In 1998 I found myself trying to explain to a bemused international audience what Nigerian journalists meant when they said that they were ‘going to Afghanistan’. At that time Afghanistan had endured 10 years of Soviet military action and was under Taliban rule, but the issue for the Nigerian press was not so much the situation in Afghanistan as the opportunity that events (real or imagined) in that country gave for discussing what was happening in our own. It would be the idiocy, brutality and corruption of governments in ‘Afghanistan’ being condemned, but readers could draw the necessary parallels and intended lessons for Nigeria. The journalist however, would be shielded from the wrath of the authorities here (because the offending article wasn’t about Nigeria) while the wrath of the authorities there ... who cared?
In an era when journalists were frequently ‘picked up’ for questioning and media houses were regularly closed down for pointing out abuses and blunders by home-grown military dictators, ‘Afghanistan’ provided a slightly safer subject for criticism than, say, an all-out attack on President Ibrahim Babangida on whose watch the letter-bomb murder of journalist Dele Giwa occurred and popular news magazines were forced into ‘guerrilla journalism’.
These days Afghanistan may be neither the physical destination of choice, nor the metaphorical refuge of necessity, but it still provides lessons and parallels.
In much the same way that Nigeria had military-supervised return-to-civilian-rule transition elections in 1998/99 which brought one of their own, soldier/civilian General Olusegun Obasanjo, to power as president, so Afghanistan had United Nations-supervised good-riddance-to-the-Taliban transition elections in 2004/05. These saw dual United States/Afghan citizen Hamid Karzai emerge as president.
Here, we have the ‘Independent’ National Electoral Commission: there, they have the Independent Electoral Commission. Both were left to conduct subsequent elections independently (albeit particularly in IEC’s case, with massive UN support), and both made a royal mess of the task. In our case twice nationally: in 2003 and 2007 with every sign of going for ‘strike three’ in 2011.
In Afghanistan’s case, accusations of massive vote-rigging and ballot-stuffing in this year’s August 20th elections were not so easy to wave aside with promises to review the process later: the country hosts several thousand North Atlantic Treaty Organisation troops who are there to establish a stable democracy which can both ensure its own internal security and keep the door closed against terrorists such as Al Qaeda. So despite initial attempts by the US to pass the elections off as ‘credible’, the Electoral Complaints Commission’s review of over 600 ‘serious fraud’ allegations left Karzai short of the 50% he needed for an outright win, and left the IEC facing the task of having to conduct costly and dangerous run-off elections with barely a fortnight’s notice.
With US President Barack Obama tying the final decision on how he intends to conduct his war in Afghanistan to the need for certainty about whose government he would be dealing with, the elections had to be concluded this year. But despite the IEC’s public determination to brave the obvious dangers (the Taliban heralded the resumption of its violent campaign to disrupt the elections by killing several UN election workers right inside Kabul, the Afghan capital) the second player in the run-off election, Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew, complaining that nothing had been done to guarantee its integrity, including replacement of the IEC chairman.
As a result, Karzai, who had had to be strong-armed into accepting a run-off election in the first place, has been declared victor,
but Abdullah’s action clearly robs him of the credibility that NATO hoped a successful run-off election would bring to erase memories of the original corrupt vote that had been engineered to see him safely past the 50% cut-off point. Although Afghan voters have been spared further Taliban violence, even Karzai’s own supporters admit that the whole process has left him badly damaged.
As for his post-victory promises to fight corruption, well ... we Nigerians can say a thing or two about how much reliance should be placed on promises made by winners of discredited presidential elections at such times.
In Nigeria of course, we don’t believe in replacing election commission chairmen even when their term has expired. We don’t believe in run-off elections either and do our best to avoid them, whether by the ‘twelve two-thirds’ abracadabra that saw Shehu Shagari taking office as president in 1979 without a run-off against Obafemi Awolowo, or the more certain 2007 wuruwuru that produced a 76% majority for Umaru Yar’Adua’s emergence as president, leaving no margin for mathematical run-off error.
So much for Nigeria and Afghanistan. Nowadays, enjoying what they insist on calling “10 years of democracy”, Nigerian journalists don’t have to ‘go to Afghanistan’ any more. Still, it is curious that in this year’s Reporteurs sans Frontières Press Freedom Rankings, Nigeria scores 46 to come only 135th out of 175 countries. To be sure, this is better than bottom-ranked Eritrea, which scored 115.5, but even if RSF rankings are more a national press freedom perception index, this - boosted by the murder of journalists, most recent of whom was The Guardian’s Bayo Ohu - it hardly qualifies as progress. As for Afghanistan, that country was 149th with a score of 54.25.