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Last week saw Nigerian voters head to the polls to decide whether President Goodluck Jonathan deserved another term in office. Jonathan, who took office in 2010 following the death of President Umaru Yar’Adua, was reeling from accusations of economic mismanagement and an inability to squelch the Boko Haram insurgency in the Nigerian northeast. Observers predicted a tense poll that could result in violence. After all, the 2011 election that Jonathan won over his challenger in this year’s race, Muhammadu Buhari, ended in riots that killed 1,000 people. However, Nigeria defied these dour predictions and more than forty million voters turned out to give Buhari a sizable margin of victory. The election marked the first time in Nigerian history that an incumbent president was defeated and optimists hope that the country, the most populous in Africa, can become a model for others on the continent. To do that, though, Buhari will have to find a way to permanently squelch Boko Haram and fix corruption issues that have plagued Nigeria for much of its post-colonial history.
This topic brief will provide an overview of the major issues that emerged during the Nigerian presidential election, discuss the reasons Buhari won, and then assess his prospects of making Nigeria a more prosperous nation.
Readers are also encouraged to use the links below and in the related R&D to bolster their files about this topic.
The Major Issues of the Nigerian Presidential Election
When Nigerian voters headed to the polls on March 28 they were presented with two options: maintain the status quo under President Goodluck Jonathan, a Southern Christian, or follow a new path represented by Muhammadu Buhari, a Northern Muslim who once governed Nigeria as a military dictator between 1983 and 1985. Jonathan had been the President of Nigeria since 2010, taking over after the death of President Umaru Yar’Adua. His People’s Democratic Party (PDP) has governed Nigeria since military rule ended in 1999. This long-time rule has enabled the PDP to construct a vast patronage network and build a sizable political infrastructure causing some analysts to wonder if these advantages would prohibit a serious challenge to its rule. A similar parallel would be the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa that has survived several sizable scandals since 1994, but maintains power due to the relative weakness of opposition parties.
Extempers should realize that there are major ethnic and religious cleavages in Nigeria that drive voting patterns as well. Northern Nigeria is poorer than Southern Nigeria and the North is also home to a large Muslim population. Southern Nigerians follow Christian beliefs. A similar divide exists in Sudan, which saw decades of sectarian civil war over such a geographic split. Nigeria avoided a similar fate, but suspicions between both regions have hindered attempts at national unity for decades. The Christian Science Monitor reports on March 31 that in 1999 an agreement was brokered between both regions that called for the Nigerian presidency to rotate between a southern politician and a northern politician. Southerner Olusegun Obasanjo assumed the presidency in 1999 and after two terms was replaced by Northern Muslim Yar’Adua. However, Yar’Adua died in 2010 and that caused his vice president, Jonathan, to take the presidency. This unsettled the rotation arrangement since Jonathan was a Southerner. It was expected that Jonathan would not seek re-election in 2011 so that a Northern politician could enjoy another four years of rule to balance out Obasanjo’s reign, but Jonathan did seek re-election and won (Buhari was his challenger). Northerners were angry at the election result, arguing that it would enable a Southerner to govern Nigeria for fourteen of the last sixteen years. According to The Christian Science Monitor on April 1, riots took place after the election outcome was announced, leading to the deaths of 1,000 people and leaving 65,000 homeless. Since 2011, Northerners have resented Jonathan’s presidency, arguing that he has neglected the economic development of Northern states, has channeled government aid to the South, and did not take the Boko Haram insurgency in the North seriously. Therefore, by the time the recent elections took place Northern voters were motivated to go the polls to elect Buhari, whose All Progressives Congress (APC) was a coalition of three prominent Nigerian opposition parties: the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), and the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP).
