Nigeria's New Beginning

It was said that General Muhammadu Buhari's election as President of Nigeria on March 31, 2015 was a repudiation of the corruption and cronyism of Goodluck Jonathan's administration. So it was, but it also showed voters are able to overcome the constitutional changes and intimidation that leaders have used to retain their positions and power. Buhari's victory was a profile in persistence, since it took him four tries and 15.4 million votes to be the first candidate to defeat an elected incumbent, since Nigeria became an independent country in 1960. To his credit, Jonathan, who lost with 13.3 million votes, kept his supporters from launching a bloody protest over the election results.

    The Buhari-Jonathan presidential race was the latest challenge in Nigeria's troubled political history until Buhari began suffering from an undisclosed illness that has kept him away from his office for long periods of treatment twice in 2017. Nigeria's new tradition of alternating eight-year presidential terms between northern Muslim leaders and southern Christians would be tested if Buhari, a northern Fulani Muslim, were defeated by another northerner who would be eligible for an eight-year term. That would keep southerners out of the presidency for 12 years.
 (Richard Bourne's book, Nigeria: A New History of a Turbulent Century, provides a good description of Nigeria since independence.)

      Buhari served as Nigeria's military head of state until he was overthrown in a 1985 coup' He was committed to protecting his people from the Boko Haram terrorists who kidnapped nearly 300 teen aged girls and killed thousands of villagers. As Boko Haram was being driven out of Gwoza in the Borno State of northeastern Nigeria, the militant Muslims massacred captured wives and old men. Local citizens expected the group's departure was only temporary. They were right. Just hours after Buhari was sworn in as Nigeria's new President on May 29, 2015, an attack by Boko Haram killed 13 people in Maiduguri, the provincial capital of northeastern Nigeria, before government troops forced the Islamic rebels to retreat. Buhari announced plans to set up a military command center in Maiduguri. Nonetheless, during the Muslim holy period of Ramadan in 2015, over 200 Nigerians were killed. Some 44 people also died in two July 6 bomb attacks in Jos, a city targeted by Boko Haram in the past. In early 2016, only a little over a month after Buhari announced Boko Haram was "technically defeated," the Islamic terrorist group killed 80 people in the village of Dalorl, near Maiduguri. A new abduction of another 100 teen aged girls by Boko Haram occurred in the northeastern Yobe state in February, 2018.

     Although Nigeria's oil and natural gas reserves, production, and exports are among the world's best, problems have plagued the industry. To counteract the loss of government revenue from collapsing crude oil prices, in October, 2015 the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation announced plans to renegotiate contracts with oil producers in order to get a bigger share of revenue from their deepwater fields. At the same time, oil corporations, also suffering from declining crude prices, are threatening to cut development spending on new deepwater projects in Nigeria. Sagging revenue from falling oil prices is just the latest problem for a government that has faced multiple oil-related challenges: pipeline sabotage resulting in oil spills that have contaminated water, farm land, and air; uncertainty about OPEC's regulations on production; underutilized refinery capacity; lack of capital for deepwater drilling and the infrastructure needed to capture natural gas burn off; and protests by southerners who have never felt they fully participated in the wealth generated by oil fields in the Niger Delta. Bille and Ogale, fishing and farming communities in the Niger Delta, are suing Shell for failing to protect oil pipelines that have caused two oil spills in the past five years. Although Shell agreed to clean up water and land in the contaminated area, the Anglo-Dutch firm has delayed compliance.

     Out of Nigeria's 170 million population, 110 million, including college-educated young people, are said to be unemployed. With nothing to do all day and lack of funds, free time leads to pregnancies that produce even more poverty.

     The government is committed to re-energizing Nigeria's agricultural sector which was the backbone of the country's economy prior to the 1970s oil boom. The attention Akinwumi Adesina paid to the agricultural sector when he was Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development in Jonathan Goodluck's administration is credited with helping to reduce food imports by a third, to increase food production by 22 million tons, and to generate millions of jobs.  By providing electronic vouchers for purchases of fertilizer and seed from private suppliers, the administration worked to move farmers beyond subsistence farming in order to diversify the economy and reduce dependence on oil.

    As of May, 2015, Adesina, the son of a Nigerian farmer and PhD degree holder from Purdue University in the US, became the new President of the African Development Bank.