Nigeria's Political Leadership.

It was on Dec. 17, 2006, that Nigeria's ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) selected the reclusive northern governor Yar'Adua as a candidate to the presidency to succeed Olusegun Obasanjo, who was barred by the constitution from seeking a third term. The selection process, in a marathon voting session at the party convention in the capital, Abuja, capped a long tussle over who would be the PDP candidate for the April 2007 presidential election.

It was to be the first time in the country's half-century post-colonial era that one elected government was to hand over power to another. Nigeria has vacillated between military and civilian rule for much of that time, suffering through multiple coups and military dictatorships.

In 1999 Obasanjo, a former general who was the military ruler in the 1970s, was elected president, ushering in the longest uninterrupted period of elected government in this era. The local state and presidential elections in April 2007 solidified Nigeria's transition to democracy, although local and international monitors found massive fraud in a voting process which was to make the country a bulwark of stability in a troubled region (see down8NigrWhoAug24-09).

Nigeria is Africa's most populous country, with about 150 million residents. But it is no longer the continent's leading crude oil exporter, having been over-taken by Angola, due to violence in the Niger Delta which has caused about half its production capacity to be shut in. Nor is Nigeria likely to become the largest exporter of LNG in the world in the next decade (gmt7NigrGasExpAug17-09).

However, the campaign in late 2006 had got off to a rocky start. Supporters of Obasanjo tried to alter the constitution to allow him to run for a third term, but were defeated by overwhelming opposition, even within the president's own party. Obsasanjo's vice president, Atiku Abubakar, had hoped to win the nomination to succeed him. But the two men had an acrimonious falling out which resulted in Abubakar being denied the right to seek the PDP nomination, with Obasanjo finally elevating Yar'Adua as the candidate to succeed him.

The fractious make-up of Nigeria had complicated things as well. The country has about 250 ethnic groups spread across 36 states, with the population about evenly divided between Christians and Muslims. Each major ethnic group claims it has the right to control the presidency, and because Obasanjo is a Christian Yoruba from the south-west, northern Muslims said it was their turn to control the presidency.

Members of other ethnic groups, particularly those in the oil-rich but deeply impoverished Niger Delta, said their needs had been ignored and that they deserved a chance at the helm. Yar'Adua, a northerner and a Muslim, was little-known and was not a member of the military elite which had ruled Nigeria for much of its modern history. Yar'Adua had a reputation for cracking down on corruption, an important quality in a country struggling to overcome a reputation for kleptocratic rule. But his main qualification was his closeness to Obasanjo.

Yar'Adua's older brother, the late Shehu Yar'Adua, was Obasanjo's deputy when he was the country's military ruler. Obasanjo was the first military ruler to hand over power voluntarily to civilians in 1979, a fact which endeared him and the elder Yar'Adua to the Nigerian public. But little was known about the nominee Umaru he seldom travelled outside Katsina, the northern state where he had served as governor for seven years.

In the convention hall on Dec. 17, 2006, Yar'Adua's election was greeted with little enthusiasm and most delegates left the session before he gave his acceptance speech. Voter registration had been hindered by technical problems and widespread violence like the outbreaks which had marred the two previous presidential elections, in 1999 and 2003.

A non-ideological, cross-cutting, election-winning machine binding Nigeria's diverse elites, the PDP has ruled Nigeria since the end of military dictatorship in 1999, winning two landslide election victories marred by rigging and violence. Yet the PDP is the largest political party in Africa.

On Dec. 17, 2006, Yar'Adua, who won the ballot comfortably but received muted applause from delegates, praised Obasanjo for being the "father of democracy and good governance in Nigeria". His running mate was Goodluck Jonathan, a governor of Bayelsa state, from the oil-producing delta zone, but who up until months earlier was only a deputy governor in one of Nigeria's most corrupt states. Yet the stature of Obasanjo helped him become PDP's candidate to the vice-presidency.