Buhari, a former major general in the Nigerian Army that seized power in a coup in 1983, was nominated by the APC as its presidential candidate. Buhari had run in the three previous Nigerian elections, but had fared poorly. He won 32% of the vote in 2003, 18% of the vote in 2007, and 31% of the vote in 2011. However, Nigerian anger at reports of corruption within Jonathan’s government worked to Buhari’s advantage. As Nigeria’s dictator between 1983 and 1985, Buhari developed a reputation of honesty as National Public Radio noted on April 1 that he put several politicians on trial for corruption. Critics said that some of these trials were politically motivated, but it is not as if Nigeria’s corruption problem is a figment of Buhari’s imagination. Since achieving independence from the British in 1960, Nigeria has battled corruption in government ministries, with some civil servants and elements of its military raiding the public treasury. Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil and natural gas producing nation, but the profits of these industries have rarely reached the Nigerian people due to the theft of its leaders and civil servants. The Economist on April 4 explains that during Jonathan’s term Mallam Sanusi Lamido, the country’s central bank governor, complained that $20 billion had been stolen by corrupt officials, but Jonathan did not take this accusation seriously. In fact, he sacked Sanusi, which turned out to be a poor political move because it made it appear that Jonathan was complicit in the theft of Nigerian oil and gas profits. Nigerian voters before the latest election had grown tired of corruption in their government, especially because that corruption has hindered social spending. Al Jazeera reports on March 27 that 60% of the Nigerian population lives in extreme poverty. The Economist adds that most of the country’s 170 million people live on less than $2 a day. Buhari and the APC capitalized on this discontent by pledging to eliminate corruption if they won the election. His supporters adopted the broom as their electoral symbol, arguing that a Buhari victory would “sweep” away governmental corruption.
Buhari’s military experience also worked to his advantage when speaking about the threat posed by Boko Haram. The Boko Haram insurgency began in the Nigerian Northeast six years ago. The group has thousands of followers and seeks to make Nigeria an Islamic state. The New York Times explains on April 1 that the Nigerian government initially botched its reaction against the group, sending poorly trained recruits to wage war on the organization and not arming them effectively. Jonathan’s government was also slow to cooperate with other countries in the region. The kidnapping of 200 schoolgirls last year and the government’s inability to rescue them also painted the Jonathan government as ineffective in fighting a regional terror threat. The New York Times adds that the Nigerian military also suffered poor morale during Jonathan’s term, which was connected to the fact that much of the country’s $6 billion military budget had been ransacked. Discipline within the Nigerian military is also questionable as it has been accused of human rights violations in the Northeast as it beats back Boko Haram. This behavior has caused the United States to withhold sending more advanced weapons to the Nigerian government because of concerns that they may be used against the Nigerian people. The Boko Haram threat caused this year’s presidential election to be postponed for six weeks, as it was originally supposed to be contested on February 14. Some were critical of the delay, arguing that it was meant to help bolster Jonathan’s electoral chances and indeed, the last six weeks have seen a stronger Nigerian offensive against Boko Haram. Nigeria has worked with its neighbors such as Chad, Cameroon, and Niger to fight the group and it has reported some successes in regaining territory. By election day, voters had to decide whether Jonathan could maintain this success or whether Buhari could do better.
Another prominent feature of the election was the state of the Nigerian economy. A GDP revision earlier this year revealed that Nigeria’s economy is now the largest in Africa, surpassing former leader South Africa. However, a revised GDP does not necessarily correlate into a great environment that will attract foreign investment and Nigeria has a great deal of problems when it comes to infrastructure. For example, Al Jazeera notes that more than 50% of the country lacks access to electricity. Also, the country’s reliance on oil and natural gas has been problematic because global oil prices have slumped since last year. The New York Times reports that 70% of the Nigerian government’s revenue comes from oil and natural gas exports, but the decline of these prices has caused the Jonathan government to reduce expenditures. Coupled with corruption, this has created a headache for his government. In addition, the naira, the country’s currency, has fallen 20% versus the dollar in the last six months and this has driven up the cost of imports, thereby depleting the country’s foreign reserves. Buhari pledged throughout the campaign to close the country’s budget deficit by fighting corruption and creating a better atmosphere for foreign investment, but his plan was still short on specifics to improve the country’s economic situation.
Buhari’s Election Win
There was a tense atmosphere heading into the recent presidential poll due to the North’s claims of being denied “their turn” at holding the presidency in 2011 and Boko Haram’s pledges to disrupt the poll. The six week delay also prompted concerns by the opposition that Jonathan intended to rig the vote so that he could stay in power. Vox reports on March 31 that past elections in Nigeria have been marred by vote buying and the use of “thugs” by political parties to intimidate voters or opposition candidates. The PDP and APC also had supporters that pledged to riot if their candidate did not win. To thwart a corrupt vote, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), headed by Professor Attahiru Jega, took steps to improve the national electoral process. The Guardian writes on March 30 that this was no easy feat considering that the election would have over 150,000 polling stations, but the INEC worked to install biometric security readers that would scan an individual’s thumbprint and thereby prevent double voting or identity fraud. Although The Christian Science Monitor from April 1 noted that 300 of these machines did not work on election day (even Jonathan reportedly had problems getting validated by a biometric machine at his polling place), international observers deemed the poll fair. The Internet also helped thwart fraud as Nigerians posted unofficial voting tallies, pictures, and videos of the count. The Guardian on April 1 noted that although there were some problems on election day, the steps taken by the INEC made large-scale fraud virtually impossible and created an environment for the “cleanest election in Nigerian history.”
