Even by the standards that Nigeria’s military dictators had set, General Sani Abacha reached new levels of notoriety. From his fortified presidential complex at Aso Rock in Abuja, he relished the use of raw power to crush all opponents and to amass a personal fortune, acting with a degree of ruthlessness that outstripped that of all his predecessors. A reclusive figure, he rarely appeared in public or travelled abroad. Not once during his time as president in the 1990s did he visit Lagos, the country’s commercial capital. Shielded by security personnel and a presidential guard, he remained inaccessible even to most of his ministers and to the ruling military council, preferring to deal with a handful of key civilian advisers and business cronies. Yet from his headquarters at Aso Rock he spawned a climate of fear that Nigerians had never before experienced. The civilian population, angry and resentful that the military had once again thwarted efforts to establish democratic rule, discovered that opposing Abacha’s dictatorship carried a high cost. ‘Abacha is prepared to reduce Nigeria to rubble as long as he survives to preside over a name,’ Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize laureate, wrote in 1995 after leaving for exile.
Within months of his coup in November 1994, Abacha faced rising public clamour for him to step down. Much of the agitation came from southern political groups still furious that the June election won by the Yoruba tycoon Chief Abiola, had been stolen from them by northern generals. Vigorous campaigns against military rule were waged by the ‘opposition’ press. In May 1995 the National Democratic Coalition (Nadeco), a loose alliance of mainly southern groups, issued an ‘ultimatum’ to Abacha to hand over power to Abiola on May 31. Members of the disbanded Senate and House of Representatives voiced their support.
On 11 June Abiola declared himself president and was ‘sworn in’ in a brief ceremony in Lagos. ‘Let the heavens fall,’ he told a press conference. Abacha ordered his arrest on charges of treason, but the result was an explosion of dissent. Oil workers declared an indefinite strike. They were joined by bank employees, teachers and nurses. The oil sector strike, paralysing refineries, terminals and other installations, led to acute shortages of petroleum products throughout the country. Oil exports were reduced by a third.
To break the strikes, Abacha tried bribes, threats, arrests, thuggery and eventually outright repression. The oil workers’ unions were shut down; pro-democracy activists were detained; Nadeco was banned; and independent newspapers – The Concord, The Guardian and Punch – were proscribed. Critics spoke of a new ‘dark age’.
In March 1995 Abacha instituted a new purge, claiming evidence of a coup plot. Among those arrested were two former generals, Olusegun Obasanjo and Shehu Yar’ Adua, both of whom had spoken out against military rule. Obasanjo had held power for three years from 1976 to 1979 before handing over to an elected civilian government; a born-again Christian from Yorubaland, he had since retired to his farm fifty miles north of Lagos and taken up chicken and pig farming. Yar’ Adua, a multimillionaire Katsina prince, ran a powerful political machine in the north and harboured presidential ambitions. In all, more than forty people – military officers, journalists and human rights activists – were convicted in secret trials held by a special military tribunal and sentenced to death or long prison sentences. Obasanjo was given life imprisonment; Yar’ Adua was sentenced to death. After international protests, both sentences were reduced.
In dealing with dissident minority groups from the Niger Delta region, the location of Nigeria’s oil wealth, Abacha acted with similar ferocity. The main grievance of Delta activists was that oil revenues produced by the Delta were used largely to benefit ethnic-majority areas of the country while their own region suffered from neglect. The Delta region was one of the poorest, least developed parts of Nigeria, lacking basic amenities; there was little provision of electricity or pipe-borne water supplies, and schools and hospitals were inadequately funded. Moreover, the Delta had to contend with the burden of environmental degradation: oil spills from pipelines polluted the land and waterways; gas flaring polluted the air; fishing and farming were contaminated, destroying the livelihood of farmers and fishermen.
During the 1970s and 1980s various Delta communities launched sporadic protests at multinational oil companies. In the early 1990s, however, more organised resistance emerged, directed not just at the companies but at the government. A host of community organisations sprang up – the Organisation for the Restoration of Actual Rights of Oil Communities; the Conference of Traditional Rulers of Oil Producing States; Concerned Youths of Oil Producing States. Many were founded to represent ethnic interests: the Ijaw National Congress; the Urhobo Progress Union; the Isoko Development Union. Foremost among them was the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (Mosop) founded in 1990.
