Nigeria-A Spark, A Fire

NIGERIA

A Spark, A Fire

When President Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler, took office in March 2015, he became the first opposition candidate in Nigeria to successfully unseat an incumbent in a democratic election since the nation’s independence in 1960.

But four years out, the optimism of Buhari’s election in Africa’s largest economy has largely subsided, the Financial Times reported.

Instead of spearheading major security and corruption efforts, Buhari’s tenure has mostly been defined by his ailing health and frequent medical trips abroad, along with his attempts to put out political fires.

One such blaze has burned slowly for decades and is threatening to spread into an all-out wildfire: Demands for a breakaway state of Biafra in the nation’s southeast.

Even though Nigeria’s national elections in 2019 are more than a year away, political elites are already drumming up long-dormant ethnic tensions.

Between 1966 and 1970, the Nigerian government fought a brutal civil war against the breakaway Republic of Biafra, the geographic core of the nation’s Igbo ethnic minority. The war killed nearly 1 million people.

As a new generation of Igbo comes of age, many are starting to call once again for the region to secede – sentiments fueled by the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) separatist movement, an opaque distribution of government funds to ethnic groups, and Buhari’s firm hand in trying to squash the rising movement, the Economist reported.

For now, Buhari has pacified a full-scale uprising by jailing IPOB’s leader and using the military to threaten protesters. During recent local elections in the southeastern state of Anambra, an Igbo stronghold, all was quiet at the polls, despite the IPOB’s calls for a boycott and a referendum on independence, Agence France Presse reported.

After it was announced that the local candidate from the president’s All Progressives Congress had been reelected governor, Buhari used the opportunity to dismiss the IPOB’s attempts to derail the poll and expressed hope that national elections in 2019 would run just as smoothly.

Buhari’s ministers quickly jumped on the bandwagon.

“The people of Anambra have shown there is no alternative to democracy and that they believe in one Nigeria and federal system of government,” Nigeria’s minister of information and culture Alhaji Lai Mohammed told reporters in Abuja. “I think the Anambra election has sounded the death knell on IPOB because they said the election will never hold.”

But the IPOB may yet have an opportunity to gain some footing.

A key ally of President Buhari, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, announced he’d likely throw his hat in the ring for the nation’s 2019 presidential elections, signaling dissent in the president’s ranks, Reuters reported.

As the political players begin to emerge for battle in Nigeria, one thing’s for certain, Bismarck Rewane, chief executive of the Financial Derivatives consultancy in Lagos, told the Financial Times: “Effectively, from Dec. 1 this year, Nigeria will be in full campaign and political mode across the country.”