Two issues have dominated public policy making in Nigeria since it gained its independence—democratization and development. No government—civilian or military—has made much lasting progress on either front, giving rise to the widespread futility and dissatisfaction that characterizes political life there today.

Political scientists have rarely included the development of. democracy as part of a country's public policy. In the past few years, however, political scientists have had to shift their attention to it because so many formerly communist countries as well as many third world states have begun conscious, planned attempts to create liberal democratic regimes.

For the most part, Africa has lagged behind the rest of the world in democratization, and no African country has fared worse in this respect than Nigeria. Nigeria's first experiment with democracy involved very little political choice or public planning. The parliamentary system it adopted at independence was inherited from the British, and neither the colonizers nor the colonized seriously considered any other options.

Development economists often refer to factories that are built by outsiders and then handed over to third world businesses or governments as turnkey operations because the new operations literally only have to "turn the key" to get them to work. Such operations are rarely successful because the designers have not adapted the facility to local conditions, including the lack of trained technical employees who can make the factory work and repair it if things break down. In that sense, the First Republic, like most of the initial African regimes, was a "turnkey government."

As noted earlier, the Nigerian military created what it thought would be a more appropriate presidential regime in 1979. However, it did not survive its second election as the ethnically driven, high-stakes politics tore it apart and prompted the military to seize power four years later.

Since then, there have been two more attempts to build a democracy, both of which we will explore in some detail here, because they show us the difficulties of doing so in a country as divided as Nigeria.

Babangida’s Failure

After he seized power in 1985, General Babangida decided to make democratization the center piece of what he claimed would be a brief period of military rule. Many observers are convinced that Babangida was never strongly committed to democracy or civilian government. Researchers have yet to get access to documentary and other evidence about what really happened inside his government, so we simply do not know how seriously to take those charges. Here, I have chosen to take his government at its word, especially early on, since even without the skepticism about its motivations, the failure of democratization in the late 1980s and early 1990s tells us a lot about both Nigeria and the third world as a whole.

Babangida's supporters always claimed he endorsed what is known as the "custodial theory" which holds that military government can only be justified on a temporary basis and only to prepare the return to civilian rule. Therefore, one of the first things the Babangida government did was to try to assess what had gone wrong in the First and Second republics. At the heart of any such explanation was the way ethnic and regional conflict, corruption, and the concentration of power at the center had turned politics into a zero-sum game that no one dared lose.

In designing a third republic, its creators therefore sought to engineer different institutions through which a more cooperative, if not consensual, politics could operate. They started by banning all leading politicians and parties from the First and Second republics on the assumption that they had now twice demonstrated that they could not run the country. Then, in 1986, they laid out a phased transition that was scheduled ti last four years. During that time, the politicians who lack practical experience in democratic practices or civil administration would gain some starting at the local level. In the process, they could "learn" from whatever mistakes they made or problems they encountered when the stakes were relatively low and later apply the new "lessons" to the more nettlesome national issues that would be tackled only at the end of the transitional period.

The plan itself was the product of a seventeen-member Political Bureau appointed in January 1986. Significantly, the bureau did not include any civil servants, prominent politicians, or other figures publicly associated with either the current or former regime. Instead, it consisted of a balanced group of middle-class Nigerians, nine of whom had academic backgrounds.

Although there were some changes in detail later on, the Political Bureau's main recommendations became the basis of the democratization plan that ultimately was to collapse in 1993. The plan called for a decentralized system in which each of the main groups would dominate in at least one of the then thirty-one states. Just as important was the conclusion that the party and electoral systems had to be rebuilt from scratch. The government would license new political parties that could not get by with narrowly based, ethnic support. The federal government would also fund the parties so that they would not be dependent on local bosses or corrupt officials. A new, neutral federal election commission would be set up to regulate the way elections were run.

In March 1987, the bureau submitted its report to the AFRC, which reviewed it using a panel of its own. Although it rejected the bureau's preference for a socialist economy (see the next section), it retained most of its other conclusions. Just as significantly, it ruled out any kind of "dyarchy" through which the military and civilian politicians would rule together. It did, however, push back the planned completion for the transition, tentatively setting presidential elections for August 1992 rather than the bureau's goal of late 1990.

