Nigeria’s National Assembly voted Tuesday to make Vice President Goodluck Jonathan the acting president, filling a power vacuum that has unsettled Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, since President Umaru Yar’Adua left the country for medical treatment in November.
The vote appeared to end weeks of political uncertainty in what had essentially been a leaderless country. Since Mr. Yar’Adua’s departure, there has been civil unrest in the north, threats of renewed violence in the south and diplomatic tensions with the United States, which required extra scrutiny of Nigerian travelers after one of their compatriots was arrested and charged with trying to detonate explosives on a plane to Detroit.
But while Nigerian political leaders said Tuesday’s vote was critical to restoring stability, questions were immediately raised about its constitutionality, about whether Mr. Yar’Adua’s partisans would accept it and about whether it would lead to more disorder. For weeks, a majority of Mr. Yar’Adua’s cabinet has insisted that there was no need to replace him, though there has been little word from the president about his condition. With Mr. Yar’Adua in a hospital in Saudi Arabia, the tenuous truce in the restive, oil-producing south of the country has fallen apart, while religious and ethnic clashes have broken out in the north in which hundreds have been killed. Meanwhile, citizens marched in the streets of the capital, Abuja, and in Lagos over Mr. Yar’Adua’s absence. Discontent focused on what many called his government’s failure to follow the Constitution, which prescribes a transfer of power when the president is gone. Demonstrators and government critics said that by insisting that the president not give up power, his northern allies had been promoting their own regional interests over national ones.
Pressure was mounting — the military had to tamp down talk of a possible coup — and the country’s 36 governors called last week for a transfer of power to the vice president, Mr. Jonathan. Finally, on Tuesday, both chambers of Nigeria’s National Assembly voted for the transfer, with the House saying “peace, order and good government” in the country justified it. The Senate president said Mr. Yar’Adua’s halting declaration, in a Jan. 12 BBC interview, that he would return when doctors allowed, was justification enough in the absence of the formal letter called for by Nigeria’s Constitution. Still, analysts immediately raised questions about whether Tuesday’s votes followed the Constitution, and they worried that the National Assembly’s seeming failure to do so would only create more problems. “What the Senate has done is compound the problem,” said Jibrin Ibrahim, director of the Center for Democracy and Development, a good-government research organization in Abuja. “They’re saying they heard the president’s voice on the radio. I’ve never seen such political farce.”
Balarabe Musa, chairman of the Conference of Nigerian Political Parties, had a similar take. “The National Assembly has illegally given power to the vice president to act as president, on the basis of what they call the doctrine of necessity,” Mr. Musa said. “If it continues, the end of the road in this case is bureaucratic anarchy.”
Mr. Jonathan, 52, is a former governor of an oil-producing state, Bayelsa. His calm demeanor and southern background are regarded as assets in tackling what both he and Mr. Yar’Adua have described as a primary objective: solving the conflict over oil in the south. As the de facto president in recent weeks, he sent extra troops to the north to help quell the violence there but has otherwise maintained a low profile, leaving others to raise the loudest voices for his appointment. “I don’t think there was a choice if the country was going to move forward,” said Walter Carrington, a former American ambassador to Nigeria. “They were simply in a state of drift,” Mr. Carrington said, adding that it was unclear whether or not Tuesday’s votes would settle the country’s political difficulties. The question, he said, is how the forces opposed to handing over power will react, and whether this will cause unrest.
Some argued for a more radical solution to the crisis. “The National Assembly should go ahead and impeach the president for gross misconduct,” said Mr. Musa, citing as justification Mr. Yar’Adua’s failure to inform lawmakers of the length of his absence.
Mr. Ibrahim said: “The president has been told over 70 days that he should transmit the letter, but he has refused to do that. We only have a crisis that is deepening. And that is why we are all very worried.”
Source: New York Times
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