Right, well im back in Abuja, not really by choice but VSO told us to pack a bag and get our bums back to the capital
If I was a journalist I would have written it like this:
We were leaving, the driver seemed anxious to get away as soon as possible. As we left we saw smoke rising above the city. The burnt out wrecks of cars and lorries littered the road back to the capital, the road was almost deserted, a huge change to the dense traffic of just a few months earlier. When we arrived at the capital there were long tailbacks of cars pressing into the city, each piled high with the meagre belongings of the occupants. In the days before we left armed gunmen prowled the streets and soldiers moved in convoy through the centre of the city.
The above is normal for Nigeria, drivers always drive fast, there’s a fuel shortage so less transport between cities, someone’s always burning rubbish, crashes are not cleaned up and armed people are always wandering about. Unfortunately, the above is much better copy and that’s what sells newspapers.
The reasons for the evacuation was due to the trouble in Jos where between 50-400 people have been killed in rioting/ethnic violence. Nigeria is no stranger to this kind of problem (in seems to happen almost every year somewhere), however this time there are additional complications. The president was taken to hospital in Saudi Arabia last November whilst the rest of the country was charging at brick walls and sacrificing rams, he has not been seen since and has only given a single quick phone interview to the BBC in which he sounded like a man who should seriously consider making sure he wasn’t overcharged on his latest estimated gas bill.
Before he left he didn’t hand over to his deputy, this has caused a power vacuum. There are many things Nigeria needs, power vacuums are very low down the list (average length of democracy between military dictatorships – 4 years, mean reversion is not this country’s friend). The president’s absence has given lots of people plenty of time for extensive plotting, a popular Nigerian past time. A number of law cases and parliamentary motions have now brought all of this to a head and it looks like the whole issue will have to be sorted in the next couple of weeks.
The only constitutional option is for the VP to take over until the next elections (early elections are not allowed), unfortunately this breaks the unwritten rule that presidential power shifts from north to south every 2 terms. Any change in power would also lead to a re-shuffle of the men at the top from Yar’Adua loyalists to Goodluck loyalists, so those currently in power (the cabinet) have the most to lose from any transfer of power and have apparently dug their heels in. Nigeria also doesn’t have a history of people giving up power willingly (i.e. once in power the VP will run for become president in the next election), so “people” are sceptical that any transfer of power will be corrected to the “agreed” distribution in 2011.
If the constitutional options aren’t forthcoming, then there is the looming shadow of the unconstitutional options, which basically means a military coup, which is what quite a few of the more politically minded Nigerians i have spoken to think will happen.
Also there might be another group of people who disagree with the idea of a President Goodluck Jonathan on the grounds it would sound silly and give tabloid headline writers far too easy a ride (try getting a pun out of Yar’Adua).
Watch this space as something will happen soon.... I’ll open the comments to bets (my reckoning of the odds in order: vice president takes over, military coup, An Other, president comes back)
Hopefully i’ll be back in Kaduna by Monday.
This post was written last Wednesday but I thought I would hold off publishing until the dust settled a bit. I am now back in Kaduna, everything seems fine. Also in an update the military have effectively been confined to barracks, this may or may not change the chance of a military coup.
Actually it turns out there’s quite a lot you can teach people who’ve never used computers before about computers without actually turning the thing on (not just “and as you can see it does make a wonderful paperweight”). Remembering the level you have to start at is a big thing, e.g. what the big button at the bottom of the keyboard does. Much confusion was caused by there being two enter keys, and me wanting them to find both, and not just one enter key then the number 2 key (try explaining that with made up on the spot sign language). Anyway this kind of fun was stretched out for a couple of hours.