The principal founder of Mosop, Ken Saro-Wiwa was a writer, television producer and business entrepreneur, born in Ogoniland in 1941. A diminutive figure, with a vituperative turn of phrase, he was best known in Nigeria as the creator of Basi & Co, a television soap opera watched by 30 million Nigerians each week that lampooned the country’s get-rich-quick mentality. In his novel Prisoners of Jebs he turned his fire on the oil-boom folly. ‘Nigeria was full of inflation, corruption, injustice, murder, armed robbery, maladministration, drug-trafficking, hunger, knavery, dishonesty and plain stupidity . . . But it still remained a blessed country.’
In the 1980s he became increasingly preoccupied with the plight of Ogoniland, an area of no more than 400 square miles in Rivers State with a population of 500,000 Ogonis. It was the fifth largest oil-producing community in Rivers State. Since 1958 its wells had produced about $30 billion worth of oil, yet hardly a trickle had filtered down to the people living there. Saro-Wiwa blamed both the government and the Anglo-Dutch company Shell, which operated most of the oil wells and pipelines there, for Ogoniland’s poverty and degradation. In a newspaper article for the Sunday Times in 1990, he demanded a reallocation of oil money in favour of local people. The article was entitled: ‘The Coming War in the Delta’.
The opening salvo came in 1990 with the publication of an Ogoni Bill of Rights. Drawn up by Mosop and approved by the traditional heads of five Ogoni clans, it demanded political autonomy for Ogoniland, local control of its economic resources and protection from further environmental degradation. Nigeria’s military rulers dismissed the demands, but Mosop’s grievances found a more receptive audience abroad, notably among environmental and human rights groups. In December 1992 Mosop wrote to Shell, Chevron and the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, the three oil companies operating in Ogoniland, demanding payment of $6 billion for accumulated rentals and royalties for oil exploration dating back to 1958; payment of $4 billion for damages and compensation for environmental pollution; and negotiations to decide ‘acceptable terms’ for future oil exploration. The companies were given thirty days to meet these demands and threatened with mass action if they failed to do so. The time had come, said Mosop, in their letter to the oil companies, for ‘the Ogonis to fight for their own salvation . . . because there is no government to deliver us’.
The government responded by sending troops to protect oil installations and announcing a ban on all public gatherings and demonstrations. It also issued a decree declaring that demands for self-determination and disruptive activities affecting oil production would be considered as acts of treason punishable by death.
Defying the threat, Mosop organised mass ‘Ogoni Day’ rallies, focusing on the demand for self-determination. ‘We are not asking for the moon,’ Mosop’s president, Garrick Leton, told demonstrators in Bori in January 1993, ‘but the bare necessities of life – water, electricity, roads, education and a right to self-determination so that we can be responsible for our resources and our environment.’ Saro-Wiwa called on the international community to come to the rescue of Ogonis before they were driven ‘to extinction’ by ‘the multinational oil companies and their protectors’. He urged the crowd to ‘rise up now and fight for your rights’.
The ‘Ogoni Day’ rallies, attended by tens of thousands of Ogonis, marked the peak of Mosop’s fortunes. Traditional leaders took fright at the growing confrontation with the government. After an outbreak of violence in April, they issued a statement apologising for the disorder and supporting a crackdown on dissidents. The Ogoni movement became divided between a conservative faction anxious to reach an accommodation with the government and a radical wing of youth activists led by Saro-Wiwa, determined to pursue the campaign. The conservatives accused Saro-Wiwa of employing ‘an army of trained thugs’ to ensure that he emerged as ‘the one Ogoni leader’. To add to the disarray, the government stirred up tribal strife between the Ogonis and their neighbours the Andonis, another oil-producing community, supplying them with arms and expertise. More than 1,000 Ogonis were killed and some 30,000 left homeless. A similar conflict broke out between Okrikas and Ogonis in Port Harcourt.
The end of the movement came in May 1994 after four conservative leaders meeting in the chief’s palace at Gokana were killed by a local mob. Saro-Wiwa and other prominent activists were arrested, and government forces unleashed fearful repression throughout Ogoniland, killing at least fifty Ogonis. A Human Rights Watch report described the carnage:
Troops entered towns and villages shooting at random, as villagers fled to the surrounding bush. Soldiers and mobile police stormed houses, breaking down doors and windows with their boots, the butts of their guns and machetes. Villagers who crossed their paths, including children and the elderly, were severely beaten, forced to pay ‘settlement fees’ [bribes] and sometimes shot. Many women were raped . . . Before leaving, troops looted money, livestock and other property.
