The Light That Failed

"Africa never ceases to amaze." So wrote V.S. Naipaul in A Bend in the River, and last week, true to the novelist's assessment, Africa amazed again. As recently as a fortnight ago, Nigerian President Alhaji Shehu Shagari, 58, was being hailed as the enlightened leader of black Africa's most populous and, in many ways, most promising democracy. Several days later, he was under detention in Lagos, while Major General Mohammed Buhari, 41, organizer of a coup that deposed Shagari, was proclaiming to his countrymen that the armed forces had saved the nation from "total collapse."

In a continent of nations still suffering 25 years later from the pains of birth and persistent poverty, Nigeria has a special significance. Its population, estimated at 90 million, is greater than that of any country in Western Europe. One of every five or six Africans is a Nigerian. Because of its oil resources, which have made it the third largest supplier of petroleum to the U.S. (after Mexico and Britain), Nigeria is the wealthiest nation in black Africa, with a gross national product that is more than half as large as that of the other black African nations combined. Unlike many other African countries, it has a sizable class of educated men and women who are well trained to run its government, industry and armed forces. And notwithstanding the occasional clampdowns imposed by the military, Nigeria has had a tradition of boisterous free speech, freewheeling politics and an unbridled press.

Thus the Dec. 31 coup that toppled Shagari dealt a blow to the hopes of a black Africa that had looked to Nigeria as a trail blazer for democratization. The fact that Shagari could not retain power, even though he was overwhehningly re-elected last August, highlighted the pattern of failure that has plagued black Africa in the quarter-century since most of its nations became independent. The problems of Nigeria are, by and large, those that afflict the entire continent: abject poverty, rampant corruption, gross mismanagement, tribal enmity, uncontrolled population growth. If, in spite of its assets, Nigeria cannot break out of the vicious cycle of political instability and economic decline, the prospects for most of the continent's other countries appear all the bleaker (see following story).

After 13 years of military rule and a civil war that had taken at least 1 million lives, the nation known as the "African Giant" had in 1979 painstakingly embarked on its second attempt at democratic government, this time under a federal constitution closely modeled on that of the U.S. The mild-mannered Shagari, a Muslim from the north and a former schoolteacher, had been elected President and re-elected last August, winning 47% of the popular vote and at least 25% of the ballots in 16 of the country's 19 states.