Political Culture and Participation in Nigeria

Any country’s political culture reflects the impact of its history on the way people think about politics and their society as a whole. In Nigeria’s case, the lack of unity and support for the regime and, at times, for the very existence of Nigeria have plagued it since the country gained its independence. What’s more, the actions of the elite since 1960 have undoubtedly left the country more alienated and polarized than it was forty years ago. That alienation and polarization, in turn, are reflected in what average people do politically, thus adding yet another strain to an already overloaded system.

Mass Political Culture

As with most third world countries, there have been no systematic studies of Nigerian political culture even though most observers are convinced that it is one of the most important causes of its fluid, unstable politics. Therefore, all we can do here is outline the broad themes those observers point to.

First and most obviously, there is little that most Nigerians like about their political system. Things did not start that way. A few polls done in the early 1960s suggested that Nigerians had a greater sense of nationhood than did people in most of the third world. One 1962 survey found that only 16 percent of those sampled had trouble thinking of Nigeria in national terms. Similarly, three quarters of that same sample felt that Nigeria had "made progress" over the past five years and two-thirds thought if would continue to do so in the five years to come.

However, that early optimism did not turn into sustained support for any of the country’s regimes. If anything, Nigerians have grown more skeptical and cynical about politics and politicians.

Part of the problem is that Nigeria is one of the most fragmented countries in the world. As we have seen earlier, the division is largely along overlapping religious and ethnic lines. The more naive observers assumed that ethnic identification would give way to a national one soon after independence, not just in Nigeria but in the newly independent states in general. That has not been the case. If anything, ethnicity has become more not less, important.

The limited evidence available to us suggests that most Nigerians do in some way think of themselves as Nigerians. However, their ethnic identification matters more as a source of pride (e.g., we Igbo) and even more importantly as a source of dislike and division (e.g., you Yoruba).

The three largest groups (Hausa-Fulani, Igbo, and Yoruba) have virtually nothing in common politically, socially, or historically. The overwhelming majority of Nigerians only speak their "home" language, and if they learn another, it is invariably English and not one of the other indigenous tongues. The different groups live separately, either in their traditional regions or in ethnic enclaves in the few cities that are ethnically mixed.

Closely paralleling ethnicity is religion. Religion is nowhere near as important as ethnicity in most of the south, where, for instance, Yoruba Muslims tend to act politically as Yorubas more often than as Muslims.

In the north, however, it is hard to disentangle the impact of religion and ethnicity because so much of Hausa-Fulani culture is defined along Islamic lines. Traditional political and religious officials (who are often one and the same) have resisted attempts to "Westernize" the region, often with considerable success. Women have never voted in the north. Similarly, when the federal government sent Igbo women census takers into the region in 1963, it touched off widespread protests. The northern desire to use a separate legal system based on sharia or Islamic law has held up the drafting of the constitutions of all three republics.

Finally, there is the region itself, which to some degree transcends both religion and ethnicity in even broader fears the north has about the south and vice versa. As we saw earlier, many northerners are afraid that southern (or modern) cultural values and economic practices will undermine their way of life. Southerners, by contrast, fear that a northern majority could seize power and leave them a permanent and aggrieved minority.

Nigeria is by no means the only country divided along these lines; Other countries are even more fragmented, and some, like the Netherlands, have a similar pattern of overlapping cleavages but have avoided the destructive controversies that ha plagued Nigerian politics.

The problem is that Nigeria is not just fragmented, it is polarized as well. Under the best of circumstances, it is hard for people to reach compromises about these kinds of issues to find a way, for instance, to use the sharia in some parts of a country but not in others without antagonizing people. In Nigeria, the politicians who have fanned the flames of ethnic, religious, and regional hatred also failed to address the country's real social and economic shortcomings. Therefore, it was just a matter of time until the violence that had been primarily orchestrated by the elites started breaking out spontaneously among an increasingly embittered public.

The importance of this alienation has been magnified by other aspects of Nigerian political culture, not the least of which has been the failure of class issues to take root. Most Nigerians live in abject poverty; in fact, poverty is one of the few things most Nigerians share. Moreover, the gap between rich and poor has grown dramatically, in particular as the corrupt political elite has siphoned off public funds to support its lavish life-style. Had economic issues become more important in defining basic values and assumptions about politics, Nigeria might have found itself in a better position. Reactions against that common poverty might have cut across ethnic, religious, and regional lines.

There also are sharp differences between rural and urban cultures. In the countryside, where about two-thirds of all Nigerians still live, many "traditional" structures and values remain strong. In particular, rural elites have found it relatively easy to turn the power the British handed them as emirs or chiefs into powerful patron-client relations (recall the oyabun-kobun relationships in Japan or the jatis in India).

In a 1988 study of politics in rural Nigeria, William Miles showed that the traditional distinction between nobles and commoners has been carried over into the politics of modern Nigeria. Virtually everyone seems to accept the hierarchical relationships in which clients defer to their patrons when it comes to politics or advice in general.