Saro-Wiwa was held in detention for nine months, without access to lawyers, before being charged with incitement to murder. He was then brought before a special tribunal, consisting of two judges and a military officer, with no right of appeal. He denied the charge and no credible evidence was ever produced linking him to the murders. He was nevertheless found guilty and, along with eight other defendants, sentenced to death. Within eight days Abacha’s Provisional Ruling Council confirmed the sentence. Despite worldwide calls for clemency, the Ogoni Nine were executed two days later, on 10 November 1994.
Abacha remained indifferent to the barrage of condemnation that came from abroad. The execution of the Ogoni Nine had served its purpose of warning critics of the costs of opposing him. Other notable victims included Kudirat Abiola, the wife of Chief Abiola, a tireless campaigner for her husband’s cause, who was gunned down in her car in Lagos by security agents; and General Yar’ Adua, who was murdered in prison. The army too was purged of dissidents. Abacha’s deputy, General Oladipo Diya, and other Yoruba officers were charged with plotting a coup and executed.
Maintaining his vice-like grip on power, Abacha next turned his attention to obtaining a popular mandate for his rule. He allowed the registration of five political parties, all of which were closely identified with members of his regime and its supporters. Other groups suspected of opposing him or likely to become ‘too powerful’ were denied registration and proscribed. All five political parties duly assembled conventions, each selecting Sani Abacha as their presidential candidate.
His plans, however, were cut short. On 8 June 1998 Abacha died while in the arms of a pair of Indian prostitutes. His successor, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, swiftly reversed direction. Within weeks he freed scores of prisoners, including General Obasanjo, human rights activists, oil union chiefs and Ogoni dissidents. Negotiations over the release of Chief Abiola were underway when Abiola suddenly died of a heart attack. Abubakar also declared his intention to return Nigeria to civilian rule, setting out a new schedule for elections. Local elections were held in December 1998, state elections in January 1999 and elections for the national assembly and for the presidency in February 1999. Obasanjo won the presidential election, taking 63 per cent of the vote, mainly through the support of northern power-brokers; and his People’s Democratic Party gained control of the national assembly. The elections in February were riddled with fraud, bribery and other irregularities. However, independent election observers, while judging the elections to be neither ‘free nor fair’, according to standard criteria, nevertheless concluded that they generally reflected ‘the will of the people’. At an elaborate ceremony in Abuja in May 1999, Obasanjo was sworn in as president, ending sixteen years of military rule.
Forty years after independence, Nigeria presented a sorry spectacle. Wole Soyinka described his own country as ‘the open sore of a continent’. Despite an oil bonanza of $280 billion, the economy was derelict; public services were chronically inefficient; schools and hospitals were decaying; higher education had virtually collapsed; roads were pitted with potholes; the telephone system hardly functioned. There were frequent power cuts; even shortages of domestic petroleum supplies. On average, Nigerians were poorer in 2000 than they had been at the start of the oil boom in the early 1970s. Income per head at $310 was less than one-third of that in 1980. Half of the population lived on less than 30 cents a day; half of the population had no access to safe drinking water. Almost one-fifth of children died before their fifth birthday; nearly half of under-fives were stunted because of poor malnutrition. Millions of people lived in slums surrounded by rotting mounds of garbage, without access to basic amenities.
The record of successive governments had been abysmal. Leading institutions such as the civil service swallowed huge sums of money but delivered few services; embezzlement and bribery were rife. The military were widely hated. The police acted as an occupying force, routinely extorting money from civilians and sometimes colluding with criminal gangs; the paramilitary Mobile Police were so notorious for brutality that they were nicknamed ‘Kill and Go’. Police numbers had been kept deliberately low to prevent them from emerging as rivals to the military. Lagos, a city of about 10 million inhabitants, had no more than 12,000 policemen on its payroll. Underfunded, ill-equipped and poorly trained, the police were no match for criminal gangs.
