By Jon Schuppe
A month before Nigeria's
national elections, retired Gen. Muhammadu Buhari traveled to London
for a speech in which he described his vision for the troubled republic,
torn by a war with Boko Haram terrorists and sapped by plunging oil
prices.
Buhari, the 72-year-old head of the opposition All Progressives Congress who briefly led the country following a 1983 military coup, promised to "choke" Boko Haram, implement economic reforms and root out waste and corruption.
"Let me assure you that
if I am elected president, the world will have no cause to worry about
Nigeria as it has had to recently; that Nigeria will return to its
stabilizing role in West Africa," he told an audience at Chatham House, an international policy institute.
Now, with this week's resounding win over Goodluck Jonathan, Buhari has to prove he can deliver.
He is taking over
Africa's largest economy and one of its most turbulent democracies, a
country that has never before handed power to an opposition party
without force. Nigeria sees itself as the one country to lead Africa
into the future.
"With 183 million people
— more than Russian Federation — what happens in Nigeria has an impact
on the entire African continent," said John Campbell, a former U.S.
ambassador to Nigeria.
The largely peaceful election alone is enough to raise Nigeria's prestige and influence, Campbell said.
But the country has profound problems.
Boko Haram's Islamist
militants have killed thousands in the country's north in an attempt to
create a regional caliphate. A February offensive drove the group back,
but it remains a potent threat.
A steep decline in
global oil prices has devastated Nigeria's economy, which derives about
70 percent of its revenue from oil. About a third of Nigerians live in
poverty, Buhari has pointed out.
The country is split
among ethnic, religious and regional lines, divisions that Buhari will
have to transcend. Buhari is a northern Muslim; his predecessor,
Jonathan, represented southern Christians.
Because he is Muslim,
Buhari has had to defend himself against accusations he'd impose hard
line Islamic law — and analysts say the allegations are not realistic.
Historically, power and
oil revenues have been divvied up by Nigerian elites. That has led to
extraordinary corruption, which Buhari has promised to eliminate.
Campbell said there are
reasons to believe Buhari can be highly effective. That impression is
rooted in his relatively modest lifestyle, notable in a country where
former government "big men" leaders live lavishly. Campbell said that
when he was ambassador from 2004 to 2007, he visited Buhari at his home,
where he answered the door himself and didn't appear to have any
servants.
"He's probably the only
Nigerian politician or political figure who is genuinely popular on the
street in the north," said Campbell, who is now a senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations.
This will be Buhari's second crack at leading Nigeria. The first one ended disastrously.
He seized power in a
1983 military coup d'etat. While in office, he engineered a legendary
crackdown on government corruption, but was also criticized for
trampling civil rights. After 18 months, he was ousted in another coup.
Since then, Buhari —
whose human-rights record has been fiercely criticized — has described
himself as a convert to democracy. He ran for president three times
before before this week's victory.
The United States has
had chilly relations with Nigeria, mostly due what has been seen as an
ineffectual response to Boko Haram, which kidnapped more than 200
schoolgirls last April. Buhari's election was endorsed by the United
States Tuesday.
A U.S. official saying
the new president was in a position to build a "new" Nigeria that could
lead Africa into a new era of modernization and peaceful democratic
change.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
Jon Schuppe is a writer on the enterprise unit at NBC News. He arrived in April 2014, after two years...
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