By Dele Olojede for The New York Times: Lagos, Nigeria LAST weekend, we trooped to the polls on street corners and under almond trees in this rough and ready city of 10 million to elect a new president. Everything seemed orderly and peaceful and oddly celebratory. This time, unusually, we even believed our votes would count.
The results that trickled in suggested that Goodluck Jonathan, who succeeded Umaru Yar'Adua upon his death in 2010, had been elected our president. And with that, we Nigerians quietly reached an encouraging but little-noticed milestone: we've held four elections at four-year intervals, and in the process passed power to three different presidents without a soldier's rifle pointed at anyone's head.
We still have trouble counting votes accurately, but nobody's perfect. We take comfort that even in America, chads occasionally hang and the Supreme Court hands down Solomonic judgments.
While our democracy remains rickety and our ruling elites remain unable to distinguish between public funds and private purposes, we take these baby steps as a sign that we will eventually get it right.
Mr. Jonathan, with nearly 60 percent of the votes declared in his favor, appears to have persuaded at least a plurality of Nigerians, as well as most external election monitors, that his victory is legitimate.
But Mr. Jonathan does have a big problem: a lack of support in the country's north. Whether he is able to manage it will determine if Nigeria succeeds in becoming Africa's economic and political heart, as its size and resources would suggest. Indeed, the rest of Africa will probably never fulfill its potential with a dysfunctional Nigeria. Nor can the United States, which gets more than 10 percent of its oil imports from Nigeria, afford disarray here at a time of upheaval in the Middle East.
Read more at The New York Times