Nigeria’s parliament empowered vice-president Goodluck Jonathan on Tuesday to run Africa’s most populous nation in place of an ill and absent president.
The politicians are striving for a political end to a crisis that ground the government to a virtual halt and triggered the resumption of an insurgency in the vital oil sector.
But the move is not contemplated in the constitution, legal experts say, and could cause more friction between the Christian south, which gains the presidency at least temporarily, and the Muslim north, which finds itself out of the seat of power.
When President Umaru Yar’Adua left Nigeria in late November, he did not write a letter to the vice-president alerting him of the medical absence and empowering him to act as president, as called for by the 1999 constitution.
Yar’Adua, who has suffered from kidney ailments for quite a while, left for Saudi Arabia on November 23 and was admitted to a hospital there the next day for what his physician said was acute pericarditis, an inflammation of the sac surrounding the heart.
Yar’Adua’s absence has caused a cease-fire he negotiated with insurgents in the country’s oil-rich Niger Delta to unravel and left no one formally in charge of the nation of 150 million.
Oil contracts went unsigned and there was confusion about who was in charge.
Constitution
The political turmoil in a powerful country with a long history of coups and military dictatorships recently prompted US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton and European leaders to call on the nation to follow its constitution.
Newspapers began worrying about possible coup scenarios as Yar’Adua’s absence grew longer. However, military leaders insist they have no ambitions to take power and say they would respect the constitution.
Both the House of Representatives and the Senate on Tuesday passed measures calling on Jonathan to act as president and commander in chief until Yar’Adua returns from Saudi Arabia. There’s no indication Yar’Adua will return any time soon.
It was unclear when, or if, Jonathan would be sworn in as president. Constitutional succession does not require such a ceremony.