Word: nigerias
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When that happens, Nigeria will have come full circle to the democratic system it inherited when it won independence from Britain in 1960. Since then, the country has had a shaky coalition regime, a short-lived parliamentary republic, three coups, a bloody civil war and the assassination of a head of state. Nigeria has simultaneously been afflicted by social and economic strains that have grown along with its wealth, which comes from its copious reserves of easily refinable "sweet" light crude oil. Largely because thousands of peasants have deserted their farms to seek bloated wages in booming Lagos, the country...
...already has black Africa's largest population (about 80 million) and most bounteous economy (1978 gross national product: $33 billion), as well as the clout that comes with being a rapidly emerging leader of the Third World. To those assets, oil-rich Nigeria may soon add another that is very rare in its part of the world: a democratic government...
...choose a President. Last week after ballots had been gathered from places as varied as the slums of the appallingly crowded capital Lagos, the minareted city of Kano in the Muslim north and steamy Enugu in the old Biafra area of the Christian and animist south, the name of Nigeria's first popularly elected chief executive was announced. He is Alhaji Shehu Shagari, 54, a slight, soft-spoken veteran civil servant who wears the robes and beaded hat of the northern Hausa tribe and has been an outspoken Muslim nationalist. If all goes as planned, Lieut. General Olusegun Obasanjo...
Last September Obasanjo ended the nation's twelve-year-old ban on political activity, and more than 55 parties exploded into noisy life. But only five, among them Shagari's National Party of Nigeria (N.P.N.), could generate a following wide enough to qualify their presidential candidates. The freewheeling and occasionally violent campaign that followed persuaded some Nigerians that the experiment with democracy was premature. Said a professor: "There are two kinds of people here, the pessimist who says civilian rule will fall apart before it begins in October, and the optimist who says that it will fall apart...
...spellbinder with crowds, Shagari, a chain-smoking, onetime science teacher, edged his two main rivals, who hinted after the election that they might challenge the results. The two were Yoruba Chieftain Obafemi Awolowo, a major architect of Nigeria's independence, and Nnamdi Azikiwe, an Ibo leader who was the nonelected President during the brief parliamentary republic. In the campaign, Shagari emphasized his experience as a minister of finance, education and other departments in previous regimes. Though once a leader of an organization that advocated "national unity" under Hausa domination, he picked an Ibo running mate. Moreover, he managed...