The justice system was chaotic. Prisoners were often locked up without trial for years on end. A government commission investigating overcrowded prisons found that half of the inmates had never been legally sentenced; some had sat in their cells for ten years without ever seeing a judge. Court proceedings were often determined by bribes rather than by justice. Many criminals were safe from prosecution because they came from prominent families or enjoyed the patronage of powerful politicians. Anyone with sufficient money and influence was able to make use of state institutions to harm opponents, whether in land or business disputes or in personal vendettas.
Vast sums had been spent on prestige projects, to no advantage. A total of $8 billion had gone on constructing a steel industry complex based at Ajaokuta that had yet to produce a single bar of steel. Billions more had been sunk into an ultra-modern capital at Abuja, complete with glittering hotels and office towers, that the ruling elite enjoyed using but that brought little benefit to ordinary Nigerians.
Even worse were the vast sums siphoned off through corruption. Abacha’s greed exceeded that of all his predecessors. It was estimated that he stole more than $4 billion, taking money either directly from the treasury, or from government contracts, or through scams like the Petroleum Trust Fund that he set up ostensibly to channel extra revenue from an increase in the domestic fuel price into infrastructure and other investments. The looting continued right through to the end of General Abubakar’s regime. In the last months of military rule a flurry of public contracts went to well-connected firms. Foreign exchange reserves shrank by $2.7 billion between the end of December 1998 and the end of March 1999.
Abroad, Nigeria was ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world. It was renowned for commercial fraud, in particular an advance-fee fraud known locally as a ‘419 scam’, after the article in the penal code that outlawed it. Nigerian syndicates also played a central role in the world’s drug trade, controlling a large share of heroin and cocaine imported into the United States.
Compounding all the difficulties that Nigeria faced was a resurgence of ethnic and religious rivalry, held in check by years of repressive military rule. ‘Everybody is sharpening his knife,’ warned the governor of Anambra State in a press interview. One underlying cause was the collapse of government institutions, their failure to provide even basic services. Ethnic and religious groups turned their back on the state, resorting to a primary loyalty for aid and protection. Politicians exploited the despair and disillusionment with central government for their own ends. Competition between rival groups was fierce. For what was at stake were the revenues of the state and the ability of politicians to deliver them to their constituents.
A host of ethnic groups sprang up, some demanding self-determination, some wanting control over local economic resources, some setting out cultural and social objectives. Militant groups formed their own militias and used vigilante forces to combat rising levels of crime that the police failed to curb. Outbreaks of ethnic violence became increasingly common. More than 200 clashes were recorded between January 1999 and January 2000. A Nigerian quoted by the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report for 2002 remarked: ‘When we were in the military regime, we didn’t get anything from the government but we had peace. Now we are in a democracy, we don’t get anything from the government and we do not get peace.’
Yoruba activists rallied to the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC), convinced of a northern conspiracy to marginalise them. Not only had the Yoruba leader Chief Abiola been deprived by northern officers of his 1993 election victory, but he had then been left to rot in prison without adequate medical care. His subsequent death was regarded as suspicious. Nor were they mollified by the installation of Obasanjo’s government. Though a Yoruba himself, Obasanjo was viewed as a stooge of northern interests. In the 1999 election Yorubas voted overwhelmingly against him, favouring the Yoruba-based opposition party, Alliance for Democracy.
Communal violence between Yoruba and Hausa flared soon afterwards. In Sagamu, a major centre of the kola-nut trade, thirty-six miles from Lagos, where Hausas had lived and traded for generations, fighting broke out as the result of the murder of a Hausa woman after she was caught allegedly watching traditional Yoruba religious rites known as Oro. More than fifty people were killed; homes, shops, mosques and markets were destroyed both in Yoruba neighbourhoods and in the Hausa quarter of Sabo. When fleeing Hausa traders arrived in Kano, bearing news of their ordeal, reprisals were launched against Yoruba residents there. Four months later, Yoruba and Hausa traders clashed over control of the strategic Mile 12 Market in Ketu, Lagos. The violence in Ketu prompted Hausa to set up a northern counterpart to the OPC, the Arewa People’s Congress. OPC activists were also involved in clashes with Ijaw dockworkers in Lagos which sparked pitched battles between residents in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle. Obasanjo ordered police to shoot rioters on sight and told a national television audience that, ‘When people decide to behave like animals, they must be treated like animals.’