During the campaign, the PDP attempted to portray Buhari as an Islamic extremist and a threat to national democracy. They reminded voters of human rights abuses that took place under Buhari in the 1980s, which included the silencing of the media and the banning of political meetings. The PDP also tried to rally voters on the religious question in the South, warning that Buhari had sympathy with those who wished to transform Nigeria into an Islamic state. The Christian Science Monitor from March 31 writes that Buhari did support the imposition of strict Islamic law in Northern Nigeria in the past, but Buhari did an effective job countering the PDP’s accusations. First, he said that his ideas on such issues had evolved (as have his ideas of democracy – he labeled himself as a “newborn democrat”). And second, he named Yemi Osbinbajo, a law professor and pastor of the country’s largest Pentecostal movement, as his running mate. These two moves, as well as disaffection with Jonathan’s administration, effectively countered the PDP efforts of trying to smear Buhari’s reputation before the election was held.
Forbes explains on March 31 that under Nigerian law, a candidate for the presidency must win a majority of the vote and also win at least 25% of the vote in two-thirds of the country’s thirty-six states, which also includes the Federal Capital Territory that is home to the capital city of Abuja. When results were announced on March 31, Buhari secured 52.4% of the vote versus 43.7% of the vote for Jonathan and satisfied the necessary victory conditions as enshrined in Nigerian law. The BBC notes on April 1 that in numerical terms this equated to 15.4 million votes for Buhari and 12.8 million votes for Jonathan. A further breakdown of the vote reveals that it could have been closer if Jonathan and the PDP had enjoyed greater turnout in the country’s Southern states. The UK Telegraph explains on March 31 that the PDP saw low turnouts in Christian-dominated areas, with Buhari winning more than one-third of the vote in some of these localities. In addition, the APC won twenty-one of Nigeria’s states versus fifteen for the PDP. The PDP also took the Federal Capital Territory. While Jonathan enjoyed low turnout in the South, Buhari enjoyed strong turnout in the North where voters defied Boko Haram’s threats of violence to wait for hours to vote. Quartz writes on March 30 that Boko Haram did attack Bauchi and Gobe states, but people still went to the polls in large numbers in those locations. The UK Telegraph adds that in Borno state, located in Northeast Nigeria, which has been home to the worst violence at the hands of Boko Haram, Buhari received 94% of the vote. Buhari also won the vote in Lagos, which dominates most of Nigeria’s commercial activity. A promising outcome of the recent election is that Buhari won votes among some Christians and Southerners, thereby making his victory more national than sectional. This might be a sign that Nigerian voters are beginning to look beyond a candidate’s background and focus their attention on where a candidate stands on policy issues.
It was anticipated that the most dangerous part of the election would come when the INEC announced the results, as some feared riots similar to 2011. The UK Telegraph explains that the United States and the British warned before the official announcement of results that there were “disturbing indications” that part of the count was rigged by the PDP, something that Jonathan denied. The Los Angeles Times writes on March 31 that when the INEC began its official count and it was clear that the PDP was headed for defeat that a PDP official charged that the vote was rigged. Godsday P. Orubebe, former minister of the oil-rich Niger Delta, also accused Jega of being “tribalistic” in handling disputes that went before the INEC. However, what followed stunned international observers and some Nigerian journalists. When it appeared as if he had definitely lost, Jonathan called Buhari and conceded defeat. Jonathan then conceded defeat publicly by announcing that he promised free elections and ensured that they took place and that “Nobody’s ambition is worth the blood of any Nigerian. The unity, stability, and progress of our dear country is more important than anything else.” Jonathan’s concession was praised by U.S. President Barack Obama, as well as the Mo Ibrahim Foundation that works to encourage African leaders to step down from power. Jonathan’s concession largely worked to reduce uncertainty over the election outcome, will likely rein in PDP challenges to the vote, and probably played a sizable role in avoiding large-scale riots across the country. The elections and their aftermath went so well that The Washington Post reveals on March 31 that some Nigerians took to social media to blast Western predictions that the polls would further divide the country.
