The popular mood is mainly sour in Africa’s largest nation. If President Olusegun Obasanjo were to run again for a third term in April, which is what he wanted to, but was retrained by the constitution, he would probably lose. If you are poor in Nigeria it is hard to appreciate the progress that impresses the businessmen, the bankers and, most importantly, the International Monetary Fund. For the man or the woman in the street all that can be seen is large-scale unemployment, rising fuel prices, more erratic electricity supplies and declining facilities in village health care clinics. Bravely, the government has decided to increase fuel prices yet again early this year in an attempt to improve the deficit, but the great mass of car and motorbike drivers who clog every street in every town are incensed. Twenty years of misrule by one bad military leader after another left an indelible mark, and the cumulative degradation of basic facilities has been hard to turn around in the space of Obasanjo’s eight years of exuberant, but demanding, democracy.
It is on the macro-level that he has scored and that has only become apparent in his second term when he has been more free to bring in his own people, not least the all-woman top team at the Finance Ministry, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Nenadi Usman, who have pruned, kicked and prosecuted until the corrupt old ways of doing federal business have been reshaped beyond all recognition, where spending is now carefully controlled, the banking system has been overhauled and rapacious bankers sent to jail, contracts have been made honest and the privatization program and the reform of the energy sector has steamed ahead. Last year Nigeria was removed from the list of noncompliant countries in the global fight against money laundering, at which Nigerians excelled.
The IMF sent in a team in December to examine the economy. They said in their report that “GDP growth and increases in per capita income have doubled in the last five years compared with the previous two decades”. Headline inflation is down to single digits. And reserves rose to $41 billion despite Nigeria repaying all its massive debts.
The hedge funds are investing in Nigerian currency and its credit rating has so improved that Nigeria is now issuing bonds on the global market. Companies such as Mittal are beginning to invest, not just in the once moribund steel sector as one would expect but in the energy sector too. The Chinese are planning to resuscitate one decaying railroad line and the South Koreans another. Five years ago the majority of Nigeria’s drugs were faked. Now the possibility that a drug is a fake has dropped to 17 percent, according to the World Health Organization.
Economic growth is consistently around an annual 7 percent rate, with a surprising 8 percent growth in the nonoil sector, mainly because of a surge in agricultural production, which has been sustained through years of both plentiful and poor rain. Few in the diplomatic community laughed when the central bank governor in a recent speech said that Nigeria could become the “China of Africa” with a 10 percent growth rate within five years. After a few days spent in the seeming chaos of Lagos, where a city of 20 million appears to be hyperactive, one senses the desperate urge for economic endeavor. Now that investors can safely come in, entrepreneurs can more easily get in and out of the docks and airport (unrecognizable from eight years ago), and money can be moved easily by Nigeria’s burgeoning e-commerce system, it must be only a matter of time before Lagos becomes another Kolkata, or — who dare say no? — Shanghai.
However, there are plenty of people who shake their heads — not just the rank and file electorate — but diplomats, especially American ones, who still see the massive problems — the slow arrival of more power stations, the inadequate electrical grid, the maladministration, the growing crime rate, the corruption of the police, the deteriorating roads and schools and, not least, the fast increase of kidnappings and extortion by armed gangs in the oil producing Niger Delta. The election is a bitter one. Obasanjo has fallen out with his vice president who is now running against Obasanjo’s own nominee.
The third candidate is an ex-hard line military dictator. With the popular mood as it is the race is wide open. But even the severe critics in the American compound believe, if the election is more or less fair and civil peace continues, none of the three candidates can turn back the clock and Nigeria will continue with its reforms, democracy and forward progress.
