Buhari victory over President Goodluck Jonathan would be a rare upset
for an incumbent in a country where petrodollars have long flowed and
the presidency has great latitude to distribute them.
But oil prices have crashed; attacks on schools, markets and entire
villages continue unabated; and Nigeria’s army has been thoroughly
incapable of stopping Boko Haram, which now controls substantial
portions of the northeast and regularly sends the country’s soldiers
fleeing.
“We have to solve it; it’s the first problem of the country,” Mr. Buhari
said tersely about the battle with Boko Haram during a long day of
campaigning this week.
“This should have been an easy one,” added the former general, who is
believed to have been a target of bombings in this city over the summer
in which dozens were killed. “But it has been allowed to develop over
five years.”
There is much at stake in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy, even as it
falters — the currency has dropped sharply, questions are swirling about
the ability to pay civil servants and the country’s oil-money reserves
have withered. The campaign has become a vociferous, at times violent,
joust between Buhari partisans in the mostly Muslim north and supporters
of Mr. Jonathan in the largely Christian south.
Mr. Buhari’s tenure as Nigeria’s military ruler was brief: a 20-month
stint in the 1980s, ended by another military coup. Yet it is remembered
with trepidation by many Nigerians.
His self-proclaimed “war against indiscipline” was carried to “sadistic
levels, glorying in the humiliation of a people,” wrote the Nobel
laureate and writer Wole Soyinka. Mr. Buhari forced tardy civil
servants, even older ones, to perform frog jumps, jailed journalists for
critical articles, and expelled tens of thousands of immigrants from
other West African countries, blaming them for the country’s problems.
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The current president and his party, which has held power since military
rule ended more than 15 years ago, have made this past a central part
of Mr. Jonathan’s re-election strategy, hoping to fan old fears about
the general.
Full-page newspaper ads suggest that Mr. Buhari is eager to introduce
Shariah law all over the country, beyond the northern states where it
already exists (in the campaign, Mr. Buhari has not said that).
Other ads remind readers of the retired general’s coup-prone past.
(Historians say that even before Mr. Buhari came to power in a military
coup at the end of 1983, he played an active role in the coups that
marked Nigeria’s early years.)
But Mr. Buhari’s supporters are far more interested in the instability
shaking the north, urging a total overhaul of the lackluster fight
against the Islamists. Many of them turned out in this northern
metropolis this week for a glimpse of the general, who has traded his
medal-bedecked uniform for traditional robes and thick-framed
spectacles.
Buhari victory over President Goodluck Jonathan would be a rare upset for PDP
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Oleh
healthandwealth
