Blocked Transition in Nigeria: democracy and the power of oligarchy

Abstract

Nigeria’s difficulties with democratic transition, culminating in the aborted presidential elections in 1993, illustrates the fragility of current transitions in Africa. It may be tempting, initially, to seek to explain the Nigerian crisis in terms of a powerful military oligarchy refusing to relinquish power. Post-colonial Nigeria has had eight military administrations. When General Ibrahim Babangida and his colleagues displaced Buhari in 1985, they seemed particularly concerned with the problem of Nigeria’s over-sized state sector. The military regime decided itself to create and fund two ‘grassroots’ political parties which Nigerians would then be invited to join. Despite having a trans-regional membership structure and an inclusive ideology, therefore, both the Social Democratic Party and the National Republican Convention were captives of the intense regional and factional conflict long present in Nigerian politics. For a host of reasons, there is a considerable gap in the comparative levels of aggregate socio-economic development in the north and south of Nigeria.