Later that year, the government issued a series of decrees setting up the official plans for the transition. Realizing that democracy requires a more enlightened population than Nigeria had, the government created a Directorate for Social Mobilization whose head described its mission as follows: "If you want democratic government to be sustained over time, then the people have to be enlightened, mobilized, and properly educated." The government also split the powerful and often repressive National Security Organization (secret police) into a number of smaller, specialized, and, thus, presumably weaker bodies.

At the same time, it published a time table for the next five years. 1987 would see the creation of the National Electoral Commission and other such bodies, as well as local government elections on a nonpartisan basis. In 1989, a new constitution would be drafted, the new parties created, and. partisan local elections held. In 1990, there would be state elections leading to the creation of civilian state governments. 1991 would be devoted mostly to taking a census, something that had not been possible since the 1960s. Finally, there would be federal legislative and presidential elections in the first six to nine months of 1992, after which the military would give up power.

The problems with the plans surfaced almost immediately. As we saw in the section on the stakes of Nigerian politics, the Babangida government hemmed and hawed and at crucial junctures manipulated the process in a way that made democratization more difficult, if not impossible. Thus, it rejected all thirteen of the potential parties that emerged from grassroots organizational efforts and created two of its own practically out of thin air. Then, it rejected the presidential candidates the two parties initially nominated and sent them back to the drawing boards.

The 1993 presidential election campaign was the most honest and least violent in Nigerian history up to that point. Nonetheless, the government rejected the results and arrested the apparent winner, Abiola, thereby setting in motion the events that culminated in the coup led by Abacha later that fall.

Abubakar and Obasanjo

A (so far at least) more successful move toward democracy came in 1999 as we also saw earlier. Ironically, this shift occurred with far less prior planning. Indeed, it took place only after the Abacha regime became by far the most corrupt and repressive in Nigerian history, thereby leading most observers to think that democracy was less—rather than more—likely than in the early 1990s.

Nothing epitomized the depths to which the regime had sunk than the 10 November 1995 execution of the author Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his fellow environmental activists from the oil-producing Ogoniland region. In 1990, no one would have expected Saro-Wiwa to be accused of capital crimes. Students throughout Nigeria read his novels at school, and he wrote the screenplay for the country's most popular soap opera, Basi and Company, about an all-too-familiar street hustler in Lagos. Hardly a radical, Saro-Wiwa spent most of his time in England.

Saro-Wiwa had made plans to write a new novel that would have woven together much of his country's sad history since the military first took power in 1966, but he never started it. Instead, he got involved in the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), which was formed in the early 1990s to demand self-determination for the half-million member tribe that lives along the Niger River delta about a hundred miles inland from the Atlantic coast.

Ogoniland sits atop oil deposits. Although it was not one of the most productive regions in the country, Shell Oil had pumped billions of gallons of oil from that part of the Niger delta over the years. Most of the profits ended up in Shell's boardrooms and in the Swiss bank accounts of Nigeria's military rulers. Precious little of the money made it back to Ogoniland, where there has been no significant investment in electricity, roads, drinking water, or other desperately needed infrastructural projects. MOSOP also claimed that leaks from drilling and poorly maintained pipelines were polluting Ogoni farmlands and the waters its people fished in.

In mid-1993, MOSOP called on the Ogoni people to boycott the presidential election that was held to complete the transition from military back to civilian rule. MOSOP's frustrations only mounted when the military government refused to accept the results of the election and, then, the seventh successful coup since the country's independence in 1960 brought Abacha, to power. Not all Ogonis agreed with Saro-Wiwa and MOSOP, and tensions within the region mounted. In 1994, a group of young men, allegedly MOSOP members, shot and killed four pro-government chiefs at a political rally. Saro-Wiwa and the others executed with him in 1995 were arrested for ordering the murders, a charge he always denied.

According to most international observers, the legal proceedings against them were a farce. Saro-Wiwa was only allowed to talk with his lawyers if the local military leader was present. The officers who presided at his trial were alleged to have personally benefited from the oil trade. Some witnesses later claimed they had been bribed to give false testimony. The defendants were all convicted as expected.

Meanwhile, the government cracked down in Ogoniland. Its "sanitization" campaign killed more than two thousand people, displaced a quarter of the total population, and destroyed thirty villages.