Moreover, most seem to reject such notions as "all men are created equal" or a world in which one's rank or status does not matter. To the degree that it is understood, democracy is sharply at odds with values that remain strong in most areas of rural Nigeria. One herder defined democracy this way in talking with Miles: "Men wander around like cattle, without any direction. They make all kinds of excited noises, but there's no sense to it. Each goes his own way, lost, until there's no more herd."

In addition, it is in the countryside where illiteracy remains the highest. Not surprisingly, local studies have shown that most rural residents have at most a fuzzy idea of what national political processes and issues are all about. For instance, on the morning after the 1983 coup, Nigerian radio began playing western classical music, which residents in one typical village assume is military music because it is only played before the announcement of a coup or some other ominous event! When the announcement itself was made, it was done in English, which very few people in the countryside understand. Only two days later was it broadcast in Hausa. Perhaps because of their isolation, rural residents rarely get deeply involved in national politics on their own. Rather, they tend either to follow the initiatives of their local patrons or be swayed by the outsiders who appear during crises or election campaigns.

The booming cities are a different story altogether. There, observers find highly politicized people who seem willing to take a stand on almost any issue at almost any time. They also find large numbers of highly dissatisfied people, alienated from a government that cannot provide jobs or housing of health care.

That cynicism is not simply an urban phenomenon. The peasants Miles lived with were convinced that politicians are by their very nature dishonest and that it makes no sense whatsoever to trust them. And, since cultures change slowly under the best of circumstances, it seems unlikely that these values will erode any time soon, no matter what the Obasanjo government does.

Elite Culture

In every country, elites think and act differently from the mass public. In few places, however, are the differences as pronounced and as politically important as they are in Nigeria.

The political and economic elite has been what amounts to a bourgeois class if not quite in the way Marx anticipated. Its wealth stems from its control of the state. This has given rise to a category of political and bureaucratic officials popularly known as lootocrats who have used their positions for tremendous personal gain and who, like the European bourgeoisie Marx did write about, have been able to protect their wealth and power under civilian and military rule alike. In the high stakes game of Nigerian politics, defeat cut one out of the process in which wealth was accumulated and distributed.

Consequently, with but a few exceptions, those in Nigerian elite were willing to violate the rules of democratic game under the first two republics and overstep normal bounds of authority when the military was in power. They accurately saw that the electoral stakes were very high and demonstrated what Larry Diamond calls "a shallow disposition to tolerate opposition when they had the power to discourage and repress it." That greed and the willingness to subvert the democratic process that went along with it were shared by the elite as a whole and were not the province of any particular ethnic, religious, or regional group. On the other hand, the elites were quick to use ethnic, religious, and regional appeals because those were the ones they could most effectively use to mobilize their largely rural clients.

Given this brief description of Nigerian mass and elite cultures, we can easily see three problems they pose for any country trying to sustain democratic rule. First, there is at most a limited and grudging sense of national identity or integration. The values that matter most to most people lead them to define who they are politically on the basis of where they stand on those sub-national, overlapping, and polarizing cleavages. Second, no Nigerian regime has enjoyed much legitimacy, without which, the theorists tell us, any kind of stable regime is impossible. Political scientists often point to the voluntary payment of taxes as a simple indicator of the degree to which a people find their regime legitimate. In 1979, FEDECO disqualified nearly forty nominated candidates for not having paid any taxes at all! Third, there is not much trust or toleration of other individuals and groups across ethnic, religious, and regional boundaries. Moreover, most Nigerians do not hold their leaders in high regard, an attitude mirrored in reverse by those very same leaders.

That said, elite and mass cultures are different in one key respect. Elite cultures can change quickly for two reasons. First, a while new set of leaders can come to power. Second, because there are relatively few people involved, a group of incumbents can decide to change more easily and rapidly than a population as a whole.

And, there are some encouraging signs that one or both may happen under Obasanjo.

Non-Electoral Participation

If we looked at culture alone, it would be tempting to conclude that Nigeria is again a disastrous civil war or revolution waiting to happen. Neither seems imminent in Nigeria today, ironically, precisely because the long history of military rule has neither provided many outlets for protesting participation nor created widespread expectations that mass involvement of any sort can accomplish much. Thus, while there have been episodes of spontaneous, violent protest as recently as 1998, they have been few and far between in comparison with India or many other ethnically divided societies.

Students of democracy argue that it can thrive only if there are ample guarantees and opportunities for people to express themselves politically either as individuals or as part of groups. Here, Nigeria has a mixed record on at least two counts. First, civil liberties of all sorts have frequently been honored in the breach even under the first two republics. As we saw earlier, civilian politicians were all too willing to implement provisions for emergency rule and bully their opponents by denying them the effective right to vote or express their opinions. At times, especially under Babangida and Abacha, their opponents were arbitrarily arrested—or worse.

