ABUJA, Nigeria – Nigerians celebrated their newly reinforced democracy Friday, dancing and singing songs and praises as Muhammadu Buhari was sworn in, the first candidate to beat a sitting president at the polls.
As Buhari finished taking the oath of office, the crowd at Eagle Square in Nigeria’s capital roared its approval.
“Change has come to Nigeria!” the announcer had declared, echoing the election slogan as Buhari arrived for the ceremony resplendent in traditional robes and an embroidered cap.
Nigerians are hopeful that Buhari – the only leader believed not to have lined his pockets from the state treasury – can curb the graft that keeps a rich nation impoverished.
With Nigeria so broke it’s borrowing money to pay government workers, Buhari intends to retrieve ill-gotten gains to fund programs from education for girls to job creation for young people – seeking to address the roots of Boko Haram’s northeastern insurgency. Nigerian newspapers are carrying unconfirmed reports that some politicians already have returned millions of dollars, in hopes of currying favour and avoiding scrutiny.
Buhari, the first Nigerian to oust a sitting president at the polls, has a wealth of international goodwill. Some 50 heads of state are expected at Friday’s inauguration along with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, looking to mend fences broken under the discredited administration of Goodluck Jonathan.
The inauguration is being held in Abuja at Eagle Square, where a 2010 twin car bombing and grenade attack by oil militants killed 12 people at Independence Day celebrations. Buhari must decide how to deal with the militants who are threatening to renew attacks if he does not continue an amnesty program that has them paid to guard the installations they once attacked.
Jonathan, who allowed Boko Haram’s nearly 6-year-old insurgency to flourish unhindered until this year and was seen as uncaring of the suffering it has imposed in the northeast of the country, won acclaim at home and abroad for graciously conceding defeat. There were fears of the kind of electoral violence that killed more than 1,000 people in the mainly Muslim north when Jonathan defeated Buhari in 2011 elections.
“You have changed the course of Nigeria’s political history,” Buhari told Jonathan when he handed over the report of his administration Thursday. “For that you have earned yourself a place in our history, for stabilizing this system of multiparty democracy and you have earned the respect of not only Nigerians but world leaders.”
Political science professor Richard Joseph of Northwestern University said Buhari’s victory has hopeful international implications.
“The world desperately needs a victory against cultist jihadism. Nigeria (under Buhari) can provide it,” he said. “In no other large country, with an almost equal number of Muslims and Christians, is such a process conceivable.”
Buhari was a major general when he defeated another homegrown Nigerian Islamic group in the 1980s.
Jonathan was forced to accept an international intervention from neighbouring countries to curb Boko Haram this year as its uprising spread across Nigeria’s borders. His government also hired foreign mercenaries to help train troops even as it halted a U.S. military training program last year.
Buhari has criticized the need for foreign troops in Nigeria, which has Africa’s largest standing army, albeit demoralized and under-resourced by some plundering officers. “The answer to defeating Boko Haram begins and ends with Nigeria,” he has said.
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