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New Election Promises Civilian Rule, But Voters Tune In to Radical Singer
By ROBERT BLOCK Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
LAGOS, Nigeria -- Forget the candidates and campaign rhetoric, the specters of corrupt generals and debauched power brokers. Nigerians hear and heed only one man: singer Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. He is outspoken, dynamic and sexy -- even 18 months after his death.
The presidential election on Saturday is trumpeted as a landmark because it is supposed to end 15 years of military rule and move this major oil producer a giant step closer to the democratic rule and stability long sought by the developed world. But the ghost of Nigeria's greatest musician is haunting the political transition and spooking the country's ruling classes as they try to win over the 100 million people of Africa's most populous country.
<Picture: [Fela Anikulapo-Kuti]>
Fela, as he is known to his fans, spent most of his life championing the rights of the common man in songs denouncing the corruption and brutality of Nigeria's military and civilian rulers. His lyrics got him beaten, tortured and imprisoned. Nigerians loved his Afro-beat music, a mix of jazz, soul and heavy percussion, but the elite found his message too radical and his private life of drugs and promiscuity scandalous. One day in 1978, he married his entire troupe of 27 erotic dancers -- only to divorce them later. He died of AIDS-related illnesses.
Now, Nigerians across the country's deep ethnic, regional and political divides are parsing his lyrics, seeking context for the crucial elections and finding ironies and consolation. Songs that date from 15 years ago remain fresh because so little has changed politically. Foes of the military are trotting out tunes like "Army Arrangement," which tells how the military sets the terms for its departure from government while keeping its hand in the till and on the tiller.
'Iconoclast to the Core'
Last week, the military-backed People's Democratic Party nominated as its presidential candidate retired Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, who ruled Nigeria from 1976 to 1979. In Lagos, people immediately took to the streets and began chanting "Soldier go, soldier come," a refrain from a once-banned Fela song about the military's appetite for power.
So potent is Fela that even the establishment is trying to gain credibility by basking in his glow. Nigerian companies, which never touched Fela during his lifetime, have sponsored memorial concerts in which they promoted their products through association with the singer.
"Fela was a prophet and an iconoclast to the core," says Rasheed Gbadamosi, a childhood friend of the singer, who knows well the power of the Fela name. He admits it probably helped win him his job as minister of national planning in the current military government of Gen. Abdusalami Abubaker, which committed itself to reforms.
But not everyone is piling on the Fela bandwagon, least of all Gen. Obasanjo. The military's favorite and the race's front-runner, the former general also is widely reviled as the singer's archenemy.
On Feb. 18, 1977, hundreds of soldiers from Gen. Obasanjo's army raided Fela's communal home, called Kalakuta. The ostensible reason was that Fela was harboring criminals. The soldiers fractured Fela's skull and broke several other of his bones. They threw his 82-year-old mother from an upstairs window, inflicting wounds from which she later died, and injured other people as well. They set fire to the compound and prevented the fire brigade from reaching the site. The blaze destroyed six vehicles, a recording studio and all of Fela's master tapes and musical instruments.
In recent weeks, Gen. Obasanjo has been asked to account for the raid at several news conferences. The general has issued a blanket apology and has asked people to forget the past, but the past refuses to go away. "That event, the burning of Fela's house, has become shorthand in the Nigerian press for all the oppressive acts carried out during Obasanjo's time as head of state," says a Western diplomat.
Fela developed many of his ideas in 1969 in California, where he spent 10 months performing. He absorbed the radical politics of the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, the Last Poets and Stokely Carmichael. After he came back to Nigeria, he tried several times to enter politics. When civilians briefly returned to power in 1979, Fela launched a political party -- Movement of the People, or MOP -- but was prevented by the military from running for office.
Zombies and Animals
He went on enraging the military with barbed tunes in which he branded the generals and their civilian cronies and international backers as zombies and animals. One such song, "Beast of No Nation," translated from its pidgin English, goes like this:
Animals in human skins, Animals they put on ties, Animals they wear robes, Animals they put on suits, They many leaders as you see them.
Over the years, governments hit the singer with drug and sex and even murder charges. He was convicted only once, in 1984, and sentenced to five years in prison on what Amnesty International called "spurious" charges of currency violations. He was released after two years, when a new government came to power.
Since his death, his musician son, Femi Kuti, has donned the mantle -- including his father's electrically sexy dancing and wild saxophone playing. Through his own music, Femi continues his father's message: Nigeria needs a government of the people and for the people. Femi has set up a new political- musical organization called Movement Against Second Slavery, or MASS, which preaches that corruption and greed are byproducts of European colonialism and should be rejected by blacks as un-African. "Obasanjo may be president again, but it will not be like in my father's time, when he could burn houses and repress people," says Femi at his headquarters, a grimy two-story structure on an unpaved road lined with trash. "The people of this country need to see the president as nothing more than a houseboy. When they say, 'We need water,' it is his job to go get water."
A Flawed Process
But just like MOP before it, Femi's MASS won't be part of the elections, which Nigerians have been awaiting since 1993, when the military canceled the last elections that would have transferred power to civilians and Gen. Sani Abacha took power. After the sudden death of Gen. Abacha last June, Gen. Abubaker took over, promising to hand power to elected civilians on May 29 this year. The presidential election has been hailed as marking Nigeria's return to democratic rule, but the process is flawed.
Few new personalities have emerged to run for governorships, legislative seats or the presidency. Most candidates are politicians who had either served in military regimes or held office in short-lived but corrupt and thuggish civilian governments.
Gen. Obasanjo, the former president and clear favorite, is Nigeria's only military ruler ever to have handed over power to elected civilians. But many see him as a stooge of the military, which has ruled Nigeria for all but 10 years since independence from Britain in 1960. His position as front-runner owes something to those who appreciate his apparent break with the military after 1979, when he ceded power to civilians, and to his current close ties to the military, whose tremendous financial clout supports him. Military funds not only give Gen. Obasanjo the campaign's best organization; they also enable him to buy votes from Nigeria's many flexible citizens, a common practice here.
The ex-general's main rival, Chief Olu Falae of the Alliance for Democracy party, was once a cabinet secretary and later a finance minister in the regime of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida. Both have pledged, in vague terms, to improve living standards. Most troubling is that the country still has no constitution. The military has promised to release one -- an amended version of the country's 1979 document -- only after the elections, leading to accusations that they want to see who wins before deciding on what powers to give the president.
So on Saturday, voters will choose a president without knowing for how long he will serve. "On the streets you hear people ask, `What would Fela have said?' " says Ben Murray-Bruce, the owner of a local radio station. "I don't think there is any doubt. If Fela were alive today, he would be savaging the whole affair."