I used to ask my students to react to this quotation from Kipling on the first day of the high school Comparative Government classes I taught over the years. The point was simple – until you know how other countries do things, you can’t understand your own country. We tend to think of our own government processes as simply “the way things are done.” Until we study how other countries govern themselves, we can’t understand the choices that leaders of our country have made over the years to end up with the political system that we live under.
I studied Comparative Government in grad school (Catholic University in Washington, DC), and loved it. Even though my focus for the past 30 years has been American history and government, I find that the insights I gained from the study of Comparative Government enhance my understanding of my own political system.
When I taught at the high school level, the Comparative Government curriculum required that you focus on five countries -- Britain, France, Russia, China, and then a third-world country (India, Nigeria, or Mexico). I just checked and discovered that the curriculum has changed a bit – now you have to study the six countries of China, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Russia, and the UK. France didn’t make the cut, India has also been removed, and Iran has been added.
Teaching this course was challenging. I had only one semester to teach it, and I had to present information about the country’s political history and culture, its political system and government, its party and electoral systems, and the internal and external challenges the country faced.
The reason I’m bringing this up today is because of an article in a recent foreign policy newsletter that talked about countries that have elections in 2023 – including two of the countries I taught, China and Nigeria. I want to spend some time today talking about Nigeria, which is holding its Presidential election in late February.
I had an academic encounter with Nigeria while I was in grad school, but I also had a personal encounter with the country through two individuals I came to know while I was in school. One was a young man named Phillip Ajofoyinbo, a visually impaired undergraduate student whom I tutored (I read his textbooks to him) for two semesters. I lost track of Philip after that year. The second was a fellow grad student – Chuba Okadigbo – whom I came to know reasonably well during the year we were in school together.
Chuba was a serious intellectual. He was 30 years old when I met him – a few years older than me. He already had a PhD in Philosophy when he started his graduate studies in Politics at Catholic University, and he spent some time as an adjunct professor of politics at both Catholic University and Howard University in DC before returning to Nigeria in 1975. At the time that I knew him, he was on the political “outs” with the people in power in Nigeria. He told us once that in order to attend his father’s funeral, he had to sneak into Nigeria on a fishing boat from a nearby country in order to evade captivity and imprisonment.
Here’s what I didn’t know about Chuba before I started doing a little research for this essay. After he went back to Nigeria, he became politically active, eventually serving as the President of the Nigerian Senate from November 1999 through August of 2000. His tenure in office was turbulent, and he was later falsely charged with corruption and impeached as Senate President. After changing political parties in 2002, he ran as the Vice-Presidential running mate to the unsuccessful presidential candidate Muhammadu Buhari. Chuba died unexpectedly in 2003 after suffering breathing difficulties on the campaign trail. His death was suspicious – some people questioned whether the tear gas used during the rally was poisonous.
His widow, Magery Okadigbo, was elected to the Nigerian Senate in 2015.
Note: Muhammadu Buhari, who was defeated (along with Chuba) in 2003, is the current President of Nigeria.
So, back to Nigeria’s 2023 elections.
When I studied (and later taught) about Nigeria, the country was experiencing the growing pains of a newly independent democracy. After 100 years of British rule, Nigeria gained its independence in 1960. At the time of independence, Nigeria was organized as a federal state with three regions, as this map shows.
These regions were dominated by three major tribal groups – Yoruba in the north, Fulani in the West, and Ibo in the East. These tribes had no underlying connection that encouraged them to cooperate in this union, and they all connected to other members of their tribes that lived outside of the artificial borders drawn by the British in the colonial years. The only unifying organization was the army – which explains why Nigeria suffered a series of military coups; two in 1966, one in 1967 (which led to the Biafran Civil War that lasted for three years), one in 1975, 1976, 1983, 1984, 1990, and 1993. Nigeria was governed by military dictatorship from 1966 through 1999 (which a 4-year period of civilian rule from 1979 to 1983). The current Republic (the fourth since independence) has lasted from 1999 until the present, ending a 39-year period of short-lived democracies, military coups, and counter-coups.
