John Campbell. In 1994, retired South Africa Defense Force general and Afrikaner tribal leader Constand Viljoen threw his support behind the move to replace apartheid with non-racial democracy. Had he opted otherwise, South Africa’s history would likely have been different. At the same time, he created a political party, the Freedom Front, to provide a political home for white, conservative Afrikaners in the new, non-racial South Africa. (The party’s name and structure has evolved; it is now called Freedom Front Plus.) In the 1994 elections, South Africa’s first conducted without racial qualification, the party won 424,555 votes, or 2.2 percent…
Author: CASADE
Editorial Commentary. Knowing how many residents in a country who are properly invested with civil responsibilities that accompany citizenship matters. There are strong reasons of late to agree that such civil exercise is more relevant in African states than elsewhere. One such important reason is the need to know who legitimately participated in plebicites of crucial national interest. The presence of ghost voters, illegal immigrant voters, and invented voters in Nigeria’s last presidential election is a phenomenon that continues to caste long shadows of doubt and legitimacy on election outcomes, and the process of internal resource allocation amongst various ethnic…
Editorial Commentary.* At 2:30AM on February 16 few hours before polling stations were scheduled to open, Mr. Mahmood Yakubu, chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC), announced to Nigerians reasonably expected to be asleep at that hour that the presidential election they had expended time, effort and unrecoverable resources on had been postponed. The reasons he adduced, ‘logistical and operational concerns,’ were no more convincing to him than the millions who woke up to the news that morning. By this singular act the chairman remained faithful to Nigeria’s international reputation, and its electoral antecedents that include postponed elections in 2007,…
John O. Ifediora* At 2:30AM on February 16 few hours before polling stations were scheduled to open, Mr. Mahmood Yakubu, chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC), announced to Nigerians reasonably expected to be asleep at that hour that the presidential election they had expended time, effort and unrecoverable resources on had been postponed. The reasons he adduced, ‘logistical and operational concerns,’ were no more convincing to him than the millions who woke up to the news that morning. By this singular act the chairman remained faithful to Nigeria’s international reputation, and its electoral antecedents that include postponed elections in…
John Campbell. Nigerians will go to the polls to cast votes in national elections on Saturday, February 16. The country has a long history of vote rigging and it has evolved over time. In earlier years it took place at the polling stations, but rigging eventually moved to the vote counting, tabulation, and collation stages. The Independent National Elections Commission (INEC) instituted reforms before the 2015 elections that led to elections more credible than in the past, and has continued to improve the process, but reforming INEC is only part of the solution. The 2018 gubernatorial elections in Osun and…
The Economist* An old-fashioned counter-insurgency strategy is failing. A wild-eyed Nigerian soldier looks into the camera: “We don’t have adequate weapons,” he says. “We can’t just be wasting our lives.” Nigerian opposition activists, who have circulated the video widely, say it shows soldiers fleeing an offensive by Boko Haram, the bloodthirsty jihadists terrorising north-eastern Nigeria, in December. Army officials say the footage is from 2014, the nadir of their fight against the militants. Few believe the official line. Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s president, came to power in 2015 promising to defeat Boko Haram. His inauguration was followed by military success. Insurgents…
Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw.* YOLA, Nigeria—The battle began with two small drones buzzing over a base where more than 500 Nigerian troops guarded the shores of Lake Chad. Then came the clatter of gunfire from a column of armored cars, artillery units and tanks that also blasted jihadist battle songs from mounted speakers. Within hours, elite forces from one of Africa’s most powerful militaries had abandoned their base and its cache of heavy weapons, routed by an insurgent army fighting under the familiar black and white flag of Islamic State. “We were sitting ducks,” said Bitrus Madu, a Nigerian…
John O. Ifediora, Director, and Editor-in-Chief. By all accounts Nigeria’s last presidential election held in March 2015, was reasonably less problematic than the rigged and blood-saturated past attempts at what passed for democratic elections in Africa’s most populous nation-state. The spectacle of young, articulate, and persistent voters determined to witness a fair and violence-free electoral process in 2015 took to social media to give notice of their collective intent. It worked, and for the first time Nigerians saw what can be achieved when the electorates, tired of marginalization by the elites, registered their choice at the voting polls. That was…
Melvin Foote*. Without question Africa is a continent that is very much on the move towards democratic governance. Africa has made incredible progress in the past two decades with many of its 54 countries now being described as democratic, holding peaceful and credible elections, enjoying a free press, and governments that are generally accountable to their people. A driving force behind the democratic reform on the continent is Africa’s youthful population that is now coming of age. More than 50% of the population of Africa is under 30 years of age and increasingly educated and connected to the internet, and…
Giles Fraser. According to the socialist academic Walter Benn Michaels, the reason that rich western liberals talk so much about racism and sexism is so they don’t have to talk so much about economic inequality. He published The Trouble with Diversity exactly a decade ago, but it feels like a tract for our times, perfectly suited as a provocation to thought as we approach the summing up of liberalism’s great annus horribilis. Rich western liberals, Michaels argues, don’t want to challenge the economic structures that produce inequality because that might seriously impact on their own standing and wealth. Instead they…