Election decision fails to pour oil on troubled waters

The judges clearly took the view that, at this crucial juncture in Nigeria’s history, any other course would have been too difficult to contemplate and would only have led to further damaging complications. In common with the rest of the world, Nigeria is suffering from the economic meltdown and in its case the situation is made much worse by the fact that the price of oil, the country’s main export, has fallen, with the result that the economy is now at a standstill. Under those circumstances it is clearly a case of better the devil you know.

However, it is a moot point as to whether Yar’Adua or Jonathan will thank those members of the bench who have given them this second chance – for second chance it was, with evidence that ballot boxes were openly stuffed and in some cases never reached polling stations. To say that these were free and fair elections is to say that the world is flat or that the Pope is not a Catholic. Some observers claimed that the elections were the worst ever witnessed in Africa – now that’s really saying something.

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For their pains the duo find themselves with an economy which is in meltdown and an infrastructure which is in daily danger of terminal collapse. Things are especially bad in the delta region, which is home to the bulk of the population and the place where most of the oil companies do their business. Criminality is rife, communal violence is endemic and billions of dollars are siphoned off the Nigerian economy through the simple ruse of smuggling huge quantities of oil. Some estimates claim up to half a million barrels disappeared last year and that the numbers are rising.

At various stages there have been fitful attempts to put a stop to the trade – in July, prime minister Gordon Brown promised to put a British finger in the dyke – but these have been thwarted by the violent measures employed by the people who do the illegal bunkering or cut the oil lines, the better to steal their contents.

With unemployment at astronomical levels it’s easy enough to find sufficient numbers of young, unthinking heavies who know how to wield a Kalashnikov and will use it to protect their bosses’ precious cargoes of so-called “blood oil”. (The description borrows the term from the “blood diamonds”, the precious stones which helped to pay for the civil conflicts in neighbouring Sierra Leone earlier in the decade.) To be fair to Yar’Adua, a well-educated and well-intentioned Muslim from Katsina in the north of the country, he has made all the right noises about instituting reforms. But the gulf between making promises and then realising them is probably unbridgeable.

There is a total lack of accountability; the different parties are unwilling to be transparent about their funding; the police refuse to investigate intimidation and the violence that goes with it, and corruption is a fact of everyday life. So slight has any change been that Yar’Adua is now known as “Baba-go-slow”, an ironic reworking of the Nigerian honorific for a wise elder.

What seems to have saved him is that he is not the same kind of politician as his predecessor Olusegun Obasanjo, whose “big man” style of politics helped to get Nigeria into the mess that it is in today. A former soldier, Obasanjo rode roughshod through just about every aspect of Nigerian politics and casually committed the kind of excesses that have given modern African politics such a bad name.

To his credit, Yar’Adua has been the precise opposite, but his critics argue that he has been painfully slow in introducing any kind of reform programme and that on his watch there have been no noticeable changes in the pace or style of Nigerian politics.

All that might change now his election has been validated by the courts, but unless meaningful reforms are introduced to prevent the kind of corruption which marred the 2007 election it’s difficult to see him as anything other than a busted flush. Yar’Adua’s supporters claim that the Supreme Court decision will change everything by reigniting his election pledges. Perhaps that’s the case – or perhaps he will join that baleful number of politicians who are warned to take care what they wish for in case it comes true.