Nigeria has witnessed civilian rule for just over eight of nearly 39 years of self-rule. Incessant military incursions into the political terrain have led to several transition programs aimed at instituting democracy. This article focuses on the nature and operations of political parties in the recent transition and their implications for a stable democratic polity. The purpose of this focus is to recognize the enormous potential with which political parties are endowed for fostering or impeding the creation and sustenance of a cohesive, stable democratic system.

This article is a tentative incursion into the making and workings of collective memory in the recent Nigerian elections. The crisis of memory—construction, distortion, exploitation, and suppression—is evident in the Nigerian “transmutation” process—the perpetuation in power, through civilianization, of a military regime. The term “transmutation” is used here to convey the sense of a political mutation, a process of uncertain nature or progeny, certainly a transition, but one emanating from an unlikely parentage, a brutal and militarized past.

Among the more pressing and enigmatic challenges for Nigeria’s new civilian regime is the reconstruction of the nation’s benighted economy. The long-standing distortions of the petroleum-led economy have been exacerbated by more than a decade of misrule, international isolation, and economic decline. The current political transition offers Nigeria an opportunity to rejoin the global economy while establishing new foundations for economic revival. The legacy of decay from recent dictatorships weighs heavily on this process. The burdens of political repression and unaccountable governance have been compounded by stagnant economic performance, deepening popular immiseration, widening inequalities, and spiraling corruption.

The victory for democracy resulting from General Olusegun Obasanjo’s election in February 1999 is as hollow as it is contrived. For many analysts and political aspirants, Obasanjo’s victory is not a triumph for democracy but merely a eulogy to formal military rule. Obasanjo is viewed as the “ordained” military successor with more continuity to the tradition of authoritarian rule than to genuine democracy. His known autocratic leadership style and his less-than-progressive stance on the media and women make him difficult to accept as a champion of democracy. Furthermore, the legality of his victory is challenged by his alleged contravention of the qualification regulations of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), a factor that has led his opponent to contest the election results.

Given this imperfect situation, this article considers how Nigeria can build on the gains of the transition and consolidate democracy. The evidence from the new wave of democracy sweeping through the developing world suggests that “democracy makes sense” when civil organizations are prepared to challenge the right of autocratic regimes to rule.

One can say with certainty that all the contradictions that had bedeviled previous democratic experiments in Nigeria were present and magnified in the February 27, 1999 election: divided loyalties, manipulation of primordial identities and loyalties, corruption and other election malpractices, lack of political discipline, and limited attention to serious structural questions.

Why did Chief Olu Falae lose the election to General Olusegun Obasanjo? Several reasons can be advanced. First, Obasanjo’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) clearly had more money. Obasanjo was able to donate N 130 million and several cars to his party.

Nigeria has had three programs of transition from military to civil rule in the last 13 years. Despite the enormous resources wasted on the first two programs, by Generals Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha, democracy remains a mirage in Nigeria. The demise of the two programs was not just a monumental failure on the part of the two leaders; it also vividly demonstrates the military’s inability to effect a lasting transition to civil rule. In addition, the utter failure of both programs has exposed the political brinkmanship to which the military is prepared to go to subvert democracy. Babangida’s brazen annulment of the June 1993 presidential election and Abacha’s repressive, dictatorial, and corrupt governing style brought Nigeria closer to the edge of the precipice than any other crisis since the civil war of the 1960s.

The Conference of Nationalities organized in Nigeria by the Campaign for Democracy, and held on December 17-19, 1998, has come and gone with little impact either on the national consciousness or on the process of transition to democracy. At the outset, I should state that I have never been convinced that the type of national conference planned in Nigeria after the expiration of the regime of Sani Abacha was going to be as useful as the most successful Conferences Nationales pioneered in francophone Africa. From the particular example of a similar conference in the Republic of Benin, the weaknesses of the Nigerian parley can be crystallized. The choice of Benin is quite easy. The Conference Nationale there was a resounding success. That triumphant experiment is a much better yardstick for measuring the Nigerian effort than, say, the failed one in Togo, although the Togo case is not without humbling lessons for the Nigerian organizers of the Conference of Nationalities.

This article cautions that the democratization process in Nigeria is not a foregone conclusion. Given the nature of the competing interests within Nigeria’s military hierarchy, there is nothing to suggest that every officer within the ruling military elite has embraced this transition project. This article focuses on the place of the military in the transition program.

Although entrenched military interests are not the only threat to the transition program, there is no doubt that the prominent role played by retired and serving military officers in the whole process of party formation and selection of presidential candidates has exacerbated concerns about the specter of militarism. While some in Nigeria simply see the military as the armed wing of the dominant oligarchy, others conclude that the military actually is the oligarchy.

The foundations of modern Nigerian politics were laid in the 1950s. That decade began with the Ibadan constitutional conference of 1950, at which leaders of northern and southern Nigeria met for the first time in a common political forum since the amalgamation of these two separate British colonies in 1914. It ended with the attainment of independence in 1960. In the course of that fateful decade, Nigerians, previously estranged from one another by the circumstances of colonial rule, not only got to know themselves but worked together to produce a blueprint for the country’s political future. In essence, they rejected British as well as nationalist proclivities toward centralization. Instead, they forged a consensus that federalism was the appropriate vehicle for resolving political problems created by the nation’s deep-seated diversity.