters went to the polls for the election long promised by the military ruler, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida.

The general had done his best to stage-manage the process. He created two political parties, one slightly right of center and one slightly left. He wrote their platforms. He even selected their candidates.

But it seems clear now that he never really intended to hand over power.

Abiola was elected with a solid national majority that successfully bridged the traditional differences among Nigeria’s 250 ethnic groups. And Babangida promptly annulled the results.

Pro-democracy riots broke out in July, leaving 168 Nigerians dead. And when Babangida finally agreed to leave in August, he handed power to a feeble, unelected interim government headed by Ernest Shonekan and backed by Abacha, Babangida’s longtime deputy.

Shonekan’s efforts to heal the deep economic wounds, without benefit of a democratic mandate, only hastened the country’s slide. When he removed the government subsidy on gasoline, sending prices at the pump rising from the equivalent of 6 U.S. cents a gallon to 45 cents, he was confronted with strikes and demonstrations in the streets.

When Abacha informed Shonekan that junior military officers planned a coup, the relieved leader promptly submitted his resignation, calling his interim government “a child of circumstance.”

Abacha took over Nov. 17. He banned “processions, political meetings and associations of any kind,” which defused the immediate civil crisis. He dissolved the National Assembly, dismissed the elected state governors and abolished the two political parties.

In private chats with foreign envoys, he promised to stage a constitutional conference to lay a “solid foundation” for democracy; he even sought their advice on the way forward.

In the streets of Lagos, a city of 8 million people, and across the country of 95 million, there was more relief and resignation than anger.

“It doesn’t mean we like this Abacha regime,” said Samuel Madu, 32, who works for a car service company in Lagos. “We are fed up with these military regimes. But people were afraid of war.”

In his brief tenure, Abacha already has managed to divide his political opposition. His most surprising accomplishment was to co-opt several key opponents of military rule into his Cabinet.

Olu Onagoruwa, a respected civil rights lawyer, accepted a job as Abacha’s attorney general. He now argues that the general’s promise of a constitutional conference was what the pro-democracy forces had been seeking all along.

Abiola’s vice president-elect took a job as the new foreign minister, and the publisher of a newspaper critical of the government also accepted a portfolio, as internal affairs minister. In a bid to distance himself from the past, Abacha “retired” 17 military officers closely associated with Babangida’s discredited regime.

“This administration has shown that it is action-oriented,” said Jerry Gana, Abacha’s information minister. “Nigerians admire that.”

The central question now is whether Abacha is serious about democracy or, as his detractors contend, merely using his own promises of democracy to stay in power as long as possible.

No one knows for sure, but it is a question that has divided Abacha’s opponents and left Abiola suspended between an election he won and an inauguration he demands.

After more than a month of silence, Abiola announced in December that he would cling to the results of the June 12 election and hope that Abacha will have “the wisdom,” as he puts it, to hand over power peacefully.

“They want to kill my mandate, but they are wasting their time,” Abiola said in an interview. “All the man (Abacha) wants is to be president and stay there. I can assure you, my mandate is alive and well and will never die.”

Perhaps. But other pro-democracy leaders say Abiola’s chance has come and gone. They contend that the popular leader lacked the nerve to form his own government and fight the military rulers last summer.

“Abiola is finished,” said Olisas Agbakoba, a lawyer and chairman of the Civil Liberties Organization in Lagos.

Gani Fawehinmi, a widely respected civil rights campaigner in Lagos, added: “He went to sleep with the mandate. People were prepared to die for him, and he didn’t show enough courage.”

Abiola’s answer: “I’m a politician, not a guerrilla leader.”

Some Nigerians were also worried by Abiola’s meetings with Abacha, shown on state-run television in the days after the coup.

Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian author and human rights campaigner, said he found it “shocking and disappointing.” Soyinka, the 1986 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, has called on foreign governments to “not say or do anything to give hope to this regime.”

“They thought I had sold out,” said Abiola, who acknowledges meeting four times with Abacha. “But I didn’t sell out. To kiss somebody, you have to get near them. But to bite them, you have to get near him too.”

Indeed, Abiola’s grass-roots support still appears strong. Being a Muslim but also a Yoruba, he bridges the historic gulf between the Muslims of the north and the Yoruba and mostly Christian ethnic groups in the south.

His substantial wealth, amassed in private enterprise, is respected.

He owns a publishing house, a large farm and an oil company; he has international connections, having spent 16 years as a vice president of the U.S. corporation ITT.

Many here believe that those personal riches would make him immune to any temptation to steal from the treasury.

Nearly every major Western government has demanded that Nigeria recognize Abiola’s victory, and many Nigerians would also like to see him given a chance to run the country.

At the recent church service in Lagos, Abiola was greeted by a standing ovation. The pastor, the Rev. Chris Okotie, a former pop music star in Nigeria, said Abiola “has come to symbolize the principles of democracy in our land.”

On the clogged streets of Lagos, Abiola’s motorcade, complete with his own private security service, is frequently stopped by cheering, waving crowds of supporters.

Still, Abacha has shown no inclination to give the keys to Abiola.

“June 12 was a watershed for democracy,” said Gana, Abacha’s information minister. “We have learned many lessons. But we are not likely to go back.”

While some pro-democracy leaders are heartened by Abacha’s promise of a constitutional conference, others are not impressed.

“We can ill-afford another journey to no destination,” said Fawehinmi, who has been jailed 18 times by military regimes. “It’s not necessary. It is a buying-time strategy by the military.”

But Onagoruwa, the new attorney general and Fawehinmi’s good friend, thinks Abacha is sincere.

“We are not fools,” he said. “If the government does not show any seriousness in the constitutional talks, I will get out.”

It is still not clear how much power Abacha will be willing to surrender to constitutional negotiators, some of whom will be elected and others appointed.

The government has already suggested that certain topics, such as whether Nigeria should remain a unified country, will be off limits.

Gana promises that decisions “will be deeply respected and implemented.” But he characterizes the decisions as “recommendations,” suggesting that Abacha will still have the final say.

Although foreign governments denounced Abacha’s coup, most diplomats in Nigeria now have decided to wait and see what the general does.

“Their moves so far have been positive,” one Western ambassador said. “But power sometimes becomes a heady thing.”

President Clinton recently announced that the U.S. government will deny visas to members of Nigeria’s military government, a decision that may be painful this year for rich government officials who want to follow their national soccer team to the World Cup in the United States.

But no more biting sanctions are in the offing for Nigeria, which exports $5 billion a year in oil to the United States.

Abacha himself remains an enigma. Some opponents contend that he is more cunning than Babangida, the close friend he helped bring to power in 1985. But Abiola, who has known both men for years, said Abacha “isn’t 1% as bright as Babangida.”

Trained in the United States and Britain, Abacha has, like most men in uniform in Nigeria, become wealthy. Among his holdings is a charter airline, which flew between Lagos and New York until August, when the U.S. government banned direct flights because of lax security at the Lagos airport.

Abacha has called for “a new era of discipline” to end corruption in the government as well as private industry.

But his spokesman said, “We won’t waste our time” with probes into the past, investigations that would likely target him.

Optimists in Nigeria believe that Abacha just wants a comfortable retirement. Soldiers have ruled Nigeria for 22 of the last 26 years, but the pressure for democratic change now sweeping Africa, evident in last June’s elections in Nigeria, has never been greater.

“Nigeria realizes it has to pay decent regard for the opinions of the world now,” said a Western diplomat with more than three decades’ experience in Nigeria. “They can’t just go their own way any longer.”