How About Nigeria?

As the people of Pakistan get increasingly restive in their protest against the dictator, General Pervez Musharraf who has straddled their political landscape since he kicked out the last nominal democratic government in their country, alarms are increasingly being sounded in some US print media channels to warn the policy makers in the US foreign policy establishment of the dangers ahead. Suggestions are clearly on the side of reigning in the general at least if not nudging him towards an alternative which will usher in another nominal democratic government that will include his secular opponents. Although, it shouldn’t have gotten to this point, but it’s unfortunate that the foreign policy establishment gets US foreign policy into this kind of situation every time and again for reasons that clearly boil down to short-sightedness.

Nigeria is one country that has continuously stumbled through an endless transition as a result of the over-bearing influence of short-sighted US foreign policy. Rather than take sides with the people in their quest to resolve the issues that emanate from unfinished state building, US foreign policy prefers to take sides with interests and actors in the country that spawn instability. US support to install and sustain Mr. Olusegun Obasanjo as president in 1999 was obviously the direct cause of the madness that gripped him over the last eight years. The initial promise for responsiveness he showed in 1999 simply varnished almost immediately when he realized that the US would help him reign in the military to render it incapable of intervening in the political process through coups. The immediate outcome of that was that he went on a field day that translated to running the country into the dust literally. That madness got the greater part of him to the degree that he proclaimed himself a messiah and stated to plot to succeed himself as his second term was about to come to an end. When his desires in that regard couldn’t materialize, he embarked on the project to self-anoint his successor. He schemed and scammed and manipulated the electoral process much to the chagrin of the many at home and in the international who condemned the stage-managed charade that took place in April in the name of elections in Nigeria.

Although, he successfully produced a winner-beneficiary from that manipulated process in the person of Mr. Umar Yar’Ardua, there is no doubt that Mr. Obasanjo has saddled Nigeria with yet another crisis which will consume the attention of everyone even as the country continues on the path of economic degeneration. It didn’t have to be that. Genuine democratic progress that will never undermine US interests is still possible in Nigeria. That alternative can only be realized by lending support to Nigeria’s political actors who are basically keen on resolving the question of state building amongst the nationalities that colonialism made to constitute Nigeria once and for all. Such actors abound in Nigeria, and Chief Anthony Enahoro is the most prominent of all of them. Bringing him close and consulting him will be the beginning of that genuine democratic progress.