Obasanjo had succeeded in forcing through Yar'Adua and Jonathan by intimidating powerful state-level politicians with the threat of anti-corruption probes, or by promising them political inducements. PDP members already upset at party nominations for state-level polls had threatened to engineer a political backlash in many of the 36 states to stop a Yar'Adua presidency. But, eventually, they failed and Obasanjo's nominees succeeded.

Opposition party primaries in late 2006 were planned to project another "big man" of Nigerian politics to challenge Yar'Adua, with many activists trying to persuade other heavyweights to line up behind the rival. Thus Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler and prominent northern Muslim politician, who challenged Obasanjo in the 2003 elections, became the opposition's front-runner. But Nnamdi Obasi of the International Crisis Group (ICG), a think-tank, then predicted: "We are looking at an election that will definitely be even more flawed than before - though Nigerians may come to accept it, as it will at least represent a transfer of power".

Despite the end of military rule almost eight years earlier, Nigerian politics were still dominated by back-room dealings, thuggery and ethno-religious and communal violence. Access to resources, rather than policies based on consistency, was - and still is - often the more likely key to political success.

Yar'Adua, a former chemistry teacher who had a kidney condition, presented himself as Nigeria's best chance of taking forward Obasanjo's attempts at reforming Nigeria's corrupt public institutions. But the tensions among Nigeria's political elite partly brought on by Obasanjo's tough style and Yar'Adua's relatively weak standing among the PDP rank and file forced Yar'Adua to deal with some senior party figures in government who were not renowned for transparent governance. Yar'Adua's supporters, with Obasanjo behind them, enabled the presidential candidate to obtain the political guile to prioritise reform over his political debts.

In early March 2007, Yar'Adua fell ill. At first, the rumour was that the patient was in a coma, rushed off for emergency resuscitation. In the next swirl of speculation the patient was already dead, and preparations were being made for a hometown burial. Later, more concrete information was released. The patient, Yar'Adua, was in a German hospital undergoing tests because of breathing problems. On March 7, he assured the BBC's service in Hausa that his health problems were "nothing serious" and that he planned to return to Nigeria to resume campaigning soon.

Yar'Adua's health troubles he had a kidney ailment, but the severity and exact nature of his illness had not been made public were then the latest of several high-profile stumbling blocks as Nigeria headed towards elections which were either to secure its place in the family of modern African democracies or send it spiraling back towards chaos. J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Africa Programme at the Washington Centre for Strategic and International Studies, then said: "This is really the historical test of whether they can move from one elected incumbent to another without having things break down. There is a lot riding on this".

Since its independence from Britain in 1960, Nigeria had see-sawed between civilian and military rule, enduring a brutal civil war and decades of misrule which siphoned hundreds of billions of dollars from the country's oil wealth. What was supposed to be a triumphant transition had been marred by a messy battle between Obasanjo and Abubakar. Obasanjo and his allies said Abubakar was unfit to run because of corruption allegations against him. Government officials accused him of looting a public education fund, and his name had surfaced in connection with a bribery scandal involving Representative William Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat.

Like many leading Nigerian politicians, Abubakar is very wealthy, but the source of his wealth is unclear because he spent most of his career in the military. He had said that his fortune came from investments. He was listed among the politicians deemed too corrupt to stand for office by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, a government agency, but critics of that administration said the commission's list was designed to attack Obasanjo's enemies.

Abubakar then used the country's courts to fight efforts to remove him from the ballot. But in the end he was checkmated by a decision from Nigerian electoral officials to bar anyone on the commission's list from running. The battle was heading to Nigeria's highest court. Further complicating Nigeria's march towards democracy in April 2007 was the unrest in the Niger Delta, where militants seeking more of the country's oil wealth for the impoverished residents of the oil-rich zone had carried out kidnappings and bombings which harmed the oil industry. By April 21, on election day, crude oil exports had been cut by as much as 25%, and the region had become so dangerous and lawless that some contracting companies were leaving.

Yar'Adua had remained the leading candidate. But even before his abrupt departure, the political elite chattered about the possibility that he would be replaced by a better-known candidate, or that the PDP had chosen a weak and ailing candidate so that Obasanjo, who planned to continue to hold a powerful position in the party after his term, could wield power through a loyal proxy.

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