ECSTATIC crowds engulfed Kano’s streets as it became clear that
Muhammadu Buhari, a former military strongman who ruled Nigeria in the
1980s, had led an opposition party to victory in a presidential contest
for the first time in the country’s history.
Passengers piled on top of lorries waved the national flag as drivers
honked their horns in northern Nigeria’s biggest city. Jubilant
drumbeating revellers shouted the name of the man back in the seat of
power after an absence of three decades.
“We will celebrate for seven days,” said Aliyu Haruna Aliyu, a farmer
outside the headquarters of Mr Buhari’s All Progressives Congress. “We
have won the most free and fair election ever to take place in Nigeria.
This is a new Nigeria.”
It is indeed a watershed for Africa’s biggest democracy and most
populous country, 170m-strong. The defeated president, Goodluck
Jonathan, graciously conceded defeat, acknowledging that the rule of his
People’s Democratic Party, unbroken since the generals gave way to a
civilian government in 1999, had ended.
Mr Buhari, a northern Muslim who led a coup in 1983, had fought the
three previous elections in vain. This time he won all the northern
states but also made inroads in the south and centre, easily meeting the
electoral requirement that the winner must get at least a quarter of
the votes in two-thirds of the 36 states to show support across the
tribal and sectarian spectrum.
The party has a lot to prove. It has proclaimed itself the harbinger of
change, winning over voters disgusted by their government’s dishonesty
and its failure to end an Islamist insurgency in the north-east that has
cost at least 15,000 lives.
Despite the brutally repressive regime headed by Mr Buhari in the 1980s,
people are putting enormous faith in him. His fierce denunciation of
corruption and his frugal lifestyle appeal to the poor, who make up the
majority of Nigerians. Many of them think it will take a former general
to root out the corruption rampant in the upper echelons of the army and
to defeat the jihadists. “We will end Boko Haram,” his party’s posters
promised.
Nigeria in graphics: the issues behind the 2015 election
But Mr Buhari will be hamstrung from the start by an economy that relies
massively on oil for government revenue and foreign exchange. The
federal coffers have emptied as the price of oil has tumbled. Mr Buhari
says he will make up the difference by cutting waste and corruption. Yet
some of his most senior party men are crooks.
Moreover, as a Muslim from the north, Mr Buhari may find it hard to
contain violence in the Niger delta, in the south. Fighters in that
oil-producing region laid down their arms in 2009 and have since grown
fat on amnesty payments and dodgy security contracts. Some of them
promised to return to war if Mr Buhari’s lot, who are expected to do
away with the expensive peace pact, won.
Mr Jonathan, a Christian from the delta, had banked on landslide wins in
that region. He did notch up a hefty vote there, but people failed to
turn out for him in the same dedicated masses as Mr Buhari’s fans in the
north. In Kano, the second most populous state, almost 2m people queued
for hours in the baking sun to cast their votes for him, whereas Mr
Jonathan’s tally there was paltry. Mr Buhari also won Lagos, Nigeria’s
burgeoning commercial capital, whose GDP exceeds that of many west
African countries. He swung a lot of voters who had previously backed Mr
Jonathan onto his side in the south-west and in the so-called middle
belt, defying the conventional wisdom that Nigerians vote almost
entirely along ethnic and religious lines.
The poll was still marred by technical glitches, Boko Haram terror and
concerns that the electoral commission might succumb to political
interference in collating the figures. But Attahiru Jega, the
commission’s indefatigable head, has received well-deserved plaudits for
maintaining his independence in overseeing the process. He withstood
government pressure to ban new permanent voter cards and biometric
readers which, despite teething problems, made box-stuffing harder.
“Analogue rigging met digital countermeasures,” said Tunji Lardner, a
civil-society campaigner. “Analogue lost.”
The current government has another two months in power. A peaceful
handover at the end of May would send a telling signal to leaders
elsewhere in Africa, some of whom want to breach their constitutional
term limits. Meanwhile Nigerians hope that their first-ever ejection of
an incumbent president at the ballot box marks the maturing of their
democracy. “If things are not better with Buhari”, says Aisha Musa, a
housewife in Kano, “we will get rid of him in four years’ time.”
