One of the more bizarre chapters in recent Nigerian history has come to a close with the passing of President Umaru Yar’Adua. Discerning Yar’Adua’s status had in recent months become the Africanist equivalent of Moscow-watchers trying to glean from the most modest clues the health of Soviet Premieres in the first half of the 1980s. But now that Goodluck Jonathan has been sworn in as Nigeria’s President, removing the “interim” from his title, one suspects that the closing of one chapter will simply open another in Abuja, where politics can be fraught in the best of circumstances.
Umaru Musa Yar'Adua
Jonathan seems to have been a capable, effective leader over the last few months, although his dissolution of the cabinet last month caused some brows to furrow. Was he simply trying to clean house of ineffective, corrupt, and dissolute leadership? Or was he trying to consolidate his own power in a country where such consolidations have been distressingly commonplace? But the question of whether or not Yar-Adua’s death will provide the pretext for political unrest or machinations remains to be seen. Nigeria has many real and imagined fault lines — ethnic, religious, geographical, socioeconomic, cultural — and how Jonathan moves forward might be crucial to Nigeria’s political stability.
Goodluck Jonathan