Confidence low as Nigeria votes

Nigerians head to the polls Saturday to elect a new president, just days after more than 21 people were killed in state elections.

from the April 20, 2007 edition

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LAGOS, NIGERIA - With every flat surface and telephone pole in Nigeria's hyperkinetic commercial capital plastered with campaign posters, radio programs crowded with candidates claiming fraud, and minivans scattering campaign leaflets to pedestrians, Lagos is clearly in the throes of a major election.

But for a voter like Nurudeen Olusola – a civil servant in Lagos – all these trappings of democracy are more a sign of massive fraud than of hope. Although he voted in the state and local elections this past Saturday, and will vote again in the presidential election this Saturday, his only hope is that this incoming government will be slightly less corrupt than the last bunch.

"For the past eight years, they say they have been spending lots of money on electricity, but we don't have lights. We don't know where [the money] has gone," says Mr. Olusola, watching members of a Tae Kwon Do club practice near Lagos' National Stadium. "Nigeria is a rich country. We have resources, we have oil, but we don't know what is going on. The number of corrupt people in Nigeria is too high."

As Africa's most populous nation and biggest oil producer, Nigeria presents a unique litmus test for the expectations that democracy unleashes across the continent. Nigeria's problems – unemployment, swelling urban populations, regional separatist movements, and grinding official corruption – are common throughout Africa.

But at this crucial point in the country's history (Saturday's election should usher in the country's first-ever transfer of power from one civilian leader to another), the problems appear to be sapping the wealth and spirit of the fifth-largest supplier of oil to the US, giving this vote an explosive potential that has made Africa experts take notice.

"There is so much money being made by the elite because they have control of oil, and ordinary Nigerians have seen so little of it," says Gani Fawehinmi, a human rights activist and top attorney in Lagos. "The government has failed us in every way, in education, in employment, in giving us infrastructure, in reducing poverty." He sighs. "I fear the worst, but pray for the best."

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