Militia groups in the east were equally active. One of the most prominent was the Ijaw Youth Council (IYC), a confederation of youth associations in the Ijaw homeland in the Niger Delta region which included an armed wing called the Niger Delta Volunteer Force, more popularly known as the Egbesu Boys. Like the Ogoni, the Ijaw demanded control of local oil resources, focusing their campaign on multinational oil companies. In December 1998 the IYC issued the Kaiama Declaration giving oil companies a nineteen-day ultimatum to vacate ‘Ijawland’ – an area covering parts of Rivers, Bayelsa and Delta States – and warning that any oil company that sought protection from government forces would be regarded as ‘an enemy of the Ijaw people’. Carrying out their threat, Ijaw militias sabotaged oil installations and pipelines and kidnapped oil company employees for ransom, prompting massive government repression. They were also involved in clashes with Urhobos and Itsekiris over control of the oil city of Warri. Kidnapping and hostage-taking subsequently became a routine for company employees in the Delta, normally settled by oil companies quietly making payments.
Igbo activists launched the Igbo People’s Congress supporting demands for the self-determination of ethnic areas. A more extreme group – the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra – agitated for the dismemberment of Nigeria and the formation of a separate Igbo state. Its members openly hoisted the old flag of Biafra. ‘Nothing good can ever come out of Nigeria,’ said a spokesman. ‘What you hear are power outages, shortage of water, armed robbery and other evils. We don’t want to be part of that evil.’
As well as ethnic mobilisation, some ethnic groups ventured into the business of crime control, despairing of police assistance. An Igbo vigilante force known as the Bakassi Boys became infamous for its use of ‘jungle justice’ but was widely popular. Originally set up by traders in the market town of Aba in Abia State in 1999, after years of extortion, theft and thuggery by criminal gangs unhindered by the police, the Bakassi Boys swiftly gained a reputation as effective enforcers and found other towns pleading for their services. Within a few weeks they succeeded in ‘cleaning’ the entire state of criminal gangs. Local traders in neighbouring Anambra State persuaded the authorities to let them fight crime there too. The results were impressive. During the first weeks of their operations in the market town of Onitsha in 2000, they caught and executed 200 alleged criminals.
A former lecturer at the University of Nsukka, Johannes Harnischfeger, described, in a research paper on the Bakassi Boys, how prisoners were handled:
At first . . . they remain for some days imprisoned in the Bakassi Centre, where they are investigated by an investigation committee. Only once their guilt has been established are they taken out on to the street and then to a road junction that is sufficiently large for hundreds of spectators. They are driven along the streets by a succession of blows, so that they have no time to turn to the bystanders, bewail their fate, or appeal to onlookers’ feelings of compassion. Nor do the Bakassi Boys announce the sentence, or attempt to justify their actions. On arriving at the place of execution, they simply throw the bound victims on the ground and chop away at them for minutes on end with their blunt machetes – a silent bloodbath, because the victims do not scream, even though some are still writhing on the ground when the Bakassi Boys finish their task by tossing tyres on top of them and dousing them with petrol.
I was unable to find anyone among the crowd of spectators who voiced any disapproval or disgust. All that I occasionally noted was a slight feeling of apprehension. A number of women, for instance, scurried past on the way to do their shopping at the market, and merely cast brief glances at the horrifying scene while quickly crossing themselves. Others held cloths before their mouths, as the smoke drifting over from the charring bodies was poisonous. But otherwise no regret was shown towards the victims.
According to a report by the Civil Liberties Organisation in 2001, the Bakassi Boys were estimated to have executed as many as 3,000 people in Anambra State over an eighteen-month period – with a dramatic impact on crime levels. A committee of journalists awarded Anambra a prize in 2001 as ‘the most crime-free State in Nigeria’.
Northern Nigeria, meanwhile, was torn apart by endemic bouts of religious strife between Muslims and Christians. Since the 1980s militant Muslim groups had agitated for the introduction of more sharia measures in northern states. A Muslim sect led by Muhammadu Marwa, popularly known as ‘Maitatsine’ – ‘the one who curses’ – mobilised the young urban poor in a series of uprisings in the early 1980s, first in Kano and later in Yola, Kaduna and Maiduguri, in which thousands died. In 1982 a wave of violence erupted in Kano spreading from Muslim anger at reconstruction work on a church sited close to a mosque. Christian resentment was fuelled in 1986 after Babangida announced that Nigeria would join the Organisation of Islamic Conference as a full member, a move that some Christian leaders interpreted as a step towards establishing an Islamic state. In 1987 a quarrel between Christian and Muslim students in southern Kaduna led to riots in which scores of churches and mosques were destroyed. Riots broke out in Kano in 1991 when a Christian evangelist from Germany attempted to stage a revivalist rally at the racecourse there. In Bauchi there were riots as a result of a feud between a Christian governor and a local Shiite leader. In 1992 a land dispute between Christian Katafs and Muslim Hausas in southern Kaduna escalated into wider religious violence in which hundreds died.
