ABUJA, Nigeria — Here in the Nigerian capital, the rows of campaign
billboards promoting President Goodluck Jonathan have been ripped down.
In some places, images of the soon-to-be ex-president have been defaced.
Mr. Jonathan, with his legacy of economic and military disasters,
cannot leave soon enough, in the eyes of many Nigerians.
But at
this critical time, with Nigeria battling terrorists, fuel shortages and
growing state debts, who exactly is replacing him?
In many ways,
the former military ruler who is set to be sworn in as Nigeria’s
president on Friday, Muhammadu Buhari, remains an enigma. He seems
composed of two such thoroughly contradictory strands — a former
strongman who espouses democratic change — that it is hard to know which
one will prevail when he takes over the government of Nigeria this
week.
Will the Muhammadu Buhari of 30 years ago show himself —
the harsh military dictator who jailed journalists, inflicted physical
humiliation on civil servants and expelled thousands of immigrants?
In
a country that has taken much punishment from bad rulers and continues
to do so, he was one of the worst, critics say. As with Mr. Jonathan
this week, few Nigerians were sorry to see him go when Mr. Buhari was
overthrown in a coup in 1985 after about a year and a half in office.
The
Mr. Buhari of today shows little to no contrition for his younger self.
He simply says that he has changed with the times and that he is now a
thoroughgoing democrat. As proof, he cites the fact that he has
submitted himself, as he likes to put it, to the democratic process four
times, losing three presidential votes before finally winning in a
historic transfer of power from the governing party to the opposition
this year.
This Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation that Mr. Buhari implicitly insists he has undergone can be hard to reconcile.
Still,
there is a palpable feeling of hope in Nigeria as Mr. Buhari gets set
to take over. Mostly, it is simply relief that the hapless Mr. Jonathan
is finally exiting.
With Boko Haram still virulent in the
northeast, the economy cratering and a crippling fuel shortage stemming
from Nigeria’s costly system of oil subsidies, Nigerians are glad to
know that Mr. Jonathan can no longer do any damage. Mr. Buhari’s
distaste for corruption in general — and the flagrant variety of the
Jonathan administration in particular — is also well known.
Despite
being one of the world’s leading oil producers, Nigerians have lined up
miserably at gas stations because of the fuel shortage, which has been
choking the Nigerian economy, the continent’s largest, for weeks.
Some
of the country’s mobile phone companies warned that fuel shortages
could impact their services because it was hard to supply their base
stations. On Monday, one of Nigeria’s biggest banks said it was closing
branches early because of the fuel crisis, news reports said.
Though
Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer, generating thousands of
barrels a day, it has to import its fuel because its refineries are
dysfunctional.
Instead, the nation relies on dozens of oil
importers who buy fuel on the global market, at market price. The
government then gives them millions of dollars in subsidies so that the
fuel can be sold cheaply at the pump — 43 cents a liter, about $1.62 a
gallon.
This has led to large-scale abuses. A parliamentary
committee last year found that the subsidy system, with its
ever-increasing number of importers licensed by the government, was
“fraught with endemic corruption and entrenched inefficiency. Much of
the amount claimed to have been paid as subsidy was actually not for
consumed” fuel, the committee found.
In recent weeks, the
importers stopped distributing fuel because they claimed the government
owed them $1 billion, creating the fuel shortage. The situation began to
ease Monday, with fuel depots reopening and gas finally making its way
to the pumps, after the exiting Jonathan government agreed to pay the
oil importers.
“Never in the history of our country has any
government handed over to another a more distressed country: No
electricity, no fuel, workers are on strike, billions are owed to state
and federal workers, 60 billion dollars are owed in national debt and
the economy is virtually grounded,” said Alhaji Lai Mohammed, a
spokesman for Mr. Buhari’s All Progressives Congress party, in a
statement on Sunday.
Two weeks ago, the country’s governors came
hat in hand to the president-in-waiting, Mr. Buhari, pleading for money
to pay state employee salaries. Their stated impoverishment is due
partly to the drop in the price of oil, Nigeria’s dominant source of
revenue, but also to their own profligacy.
Most of our state
governors are irresponsibly corrupt and reckless and govern without any
due consideration to the public good,” the country’s leading political
scientist, Jibrin Ibrahim, wrote this month.
The new president’s
response was cool. He did not promise to bail them out, indicating that
Mr. Buhari is less interested in currying favor with these local power
brokers than in being realistic.
“The expectation is too high,”
he was cryptically quoted as saying afterward. Only a few of the
governors were smiling in the group portrait taken later, and Mr. Buhari
decidedly was not.
Last week, Mr. Buhari dropped another hint that it would not be business as usual once he assumes office.
In
an interview published Friday in the Daily Trust newspaper, the
president-elect said that instead of allowing the powerful state
governors to pick cabinet ministers — the color-by-numbers approach of
the defeated party, a tactic to mollify these local kinglets — he would
be his own man on the ministerial appointments.
“We are hoping
that we’ll get good people to be in charge of ministries who can apply
themselves to their responsibilities,” the newspaper quoted Mr. Buhari
as saying.
It would be a revolution — and not of the brutal type
the former general tried to put in place as a much younger man in the
early 1980s.
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/05/27/world/africa/former-strongman-taking-over-presidency-raises-hope-in-nigeria.html
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