Africa Works

Who is Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and why is he increasingly seen as the next President of Nigeria? Yar’Adua is the front-running candidate of Nigieria’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP), which has run Africa’s most populous country for the past eight years. President Olusegun Obasanjo steps down in April after two terms. Opposition to Obasanjo is strong and widespread in Nigeria, but opponents have yet to rally around a single candidate — and the odds are that, in Nigeria’s fractitious political culture, they won’t. Yar’Adua is an obscure governor of one of Nigeria’s northern states, Katsina. He is considered reclusive and would not even be in the running for the presidency were he not both a Muslim and of Hausa descent. Muslims represent about half of Nigeria’s population and the Hausa people are one of the country’s three major ethnic groups. Since Obasanjo is neither a Muslim nor a Hausa — he is a Christian and a Yoruba from the south — the PDP opted for choosing a candidate along ethno-religious lines. Yar’Adua is trying to make the right noises as a candidate but he is essentially a party hack and is likely to continue the pattern of ethnic patronage and corruption that characterizes Nigerian politics. While foreign observers are expected to crow about the “democratic” transition between elected administrations, which would be a first for Nigeria, the absence of any candidate broadly representing the interests of Nigeria’s poor majority is a sad commentary on the state of the country’s democracy. Should a populist candidate emerge, Nigerians will test the truism that ethnicity trumps class-interests. This would be a test worth taking.