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One party state for Nigeria?
21/04/2003 17:43 - (SA)
Lagos - The crushing victory of Nigeria's ruling party in parliamentary elections, and the strong likelihood that it will romp home in presidential and state elections, have raised fears that Africa's most populous country could become a one-party state, analysts said on Monday.
President Olusegun Obasanjo's Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) won a majority in both houses of parliament in an April 12 poll, and initial results show Obasanjo is on course for a comfortable re-election, along with most of his party's state governors.
The once mighty Alliance for Democracy (AD) has been all but wiped off the electoral map outside of the southern metropolis of Lagos, while the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) was unable to make gains outside its northern heartland.
The PDP victories have been accompanied by widespread and credible allegations of ballot-rigging, but nothing seems likely to stop the party - a largely ideology-free coalition of wealthy "big men" - from dominating the next four years of Nigerian public life.
"The overwhelming victory of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) at the poll is so unnatural. We are definitely heading for a one-party state which could be worse than military dictatorship," a defeated state governorship candidate, Femi Aborisade, said.
Aborisade, a rights activist, stood for the governorship of Oyo State under the banner of the leftist National Conscience Party, one of 27 formations to have been registered as parties since 1999, when only the PDP, the AD and the ANPP were allowed to stand in an army-run poll.
The 27 parties had to fight a long court battle to win the right to compete at all, and their arrival briefly inspired hope that Nigeria's stale political culture might be revived in time for this year's landmark elections, the first civilian-run polls in 20 years.
But when polling day came it was the usual suspects - and the vast fortunes they had earned during the 15 years of military dictatorship before the 1999 election - which dominated the voting.
Babalola Bankole, a political analyst, saw one silver lining in the development.
"The good thing is that PDP cannot be said to belong to any ethnic group in Nigeria, unlike the Alliance for Democracy which is clearly identified with the Yoruba," he said.
Nigeria, whose 120 million people come from more than 250 ethnic groups, has been wracked by ethnic divisions and unrest in the 43 years since its independence. Between 1967 and 1970 the Igbo people of the southeast tried to secede in a civil war in which more than one million died.
The shift by angry voters in the largely Muslim, Hausa-speaking north to the ANPP, led by Obasanjo's main rival in the presidential race, former military dictator Muhammadu Buhari, has sparked fears of a dangerous polarisation in Nigerian politics.
Obasanjo's PDP allays those fears, allying key northerners in the party to a southern Christian president.
But aside from the PDP's non-exclusive membership, Bankole sees its huge dominance of the political spectrum as posing problems for Nigeria's democracy because it raises "clear fear... of a one-party state".
Dayo Adenipekun, a Lagos lawyer said: "The party in power, right from onset, did not want rivals and that explains why it was reluctant to register more political parties until the court forced it to do so.
"So, what has happened now is that with PDP's victory, most of the other parties will be extinct, leaving it with little or no opposition," he lamented.
Nigeria has spent 28 of its 43 years of independence under a series of brutal, kleptocratic dictatorships, and this year's elections were billed as an opportunity to put its bloody history behind it and move forward with its fledgling democracy.
"It will be a monumental disaster if Nigeria becomes a one-party state," said a teacher in political science at Lagos State University, who asked not to be named.
"We know the draconian rule in Togo, former Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko and former Dawda Jawara of the Gambia," the professor said, casting a worried eye around the African continent.
- AFX
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