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Nigeria
Nigeria at the crossroads
Nigeria is a bewildering country. Even the most outrageous scenarios dreamt up by fanciful novelists pale before the actual reality on the ground, as evidenced in the current situation of political impasse, massacres in Jos, and an economy adrift. Nothing goes as we think or hope, or would want to believe. Reporting from Lagos, Adewale Maja-Pearce tells of a country beset by a power vacuum but where nothing much will happen between now and May next year when general and presidential elections will be held.
No amount of fantastic invention can possibly compete with the reality on the ground in Nigeria today. Fidelity to the facts of what actually happens in Nigeria is magical realism enough for anyone. Take the current power vacuum. As things stand, the country is without a substantive president. Or, to put it another way, we do have a president but nobody in authority has laid eyes on him since November last year, when he travelled to Saudi Arabia for a medical condition. President Umaru Yar’Adua was away for three months and in all that time nobody knew whether he was alive or dead because the official delegations that went to find out were blocked by his wife, Turai. And that was that.
Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan was hamstrung to act. According to the Nigerian constitution, the president continues as president until either he writes formally to the legislature transferring power to his deputy or the legislature impeaches him. Given the rumoured state of his health, he may or may not have been capable of the first, but the legislators for their part were reluctant to undertake the second on the grounds that it would not do to impeach a sick man. They simply wanted to know his condition.
Eventually, the legislators reached a compromise and made Jonathan the acting president, whereupon the nation woke up one morning shortly afterwards to the news that the president was back in the country. It seemsd that he had arrived in the dead of night and was whisked away in an ambulance to Aso Rock, the presidential palace in Abuja, without anybody seeing him. His chief press secretary has since confirmed that he is indeed alive and that Jonathan continues as acting president. That was the scenario as we went to press. What is one to make of it all? The most obvious explanation is that the political entity known as the North doesn’t want to transfer power to the political entity known as the South. Turn-by-turn, Nigeria dictates that each side gets its own two terms – eight years – and here we are barely through the first.
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