On the other hand, we should not confuse military rule in Nigeria with some of the extremely ruthless dictatorships the world has seen in this century, such as the one in Iraq today. During most periods of military rule, the press has remained reasonably free and has frequently criticized governments and their policies. Many interest groups were allowed to remain in existence, though, as with the press, those critical of military rule itself were often suppressed.

Second, there are sharp differences between rural and urban Nigeria. If the anthropologists are to be believed, there is little ongoing political life in the countryside other than during election campaigns. There are times, however, when major protests break out in the countryside. Thus, as these lines were being written, activists from the Ijwa and Itsekeri peoples had been engaged in months of near-civil war over ethnic differences and access to the oil wealth of the Niger delta region.

The spontaneous and often violent protests that have wracked Nigeria have occurred primarily in the cities, especially in the former capital, Lagos. There they have often been dramatic and even violent. In the early 1990s, rioters burned cars, looted stores, and trashed government offices in Lagos to protest against the government’s acceptance of an IMF-imposed austerity program to be discussed in the policy section below. In urban areas, we also find a wide variety of groups representing doctors, lawyers, students, and more. Informal groups of business leaders or ethnic associations seem to be far more influential in large part because they can work more effectively within the patron-client networks that still largely dominate Nigerian politics.

There have also been a number of groups that have pushed for legal and constitutional reform, especially when military rule began to weaken. Thus, today’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) is an outgrowth of the earlier People’s Democratic Movement which was founded by General Shehu Yar’Adua and other former officials who had been imprisoned under Babangida (Yar’Adua died in prison in 1996). Similarly, the 63 human rights organizations that made up the Transition Monitoring Group (TMG) brought to light a number of violations of the electoral law during the 1999 legislative and presidential campaign.

Political parties and competitive elections are accorded a privileged place in analyses of democracy. On the one hand, their very existence is part of the definition of liberal democracy itself. On the other, how they operate in practice goes a long way in determining whether or not democracy will endure. Earlier, we saw that there were a number of highly active political parties before independence and then during the First and Second republics. The military regime then created two new parties as part of the transition to a third republic, which ended with the ill-fated presidential election of 1993.

Afterward, the Abacha government banned all partisan activity, a ban that remained in effect as what turned out to be sham consultations on a new constitution began. Indeed, it was only after Abacha’s death in June 1998 that the government authorized the creation of new political parties.

Unlike the parties created along with the second republic, the parties that sprang to live in late 1998 had little in common with earlier institutions. That is not to say, however, that they were independent of the outgoing military regime.

In all, nine political parties gained legal recognition. Of them, only three did well enough in state and local elections to run in the 1999 legislative and presidential elections (See Tables 6 and 7).

And of them, two had close links indeed to the military. Obasanjo and others who had come to oppose the Abacha government in the mid-1990s (though only after many of them had been sent to prison) formed the People’s Democratic Party. There are widely believed rumors, however, that the PDP has close ties to the military, especially to supporters of former President Babangida who is said to have donated as much as $18 million to the party’s coffers. The smaller All People’s Party (APP) is led by politicians who were close to Abacha. Only the small Alliance for Democracy (AD) had anything approaching serious democratic credentials, since it was led by people who had been close to Abiola. What’s more, in all the articles written on the 1999 elections, the parties’ goals and ideologies are rarely mentioned, since they hardly figured in the campaign.

The elections largely lived up to the mixed expectations of most observers.

On the one hand, Obasanjo and the PDP did about as well as expected. The party handily won the legislative elections totaling just under 60 percent of the vote and the seats for both houses. Their poor showing in the legislative elections prompted the AD and APP to run a single candidate, Ole Falae, in the presidential election. Obasanjo, however, did slightly better than his party had in that two-way race, winning nearly 63 percent of the vote, though he ran poorly in his native Yoruba-dominated west.

On the other hand, there were the all-too-frequent charges of electoral fraud that prompted Falae to challenge the outcome in the courts. International and domestic monitors agreed that there had been considerable abuse. The most flagrant examples included instances in which the polls never opened because local officials arrived at the voting stations with ballot papers that had already been filled out. Nonetheless, most impartial observers felt that there were abuses on all sides, and that they were not extensive enough to have altered the outcome of the election. The courts then threw out Falae’s challenge and Obasanjo took office on schedule.

Table 6
The Legislative Elections—1999

House of Representatives Senate

Note: 12 seats in the House of Representatives and 1 in the Senate were still to be filled when these results were published by the Nigerian government.

The relatively smooth 1999 elections should not obscure the fact that ethnicity and the tensions that go with it remain just below the surface at any time. To see that, consider this typical Hausa song used by the NPN during its 1983 campaign.

Every slimy (NPP) supporter is a dog.

If he dies, do not bury him.

Burn him in fire, the ingrate dog.

Jatau Oye, (Governor Rimi of Kano) is a slave to the Jews.

He will teach your sons to be effeminate.

They will tie women's wrappers round their hips.

He treats people like dirt.

Kano has ...elected a consummate hypocrite.

May God take away this Satan,

King of the Ingrates."