Months of turmoil over Nigeria’s leadership have exposed the gulf between its reform-minded professional class and a political elite accused of being utterly self-serving and indifferent to its image abroad.
Africa’s most populous country has taken huge strides in the decade since it emerged from military rule. Its banks are opening branches in London and New York, its mobile phone market has become the continent’s biggest and a crop of new airlines are adding routes around Africa and further afield.
But while ambitious entrepreneurs strive to build world-class businesses and persuade foreign investors Nigeria is more than just a risky frontier market, its political class has done little to shake off a reputation for corruption and greed.
“Many Nigerians in the diaspora started moving back home at the turn of the new millennium with high hopes and a sense of momentum,” said Seye Akinola, a 24-year old investment analyst who returned to Lagos from the US a year ago.
“But it’s our brothers and sisters in power that have thrown away the rudder of the ship and decided that, instead of steering us to El Dorado, they’d rather bicker and gorge over the spoils from their fishing expeditions,” he said.
The oil-producing nation of 140mn has been teetering on the brink of constitutional crisis and government paralysis since November, while rival factions battled for influence as President Umaru Yar’Adua lay in a Saudi hospital bed.
It took court challenges, street protests and resolutions by both houses of parliament to persuade those around Yar’Adua to let him hand over to Vice President Goodluck Jonathan.
Two weeks after he did, Yar’Adua was flown back in a mobile intensive care unit at the dead of night in an apparent bid to maintain the influence of the cabal around him.
“In a normal country what would have happened … is that an incapacitated head of state would have resigned or been constitutionally eased out,” said Lagos-based consultant Adeyemi Adeleke. “It makes us all look foolish and impotent.”
Even Information Minister Dora Akunyili, who has been spearheading a “rebranding Nigeria” campaign meant to help shed an image of corruption and mismanagement, acknowledged the handling of Yar’Adua’s absence had been damaging.
“I would call it a brand eroder. It has eroded whatever little we had left,” she told Reuters.
“Some of us feel that the rebranding Nigeria project may not be resuscitated very easily because of what is happening. The whole world is watching us,” she said.
Yar’Adua’s return on Wednesday was so shrouded in secrecy that even Jonathan, the acting president and commander-in-chief, did not know he was coming.
The US issued a statement of concern his return might create renewed uncertainty even before the Nigerian government was able to publicly confirm he was back home.
“A group of incompetents are putting the country’s image through the grinder,” said 25-year old management consultant Lanre Oyedotun, who recently returned from Boston, Massachusetts to start his own business in the commercial hub of Lagos.
Many wealthier Nigerians of Oyedotun’s generation were educated in England or the US in the late 1980s and 1990s when Nigeria was a military dictatorship with little foreign investment and a disintegrating education system.
They watched with cautious optimism as it began to return to democracy in 1999 with the election of Olusegun Obasanjo and as reforms helped win $18bn of debt relief in 2005.
But three decades of military rule took a heavy toll on Nigerian politics, a world of patronage in which the reward of high office is the opportunity to control lucrative government contracts rather than to serve the public interest.
The result is a nation full of anomalies.
Despite being one of the world’s biggest crude oil exporters, petrol shortages are a way of life. Much of the country can go without mains electricity for weeks. Two Nigerians are on the latest Forbes billionaires list, yet 80% of the population survive on $2 a day.
“We are a young democracy, only a decade out of military rule. It will take time,” said civil servant Julius Ogunro.
“All we pray for is there is no coup d’etat. That would set back what progress we have made.” — Reuters