On top of everything else going on in Africa and the Middle East, rioting has been taking place in the last week in Nigeria following presidential elections, with some estimating that as many “600 people may have been killed”:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-25/nigerian-rights-group-says-600-killed-in-north-s-post-election-violence.html. My colleague “Alexandra Scacco”:http://homepages.nyu.edu/~als8/ is currently working on a book on ethnic conflict and rioting in Nigeria, so I asked her for her thoughts. Across a couple of different email exchanges on the topic, she noted the following:
bq. This is the first set of riots in Kaduna and Kano in many years that have been explicitly “political” in the sense that victims were targeted as supporters of the incumbent PDP party, rather than as Christians or Muslims or as members of a particular ethnic group. This probably helps to explain why participation was relatively limited, e.g., didn’t “catch fire” to the same extent as the Christian-Muslim riots, which touch on fundamental concerns about safety and protection in these very mixed cities. As soon as the word gets out that “the Christians are coming” (or vice versa), it’s much less easy to contain.
bq. That said, it’s still a disturbing sign that Buhari has not willingly conceded defeat. This is a common trend in African elections, even relatively clean ones, and it’s a problem for democratic consolidation that isn’t mentioned as often as concerns about incumbent behavior (cheating, violence and intimidation).
She also noted that one particular Nigerian problem that has been highlighted here is:
bq. Many Nigerians in the north have come to expect ‘alternation’ between Northern and Southern presidents, regardless of election results. This is not how democracy works. [With this in mind], in some sense, Goodluck Jonathan seems to be the best thing that has happened to Nigerian politics in years. Which is not surprising, given that an exogenous shock (Yar’Adua’s death from pericarditis) brought him to power. I think the fact that he is a relative outsider in Nigerian politics and is from a region that has never produced a president before is a big part of why he managed to oversee clean elections.