The Meaning of Buhari’s Win for Africa and Nigeria
The meaning for Buhari’s win for Nigerian democracy cannot be understated. Future historians may look back on it as Nigeria’s version of the U.S. presidential election of 1800, a bitterly contested fight between Federalist President John Adams and Democrat-Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson won that contest, making Adams the first incumbent president to lose and a peaceful transfer of power then took place, which helped the country solidify that practice for successive elections. The recent Nigerian election may represent the same pattern as Buhari becomes the first challenger to unseat a sitting Nigerian president and Jonathan agreed to abide by the election result. Unlike other African leaders such as the Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to step down after losing a presidential election in 2010, Jonathan will step down peacefully and allow an opposition party to take power.
After Buhari’s victory, some analysts wonder whether a strengthened Nigerian democracy will end up encouraging political reform elsewhere on the continent. The Week writes on April 2 that although the world should be encouraged at Buhari’s win, the true test of Nigerian democracy will come in a few weeks when the country’s governors are elected. In the Nigerian political system governors enjoy a vast amount of powers relative to the central government and these politicians are often the ones who use their political machines to steal money from the country. These governors also tend to be very protective of their positions and corruption in local elections is a staple of the Nigerian system. Therefore, Buhari’s win is significant on a national scale, but more reform must be done to make the Nigerian model work more successfully on a regional and local level, thereby becoming a better model to export to other African countries. Still, the Agence France Presse reports on April 1 that the Nigerian election follows an encouraging pattern where sub-Saharan African incumbents have lost elections seven times since 2010. Also, Buhari’s victory might begin to show the power of democracy among Africa’s young people. Sub-Saharan Africa has 200 million people that are between the ages of 15 and 24 and this younger generation does not remember European colonialism and shows a greater willingness to abandon some of the traditional patterns of political loyalty their elders share. The enthusiasm generated from the Nigerian election might illustrate that the future of the continent’s democratic practices rest with its younger peoples. Yet it must also be said that Nigeria’s election enjoyed some differences than its other neighbors as the APC was stronger than other opposition movements in Burundi, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Nigerian INEC enjoyed more powers relative to other bodies in the region. Thus, Nigerian democracy might become a model for West Africa and other surrounding nations in the future, but it does enjoy some unique qualities that other countries are not able to replicate at the present time.
In terms of whether Buhari will be successful, he has set himself up to tackle some very sizable tasks in a short amount of time. The Brookings Institution writes on March 31 that Buhari must direct more federal aid to Northern Nigeria, which is far more underdeveloped than its neighbors to the South. Doing so would give Northern Nigerians a greater stake in the future of the nation and also work to reduce some levels of distrust that citizens in that area of the country have for the central government. Buhari must also continue cooperation with other African nations to fight Boko Haram. Eliminating that security threat would protect workers who will be sent to rebuild the territory, yet also win more trust from Northern Nigerians that did not see a robust government response under Jonathan. The biggest challenge that Buhari will face is cleaning up corruption. The Wall Street Journal writes on April 1 that the Nigerian Stock Exchange made its biggest one-day leap in five years after the result of the presidential election was announced, but there are concerns that Buhari’s anti-corruption plan will be a long-term process. The World Bank sees Nigerian corruption as an endemic problem, something that has persisted so long that is has almost become part of the country’s political culture. Tackling this aggressively will not be easy, especially because it will put Buhari into conflict with other political figures that he may need to secure the passage and enforcement of future legislation. Fighting corruption could also increase political tensions if it appears that the APC is only interested in going after PDP figures and indeed, this was one of the reasons some observers thought Jonathan would be reluctant to cede power. It is important that in Buhari’s anti-corruption drive that he proceeds in a nonpartisan manner. He enjoys much goodwill at the moment, but that could be squandered if it begins appearing like a traditional politician that is solely interested in settling scores.
National Public Radio writes that Buhari will enjoy a six month honeymoon to begin showing his supporters that he is working to fix Nigeria’s problems. Buhari was vague on the campaign trail about what he intends to do about economic underdevelopment, corruption, and security, but now that he will assume power he must create a coherent plan that will alleviate voter’s concerns. If he fails, future historians may one day see his presidency as a missed opportunity and it could stymie Nigeria’s quest to become a regional powerhouse in the coming years.