Last week, Victor, a carpenter, came to my Lagos home to fix a broken
chair. I asked him whom he preferred as Nigeria’s next president: the
incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan, or his challenger, Muhammadu Buhari.
“I don’t have a voter’s card, but if I did, I would vote for somebody
I don’t like,” he said. “I don’t like Buhari. But Jonathan is not
performing.”
Victor sounded like many people I know: utterly unenthusiastic about the two major candidates in our upcoming election.
Were Nigerians to vote on likeability alone, Jonathan would win. He
is mild-mannered and genially unsophisticated, with a conventional sense
of humor. Buhari has a severe, ascetic air about him, a rigid
uprightness; it is easy to imagine him in 1984, leading a military
government whose soldiers routinely beat up civil servants. Neither
candidate is articulate. Jonathan is given to rambling; his unscripted
speeches leave listeners vaguely confused. Buhari is thick-tongued, his
words difficult to decipher. In public appearances, he seems
uncomfortable not only with the melodrama of campaigning but also with
the very idea of it. To be a democratic candidate is to implore and
persuade, and his demeanor suggests a man who is not at ease with
amiable consensus. Still, he is no stranger to campaigns. This is his
third run as a presidential candidate; the last time, in 2011, he lost
to Jonathan.
This time, Buhari’s prospects are better. Jonathan is widely
perceived as ineffectual, and the clearest example, which has eclipsed
his entire presidency, is his response to Boko Haram. Such a barbaric
Islamist insurgency would challenge any government. But while Boko Haram
bombed and butchered, Jonathan seemed frozen in a confused, tone-deaf
inaction. Conflicting stories emerged of an ill-equipped army, of a
corrupt military leadership, of northern elites sponsoring Boko Haram,
and even of the government itself sponsoring Boko Haram.
Jonathan floated to power, unprepared, on a serendipitous cloud. He
was a deputy governor of Bayelsa state who became governor when his
corrupt boss was forced to quit. Chosen as vice president because
powerbrokers considered him the most harmless option from southern
Nigeria, he became president when his northern boss died in office.
Nigerians gave him their goodwill—he seemed refreshingly unassuming—but
there were powerful forces who wanted him out, largely because he was a
southerner, and it was supposed to be the north’s ‘turn’ to occupy the
presidential office.
And so the provincial outsider suddenly thrust onto the throne,
blinking in the chaotic glare of competing interests, surrounded by a
small band of sycophants, startled by the hostility of his traducers,
became paranoid. He was slow to act, distrustful and diffident. His
mildness came across as cluelessness. His response to criticism
calcified to a single theme: His enemies were out to get him. When the
Chibok girls were kidnapped, he and his team seemed at first to believe
that it was a fraud organized by his enemies to embarrass him. His
politics of defensiveness made it difficult to sell his genuine
successes, such as his focus on the long-neglected agricultural sector
and infrastructure projects. His spokespeople alleged endless conspiracy
theories, compared him to Jesus Christ, and generally kept him entombed
in his own sense of victimhood.
The delusions of Buhari’s spokespeople are better packaged, and
obviously free of incumbency’s crippling weight. They blame Jonathan for
everything that is wrong with Nigeria, even the most multifarious,
ancient knots. They dismiss references to Buhari’s past military
leadership, and couch their willful refusal in the language of ‘change,’
as though Buhari, by representing change from Jonathan, has also taken
on an a historical saintliness.
I remember the Buhari years as a blur of bleakness. I remember my
mother bringing home sad rations of tinned milk, otherwise known as
“essential commodities”—the consequences of Buhari’s economic policy. I
remember air thick with fear, civil servants made to do frog jumps for
being late to work, journalists imprisoned, Nigerians flogged for not
standing in line, a political vision that cast citizens as recalcitrant
beasts to be whipped into shape.
Buhari’s greatest source of appeal is that he is widely perceived as
non-corrupt. Nigerians have been told how little money he has, how spare
his lifestyle is. But to sell the idea of an incorruptible candidate
who will fight corruption is to rely on the disingenuous trope that
Buhari is not his party. Like Jonathan’s People’s Democratic Party,
Buhari’s All Progressives Congress is stained with corruption, and its
patrons have a checkered history of exploitative participation in
governance. Buhari’s team is counting on the strength of his perceived
personal integrity: his image as a good guy forced by realpolitik to
hold hands with the bad guys, who will be shaken off after his victory.
In my ancestral home state of Anambra, where Jonathan is generally
liked, the stronger force at play is a distrust of Buhari, partly borne
of memories of his military rule, and partly borne of his reputation,
among some Christians, as a Muslim fundamentalist. When I asked a
relative whom she would vote for, she said, “Jonathan of course. Am I
crazy to vote for Buhari so that Nigeria will become a sharia country?”
Nigeria has predictable voting patterns, as all democratic countries
do. Buhari can expect support from large swaths of the core north, and
Jonathan from southern states. Region and religion are potent forces
here. Vice presidents are carefully picked with these factors in mind:
Buhari’s is a southwestern Christian and Jonathan’s is a northern
Muslim. But it is not so simple. There are non-northerners who would
ordinarily balk at voting for a ‘northerner’ but who support Buhari
because he can presumably fight corruption. There are northern
supporters of Jonathan who are not part of the region’s Christian
minorities.
Last week, I was indifferent about the elections, tired of television
commercials and contrived controversies. There were rumors that the
election, which was scheduled for February 14, would be postponed, but
there always are; our political space is a lair of conspiracies. I was
uninterested in the apocalyptic predictions. Nigeria was not imploding.
We had crossed this crossroads before, we were merely electing a
president in an election bereft of inspiration. And the existence of a
real opposition party that might very well win was a sign of progress in
our young democracy.
Then, on Saturday, the elections were delayed for six weeks.
Nigeria’s security agencies, we were told, would not be available to
secure the elections because they would be fighting Boko Haram and
needed at least another month and a half to do so. (Nigeria has been
fighting Boko Haram for five years, and military leaders recently
claimed to be ready for the elections.)
Even if the reason were not so absurd, Nigerians are politically
astute enough to know that the postponement has nothing to do with
security. It is a flailing act of desperation from an incumbent
terrified of losing. There are fears of further postponements, of ploys
to illegally extend Jonathan’s term. In a country with the specter of a
military coup always hanging over it, the consequences could be
dangerous. My indifference has turned to anger. What a staggeringly
self-serving act of contempt for Nigerians. It has cast, at least for
the next six weeks, the darkest possible shroud over our democracy:
uncertainty.
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This article was first published on The Atlantic
Chimamanda Adichie is the author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists.