Nigeria at a tipping point

Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua has been incapacitated in a Saudi Arabian hospital since November. One of his aides has announced that he will officially hand over power to the country’s Vice President, Jonathan Goodluck. In a consolidated democracy, this would be no problem, but Nigeria’s democracy is fledgling, at best. The turnover may create as many problems as it will solve. Due to Nigeria’s deep ethnic and religious tensions, it has been customary to balance power between the north (mainly Muslim) and the south (mainly Christian). Handing over power to Goodluck means that the presidency will go from a northern politician to a southern one.

Today’s editorial in The Punch, Nigeria’s most popular newspaper, warns that failure to handle the situation correctly could unleash a wave of instability. Governors in the North, for example, have already announced they are against the move. It also makes the correct point that institutions don’t enforce themselves, people enforce them. Putting pressure on leaders to respect democratic institutions in times of political crisis can mean the difference between democratic consolidation and democratic collapse. Leaders in the US, the EU, the African Union, and Africa’s democracies, such as Ghana and South Africa, can play that vital role now. Nigeria is edging towards a tipping point. It will be vastly easier to put pressure on politicians now than to clean up the wreckage of a flawed turnover in power. Preparing for the worst and hoping for the best is far better than the opposite.

Technology is neutral

I have been writing a lot about the internet lately, primarily as a result of Secretary Clinton’s speech last week on internet freedom. It’s important to recall, however, that technology is typically neutral. Whether it is good or bad for democracy is a function of who uses it and for what purposes. Recent violence in Nigeria makes this clear:

Text messages that urged people to murder and then burn their victims’ bodies helped stoke inter-religious violence in central Nigeria that killed hundreds of people last week, police and rights activists said overnight.

Rights activists have identified at least 145 texts that circulated on mobile phones in the central city of Jos, the epicentre of four days of Muslim-Christian clashes that authorities said killed 326 people.

“The messages helped escalate the violence in Jos in that some of them instructed people on how to kill, dispose of and burn bodies,” said leading rights activist Shehu Sani.

The texts were aimed at “spreading rumours and inflaming tensions”, said Mr Sani, who heads a coalition of 32 Nigerian civil and human rights groups called the Civil Rights Congress.

One of the messages seen by AFP read: “War, war, war. Stand up … and defend yourselves. Kill before they kill you. Slaughter before they slaughter you. Dump them in a pit before they dump you.”

Moreover, this is not an isolated incident. For example, people used SMS’s for similar purposes following Kenya’s flawed election in 2007.