Saturday’s elections in Nigeria could prove to be a momentous struggle in Africa’s largest democracy. Eighteen candidates are vying to replace current President Muhammadu Buhari, the nation’s 80-year-old leader who originally came to power in a 1983 coup.
Buhari is leaving the presidency after two terms, and his successor will inherit a nation grappling with immense inequality, internal security problems and an ongoing financial crisis. Although Nigeria has significant natural resources and has experienced a boom in entrepreneurship over the past decade, young professionals are leaving the country in droves to seek better opportunities in the UK, Europe, the US and Canada, according to CNN. Organized crime, terrorist violence, ethnic and cultural tensions, corruption, nepotism and state violence are all critical issues for the next leader to address.
Saturday’s elections also include races for the legislature and governance; All 109 seats in the Senate of the National Assembly and 360 seats in the House of Representatives are up for election, as are 18 of Nigeria’s 36 governors. Although the two traditional parties, Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), are expected to continue their dominance in the National Assembly, that will not be the case, according to a January report by the Africa Center for Strategic Studies its essential to apply for the presidency.
Two established candidates, the APC’s Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the PDP’s Atiku Abubakar, are front runners. They have both been in politics for a long time – Abubakar is running in his sixth presidential campaign – and are in their 70s. Peter Obi, a businessman and former governor of Anambra state in the south-east region, is the Labor Party candidate who has worked to mobilize the youth voices and, with his supporters, the “Obidients”, to dominate the social media landscape.
Despite his wealth and experience in government, Obi represents a break with entrenched political networks and enjoys a reputation for competence and transparency. “He wasn’t part of the ‘godfather’ political stereotype that we see with Bola Tinubu or Atiku Abubukar,” Joseph Siegle, research director at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, said in an interview with Vox.
The results of the vote will likely take several days; Although the election was reportedly successful overall, some violence, delays and irregularities were reported. Whoever wins the 2023 contest, whether through Saturday’s polls or during a later run-off, should no candidate win a majority of the vote in that round, they will have to focus their work on helping Nigeria’s fledgling democracy amid the democratic backslide during the throughout the continent and the multiple problems Nigerians face.
A successful election in Nigeria “opens the door to democratic self-correction,” Siegle said, enabling a government that is responsive to the needs of the people and capable of change and flexibility in the face of major shifts across the nation, continent and US World. “It’s a big deal,” he said. “It would be a big statement for Nigeria and for Africa; With Nigeria being Africa’s largest population and largest economy, that’s a big deal.”
Nigeria’s current overlapping crises are leading voters to seek change
Nigeria’s reputation as Africa’s largest democracy and largest economy has not protected the country from serious economic, security and political problems.
In February, the central bank recalled old banknotes in 1,000, 500 and 200 naira, rendering them worthless. The replacement notes have not been widely distributed, causing a cash shortage in a country where millions of people rely on cash. Add to this global inflation and a cost of living crisis that has forced doctors and other young professionals to leave the country in search of better opportunities elsewhere.
The government’s explanation for the currency changeover ranges from an attempt to curb vote-buying, counterfeiting and cash hoarding; Whatever the reason, these efforts have resulted in frustration, anger and protest from ordinary Nigerians who can no longer pay their bills. Buhari has reintroduced the old 200-naira notes to ease the crisis but has otherwise supported the central bank’s decision.
The country’s security crisis is also a major concern for Nigerian voters, although the precise nature of this crisis varies from region to region in this large, diverse nation. In the Northeast, Islamist terrorist violence continues despite claims by the Buhari government that Boko Haram has been defeated. Although some important measures have made the state of Borno in the Northeast safer than it was in 2015, when Buhari won the presidency, according to Brandon Kendhammer “there is still a lot of violence, an incredible amount of disruption and humanitarian disasters” in the country. associate professor of political science and director of international development studies at Ohio University, to Vox.
While groups like Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) “are less militarily capable of destroying lives than they were five or six years ago, that’s the good news,” Kendhammer said. “The bad news is that many other types of violence have largely replaced violence in north-eastern Nigeria. If you rank the immediate security concerns in Nigeria today, ISWAP and Boko Haram are third or fourth on the list.”
Chris Kwaja, interim country manager for the US Institute for Peace in Nigeria and senior lecturer at Modibbo Adama University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies, told Vox that there is a staggering number of security problems, some of which stem from government incompetence Include people from different backgrounds and social statuses.
“The emergence of so-called bandits in the north-central and northwestern parts of the country, communal conflicts, as well as conflicts over access to and management of natural resources, as we see in connection with farmer-herder conflicts in part of the Northeast and part of the north-western part of the country” are a key driver of insecurity, he said. Farmers and herders often compete for resources that are limited by ongoing urbanization and climate change, Kendhammer told Vox; Although this conflict rests on longer-standing ethnic and cultural tensions, the proliferation of small arms over the past decade has made the conflict deadlier.
Militant groups in the South competing with the government for access to and distribution of crude oil, as well as separatist groups, are also creating instability. “For many citizens, the state is not able to effectively contain these drivers and sources of insecurity,” said Kwaja, which is driving disillusionment and apathy towards the existing structures.
“The expectation is that the country should be able to put itself together in a way that it is able to meet some of the basic expectations of citizens in terms of inclusion, poverty alleviation, inequality, as well as unemployment and other basic functions that make democracy work should,” Kwaja said.
The future of Nigerian democracy could be at stake
The country’s political system – somewhat sclerotic, with entrenched corruption – also depends on the outcome of the election and the winner’s ability to continue democratic reforms. The country only became a democracy in 1999, after decades of colonialism and then military rule, and only began to have a viable, competitive multiparty state two election cycles ago, Siegle told Vox.
“There are choices here; it will matter who gets elected,” he said. “In many African elections, people have no choice.”
Kwaja and Siegle both pointed to nepotism and corruption as key weaknesses in the Nigerian government structure. “People see access to public office as an opportunity to accumulate wealth rather than work for the people,” Kwaja told Vox. And politicians rely on seniority and entitlement rather than competence and service to justify their office. “This feeling that there’s a certain number of people who are supposedly entitled to it because of the power they wield, the resources they have, the political networks they control [positions of power] really have a big impact on how Nigerian politics works,” said Kendhammer.
Nigeria has implemented a number of important electoral reforms over the years, and civil society and the media have played a crucial role in calling for change and urging transparency, Siegle said. In this contest, votes are tabulated at polling stations before being handed over to federal authorities in the capital, Abuja, for oversight authorities such as the African Union are both important methods to deal with fraud and threats to the electoral system. “Every election gets a little bit better, they learn from recent experiences,” Siegle said.
The election and its outcome are critical for both Nigerian democracy and Africa as a whole, Kwaja said. “The international attention being given to the situation in Nigeria is based on this very strong belief that if we get things right in Nigeria’s democratic transition, the rest of Africa will get things right too.”
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