Succession crisis looms after Obasanjo barred from new tenure

After the Nigerian parliament threw out a bid to change the constitution and enable President Olusegun Obasanjo to stay in office for a third consecutive term, uncertainty is growing over who may succeed him in less than 12 months. Presidential elections are due in April 2007 and until parliament turned down the amendment last month, Obasanjo had been widely perceived as the leading candidate for the forthcoming poll despite never confirming any third term ambitions in public. Vice President Atiku Abubakar has his eye on the top job and last week launched his campaign to win the presidential ticket of the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP). “I am going to run as a PDP candidate” Abubakar told reporters while opening his campaign office in Abuja last week. But the Abubakar does not have all the PDP’s – nor Obasanjo’s - backing and the issue is widening cracks within the party ranks. The coming months are likely to unfold a bitter political struggle in Africa’s most populous country of 126 million people who are starkly divided along ethnic, religious and regional lines. Northern politicians and military leaders dominated power for most of Nigeria’s years following independence from Britain in 1960 and Obasanjo – a southern Christian - owes much of his presidential success in 1999 to the support he received from the north. Top politicians from the mainly Muslim north claim there was a gentleman’s agreement in 1999 to hand power to a northern candidate at the end of Obasanjo’s tenure in the interest of peace and national unity. “It was clearly stated using the platform of the PDP that power will reside in the South for the first and second [terms], after which it will shift to the North,” Ango Abdullahi, told reporters on behalf of group after a meeting in Abuja last week. Northerners expected to declare their candidacy include onetime military leaders General Ibrahim Babangida and General Muhammadu Buhari - Obasanjo’s main challenger in 2003. But the Igbo ethnic group of the southeast and minorities that inhabit the region’s Niger Delta, also have the presidency in sight. The region produces most of the oil wealth that supplies 95 percent of government revenue but has yet to produce a president. Insurgents whose attacks in the oil region have cut Nigeria’s oil exports by more than 20 percent since January say a succession of governments have marginalised their region. When a governor of the northern Nigerian State of Niger, Abdulkadir Kure, declared that the oil region lacked people with the political stature to lead the country, southern senators were enraged. “We produce a good percentage of the wealth of this country but have been consistently denied the opportunity to produce the president,” said Udo Udoma, a senator from the oil region. “To add insult to injury we are being told this great injustice is because we are not good enough,” added Udoma. “This nonsense must stop.” But some observers believe they haven’t seen the last of Obasanjo and speculate there is a substitute plan to create political chaos during the elections and prolong the former military-man’s stay through emergency rule. “To let down our guard can be fatal,” Kola Animashaun, Vanguard national daily columnist warned on Sunday. “We must not allow this President to create a situation where he can use emergency powers to get by the back door what he could not by the front.” DM/ SS