Nigerians Take Step Toward Democracy With Landmark Vote

Nigerians voted Saturday in landmark parliamentary elections, marking the latest step in their country’s transition to civilian rule and greater democracy.

An estimated 40 million voters in this West African nation were given their first chance in 15 years to select civilians for a two-chamber National Assembly. However, there was little fanfare here in Nigeria’s commercial capital and second city.

Political observers attributed the lack of outward enthusiasm to pent-up excitement in anticipation of a hotly contested vote Feb. 27 for a civilian president to lead this nation of 108 million.

The outcome will end decades of domination by the military, which has ruled Nigeria for all but 10 years since the country’s independence from Britain in 1960.

Politicians from the People’s Democratic Party, the All People’s Party and the Alliance for Democracy will make up the 360 members of the House of Representatives and 109 senators.

PDP’s candidate, retired army Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, who ruled Nigeria in the 1970s, is widely expected by pundits to win over rival Olu Falae, a onetime finance minister who is the joint presidential candidate of the APP and the AD. In May, the country’s new leader and parliament will be sworn in.

Obasanjo is widely considered to have the backing of the current military regime of Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, who set the democracy transition program in motion.

Abubakar succeeded military dictator Sani Abacha, who died in June.

For several hours Saturday, an eerie silence enveloped Lagos, normally crammed and bustling with pedestrians, hawkers and traffic.

“People are going to be pretty calm about this” election, said Olawale Fapohunda, a human rights lawyer and local election monitor. “It is with the next big one that tensions [will] rise.”

Residents were not allowed to leave their neighborhoods Saturday until the electoral process was over.

In the slum district of Moshin, a jumble of shacks and stalls lining crumbling, garbage-strewn streets, handfuls of voters lined up at polling tables on the sidewalks.

Some voters suggested that many had stayed away because they considered the voting exercise a sham. They claimed that parliament will not matter because the country’s new president--Obasanjo--has already been undemocratically decided.

“We are going from military to military,” said Brendan Njerigbo, 23, a self-employed businessman and former PDP supporter who still had not decided which of the other two parties will get his vote. “The arrangement has been done already. The masses are not expressing their choice. A leader is being imposed on them. We are just voting in order to exercise our civic responsibility, but consciously we know we are being exploited and victimized.”

Votes were expected to be counted in front of party representatives and then collated at ward, state and national levels. Final results were unlikely to emerge before late tonight.

Although definitive reports from election monitors assessing the voting process were not expected until early this week, initial indications of discrepancies were noted at some polling stations. Local election monitors pointed to the lack of indelible ink at certain venues; the absence of private booths and covered ballot boxes to ensure secret voting; and smudges of ink under more than one party symbol, rendering the ballot invalid.

Analysts said the new parliament would be wise to use the grace period before May to address such infrastructure issues as roads, power, water supplies and education in addition to determining a new constitution. The legislators also are expected to tackle questions of federalism and autonomy for the states, allocation of resources, and methods to resolve regional and ethnic differences.

“It is important that Nigerians, and everyone else, view the elections as only the beginning of a true democratic transition,” said Christopher Fomunyoh, a specialist on democratization in Africa at the Washington-based National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. “It is important that the elections are not seen like an end in itself.”