The cause was often as much to do with mass poverty, unemployment and crime and the government’s failure to alleviate them as with religious belief. A contributing factor to rising demands in the north for the implementation of sharia law was the collapse of the judicial system and inadequate law enforcement. Youths invoked piety and joined vigilante groups to enforce sharia law not out of religious conviction but as political acts. Politicians for their part exploited religious loyalty as a means of gaining mass support in their own struggles for power.
Religious tensions in the north flared up once more after Obasanjo, a southern Christian, was installed as president in 1999. The northern power-brokers who helped elect him were disgruntled to find that he was not as amenable to their bidding as they had expected him to be. Soon after his inauguration, Obasanjo acted to remove hundreds of senior army officers who had been closely involved with the previous military regime, most of them northerners. Smarting from the loss of political power, northern leaders raised fears of a Christian ‘hidden agenda’ and used sharia as a weapon to reassert northern solidarity.
In October 1999 a newly elected governor, Ahmed Sani, announced that Zamfara, an impoverished state in the far north, would adopt sharia law as its only legal system in January 2000, citing Saudi Arabia as his model. Hitherto, about three-quarters of the northern penal code had been based on sharia, including such matters as marriage and divorce. Sani’s intention was to extend sharia to all criminal cases and to apply it as well to sentencing, with penalties that would include flogging and stoning. Sharia, he said, was necessary to restore clean living to a decadent society. He claimed that sharia would affect only the Muslim population, though he proposed bans on alcohol, prostitution and the local cinema. Minority Christian groups in the north were outraged and fearful. The southern press accused Sani of leading Zamfara back into the dark ages. The Christian Association of Nigeria announced legal action in the courts. Delegates in the Cross River assembly in the south-east threatened to declare a ‘Christian state’ if Zamfara made the change.
Other northern states, however, decided to follow Sani’s lead – twelve in all. A Christian protest in the city of Kaduna in February 2000 resulted in bloody clashes leaving hundreds dead. Entire neighbourhoods were ‘religiously cleansed’. Many of the victims were Igbo. In revenge, Igbo vigilante groups in southern Nigeria – including the Bakassi Boys – killed hundreds of Hausa migrants from the north living there. As thousands of refugees and emigrants fled from the far north, religious tensions increased in other areas. Jos, the capital of Plateau State, hitherto renowned for its peace and quiet, was engulfed in clashes between Christian and Muslim groups in 2001 in which 3,000 died.
So many violent disputes broke out in the early years of Obasanjo’s regime – over land, politics, religion, ethnicity, money – that at times it seemed that Nigeria was ungovernable. With a population of 120 million divided into some 250 ethnic groups, each with its own agenda, the potential for disorder was unlimited. ‘The frequency and ferocity with which these clashes have spread across the country have made many Nigerians wonder to what extent the generality of Nigerians are appreciative of our hard-won democracy,’ Obasanjo remarked in 2002.
Obasanjo struggled valiantly to keep a lid on ethnic strife and to get to grips with the myriad of problems that Nigeria faced. But he made little headway. The decay in Nigeria was too deep-rooted, its system of corruption too deeply embedded, to allow for easy solutions. Nigerian politics, moreover, remained an arena for an elite group on the look-out for money-making opportunities, not a vehicle for pursuing economic and social reform.
In 2003 Nigerians went to the polls once more, electing Obasanjo for a second term, but more disillusioned with politicians than ever before. It was a measure of how little was expected of Nigeria that the holding of a second election in four years in relatively peaceful circumstances was itself regarded as a major achievement. Nigerians, however, remained profoundly sceptical about their prospects. One of their favourite admonitions, carried on the side of trucks and buses, was: ‘No condition is permanent’.