Introduction: Nigeria – Twenty years of civil rule

Abstract

Ebenezer Obadare (obadare@ku.edu) is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas and Research Fellow at the Research Institute for Theology and Religion, University of South Africa. His latest book is Pentecostal republic: Religion and the struggle for state power in Nigeria (Zed Books, London, 2018). December is typically a month of fevered agitation in Nigeria. It is, for one thing, a month motorists have come to associate with fuel shortages, owing to industrial action by the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG), bottlenecks integral to the structure of oil distribution in the country, or sometimes a combination of both. December 2018 was different. Absent the usual petro-agony, the public was held in thrall by the allegation levelled by Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), a group claiming to champion self-determination for the Igbo, that the man Nigerians have been ‘looking at on the television’ is not President Muhammadu Buhari, but his genetically modified doppelganger, one ‘Jubril al Sudaniya from Sudan’.1 Mr Kanu, who has been a thorn in the Buhari administration’s flesh since its inauguration in May 2015, first made this bizarre claim in September 2017, and the fact that it did not gain traction until a year later – and even so only following multiple reaffirmations – may be attributed in part to its sheer outlandishness. Be that as it may, such was the speed at which the rumour had gained ground that President Buhari, addressing a gathering of Nigerians in Poland, had to categorically affirm that he was not dead and had not been replaced by a Sudanese look-alike. The statement later released by his aides titled: ‘It’s the real me, President Buhari responds to cloning allegation’ merely added a touch of farce to a bizarre episode.2