This is the situation in which Chuba operated during the 25 years after I was in grad school with him. Political instability and poverty haunted (and still haunt) this country. Although Nigeria is not alone in its problems, its challenges are unique and consequential. It is tempting for those of us in “the west” to lump all African countries together as “the third world” and not attempt to understand that the histories (and the futures) of the countries in that part of the world are distinct and worthy of study and understanding. But we err if we ignore Nigeria and its neighbors.
The Foreign Policy article that I linked to earlier in this essay explains why we should care about Nigeria. Africa is rapidly becoming the stage for the largest demographic changes in the world, and Nigeria is at the center of all of this. Nigeria is geographically 1.4 times the size of the state of Texas, but by the end of this century its population will double, surpassing the United States and becoming the world’s third most populous country after India and China. Some estimates suggest that it will have as many as 560 million people. Nigeria has not been able to exploit its national resources to build the kind of society that will be able to adapt to the challenges of this type of population growth – largely because of the inequities and corruption associated with British colonial rule.
In the Foreign Policy article, the author goes on to explain why the recent experience of China might be instructive to those trying to address the problems of Nigeria and its democracy. It’s too detailed to go into here, but I recommend it for your perusal. It’s interesting to me, as I taught about both China and Nigeria in my Comparative Government classes.
One of the things that the study of Comparative Government does is give you a vocabulary to compare things that look different – like China, Nigeria, and the United States. Very generally – the approach assumes that all countries have the same goals – creating a national identity and loyalty, serving the needs of the population, encouraging participation in political parties and elections, binding together regions of the country that might be separated by distance and history, creating economic prosperity and physical security – but that different countries perform these functions through different institutional structures and processes.
The 1999 Nigerian Constitution has a lot of similarities to the United States Constitution of 1787. It has the same three branches of government. Its President and Vice-President are directly elected, and its National Assembly has two houses – a Senate and a House of Representatives. Nigeria is a federal system, much like the United States; its 36 states are not directly analogous to the 50 states of the United States, but they operate with a great deal of autonomy and local control.
One thing that Nigeria does not have going for itself, however, is more than 220 years of experience with democracy like the US has experienced. The political and cultural understandings that allow the American political system to function (although it’s been a bit rocky recently) are not widely shared in Nigeria. It’s hard to figure out how the current government is going to maintain its recent stability as Nigeria faces ever-increasing demographic and economic challenges in the coming years. One of the things that the 20th century (and the first quarter of the 21st century) has taught us is that you can’t just plop democratic institutions and processes on top of a country that doesn’t have the fundamental characteristics to support these ideas.
The upcoming presidential election should prove interesting. Buhari is not running for reelection – almost certainly due to his age and poor health. . One of the candidates seeking the office is Bola Ahmed Tinubu – a wealthy former governor of Lagos State who has long aspired to the presidency. He is seen as the favorite in this race, running on the slogan that “it’s my time.” Another insider candidate – former vice president Atiku Abubakar – is running based on the slogan that he has “paid his dues.” The third candidate, Peter Obi, is an insurgent outsider with support among youth and intellectuals, although he has had no political experience at the national level. Thus far, there have not been serious debates among these three candidates and there’s a sense that Nigeria is entering this election cycle with candidates who have not articulated any detailed vision of how to solve the problems Nigeria is facing.
I’m struck by one problem that Nigeria shares with the US – the age of its candidates for office. The average age of the three candidates is 69, with Obi being the youngest at age 61. The outgoing president, Buhari, is 80. Sound familiar?
This was an interesting read. What concerns me about Nigeria are issues of human rights violations and the high rates of poverty and crime. But, as noted in Anne’s comments and Karen’s response, Nigeria had lots of company, including America. What will it take to ever get it right?
Whenever I think of Africa, I think of England, but not because of Kipling. I've only been to Kenya and read about the attitudes of Brits vis a vis their "immigrants." Along the way, the US has done some pretty bad and stupid things with our own people, but I think that Britain has a lot to account for because of empire. We keep getting it wrong and we don't seem to learn quickly enough from our mistakes in human relationships and governance--large or small. A better world is possible, but our acts of force and hatred seem to dominate humanity. That's why we need young people to take the reins-- to guide our tiny planet toward greater justice and community through education and deeds. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to rant.