Crucial dilemma for Africa's most populous country

With 216 million inhabitants, Nigeria is not only Africa's most populous country but also, according to demographic projections, the third most populous in the world by 2050, behind only India and China. The country held a crucial election this Saturday for its future, and indeed for the entire continent, in which the 90 million voters called to the polls were to choose their representatives in the National Assembly and the Senate, but above all the president, whose executive powers grant him very broad powers.

Among the few limitations he has is that he cannot extend his presidency beyond two four-year terms, which has prevented Muhammadu Buhari from running for a third term, and has opened the door to the closest elections since the country's return to democracy in 1999.

Fourteen candidates have contested the elections, but only three of them have a real chance of winning. It is unlikely that the winner will be declared within a week, given the technical difficulties involved in the vote count and the correction of the incidents reported to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), which have even led to Sunday being made available for voting in several of the country's states.

What is new and crucial in these elections compared to previous ones is that there is a candidate in the running who could break the traditional struggle between parties with a purely Muslim majority. He is the 61-year-old Christian Peter Obi, former governor of Anambra State, who, at the head of the Labour Party (LP), advocates a radical change in the fight against corruption, insecurity and above all in the administration, where the Christian minority feels discriminated against, if not excluded, from the best positions in the civil service.

Obi embodies the third way as opposed to a heavy-handed approach to maintaining "non-negotiable national unity" and those who advocate violence, or even "peaceful agitation" for the partition of the country. Secessionist sentiment has re-emerged in the Biafra region after supposedly being wiped out in the aftermath of the 1967-1970 civil war, which killed more than a million people. Prominent among them is Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) movement. Kanu founded IPOB in 2012, rejecting the violence advocated by several other separatist groups and espousing "peaceful agitation", which was also not well received by the Abuja authorities. In fact, he had to flee the country and took refuge for four years in Israel and the UK, before being arrested in Kenya and extradited to Nigeria in 2017. Charged with terrorism and high treason, and imprisoned, an appeal court surprisingly quashed all charges against him in 2022, on the grounds of "manifest illegality" in his arrest and extradition.

Although Peter Obi is openly opposed to secession, his hypothetical victory would deal a blow to IPOB by demonstrating that an Igbo Christian can also occupy the country's highest office. He would also have to make up for the region's obvious lag behind the rest of the country, especially in terms of investment, infrastructure and transport.

The two other candidates Obi faces are former governor of Lagos, the economic capital of the country, Bola Tinubo of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and former vice-president Atiku Abubakar of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). One of the country's biggest and richest businessmen, this is the sixth time he has contested the highest echelon of power. Both are Muslims and have the same desire to win. Tinubo would grudgingly accept defeat, as he never tires of repeating that "it's my turn to govern", a slogan that his APC party members and those in his extensive and personal political-business network repeat over and over again.

Whoever wins, they will have to address the serious problems of insecurity, impoverishment and secessionism that they inherited from President Buhari. President Buhari had promised that he would leave an unforgettable legacy for history. The reality is that the figures for Africa's largest oil-producing and exporting country belie him on these three major issues.