The death sentences were carried out only ten days after they had been imposed following what many observers felt in Nigeria and abroad felt was a less than fair trial. Because of pressure from the international community, the expectation was that the Abacha government would at least commute the sentences. However, the military leaders turned a deaf ear to pleas to spare Saro-Wiwa and rubbed salt in the wounds by executing the nine while the heads of governments from all the Commonwealth of Nations countries were attending a summit meeting in New Zealand.

This wave of repression turned out to be the last straw both at home and abroad. More than thirty countries immediately withdrew their ambassadors. Western leaders threatened to stop all pending trade and aid deals although in the end only military and certain other kinds of assistance were cut. More importantly, the British Commonwealth and the Clinton administration put strong pressure on the regime to change. Meanwhile, new protest groups developed at home, sparked both by the repression, the corruption, and the country’s ongoing economic difficulties. Much of the protest focused on the release of Abiola and the establishment of the government that had been elected in 1993.

No one knows what would have happened had Abacha and Abiola not both died in rapid succession in the summer of 1998. Their deaths, however, did open the door to a remarkably rapid chain of events (especially given Nigeria’s history) that led to the creation of the Obasanjo government less than a year later.

Almost immediately after taking office, Abubakar made it clear that he was not planning to perpetuate military rule. He immediately began negotiating with Abiola about the latter’s release and the transition to civilian rule. In fact, Abiola was meeting with a group of American diplomats in his cell on that very subject when he suffered his fatal heart attack.

Abubakar then announced that he still planned a return to civilian rule within a year and soon announced a timetable for the recreation of political parties and the holding of elections. In a number of subtle ways, General Abubakar made it clear that he would not be like his predecessors. He also started the crackdown on the Abacha family fortune mentioned earlier. And, at the ECOWAS (Economic Council of West African States) summit in late 1998, he announced that this was the one and only time that he would be addressing the delegates.

In the end, Abubakar held true to his word and retired on 29 May 1999. The fact that he did so raises an obvious question that lurks below the surface of these two narratives. Why, if democratization has been such a central plank of government policy for so long, and why, if practically every one professed to believe in it, did it fail so miserably in 1993 but not 1998?

To some extent, the answers reflect the specifics of Nigerian politics. Any such list would have to start with the manipulative and power-hungry side of the Babangida (but not the Abubakar) government that its critics properly point to. To some extent, too, it reflects the international pressures and worsening economic conditions which we will turn to next. And, perhaps most of all, it reflects the willingness of Abubakar and politicians like Obasanjo to find ways of working together and forging a gradual, consensual transition to civilian rule and democracy.

Though they have not yet done so, scholars interested in comparative politics and the general process of democratization will undoubtedly stress some of the characteristics that Nigeria shares with other third world countries in similar situations. In their recent analyses, political scientists have stressed a number of factors that seem to be necessary preconditions for successful democratization, all of which Nigeria has had in short supply at least until the late 1998s.

For example, they focus on the importance of elite accommodation. For democracy to work, elites have to be willing to work with each other enough to forge compromises and other decisions that they are all willing to abide by. Democratic regimes also emerge most easily if the transition can be achieved gradually and if partially democratic politics begin in a regime in which participation is limited and then expands to include an ever-larger proportion of the population, much as we saw to have been the case in Great Britain. That is not possible in Nigeria today, but the last two democratization efforts have started with the less contentious state and local politics before turning on to the national level. Observers also are convinced that democracy is most likely to succeed if there is substantial national unity and, therefore, limited fundamental opposition to the existence of the state if not the particular regime in place at the time. The Abubakar regime could not create that sense of unity in a few short months. At the very least, however, they did little to unravel it further which stood it in good stead as it got ready to hand over power.

That said, there is no reason to be overly optimistic about this most recent attempt at democratic government in Nigeria. The most important conclusion to emerge from the literature on democratization is that no amount of constitutional engineering or tinkering with established institutions can eliminate the debilitating effects of a situation in which people tend to view all issues and all conflict as zero-sum in nature. And, there is every reason to believe that such an approach to politics will reappear either once the initial enthusiasm for the new regime declines or when Obasanjo leaves office after his four-year term. After all, it was the second election that did in the first two Nigerian republics.