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Soriek  6mo ago (text post)   950 thread views

Transnational Thursdays 23

This is a weekly thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or IR history. I usually start off with coverage of some current events from a mix of countries I follow personally and countries I think the forum might be interested in. I’m increasingly doing more coverage of countries we’re likely to have a userbase living in, or just that I think our userbase would be more interested in. This does mean going a little outside of my comfort zone and I’ll probably make mistakes, so chime in where you see any. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Nigeria

The Nigerian Supreme Court has finally agreed to hear opposition party complaints about the validity of the last election. The runner ups in the election, the People's Democratic Party & Labour Party, have accused the election of being fraudulent and have demanded that current President Bola Tinubu must step down:

Nearly 25 million Nigerians voted in the February polls in an election that was generally calm, but was marked by delays in counting and failures in the electronic transfer of results.

The final results were widely accepted by the international community, which saw Tinubu declared the winner with 37 per cent of the vote.

No legal challenge to the outcome of a presidential elections has ever succeeded in Nigeria which returned to democracy in 1999.

Worth noting Bola also received the least votes of any winning candidate since 1999. It’s pretty unlikely the election will be overturned but remarkable that it’s even being heard. Legal challenge aside, Tinubu’s tenure has been pretty rocky thus far. It started with cutting off a subsidy for gasoline to better fund other progressive initiatives, but sent gas prices soaring and caused large scale unrest.

Nigerian President Bola Tinubu’s push to reshape Africa’s biggest economy appears to be a case of too far, too fast.

Four months after he took office, inflation is surging and the naira’s street value has slipped to the psychologically important level of 1,000 to the dollar. The national power grid collapsed twice in September and a surge in business confidence that accompanied his announcement of a spate of reforms has dissipated.

The government appeared ill-prepared for the price surge that followed the scrapping of a fuel subsidy, $6.8 billion of forward payments in the foreign exchange market are overdue and a crucial interest-rate decision was postponed after the acting head of the central bank resigned. The new governor’s appointment is awaiting confirmation from the Senate…

There’s no doubt that the measures Tinubu is undertaking are necessary and that Nigeria’s economy will ultimately be healthier when the budget is no longer burdened by an unsustainable fuel subsidy and an unrealistic official exchange rate.

What is in question are his methods, the pace of change and whether he can see them through.

Has the threatened Niger invasion been junked?

Sorry I've been pretty slammed lately. Yes it has been scrapped; Tinubu was very in support of an interventoin but the rest of the government wasn't. Even though his party has a majority in the Senate, the Senate still voted against a military intervention (and ECOWAS intervening without Nigeria is implausible).

As far as I know though the ECOWAS sanctions are still in place, which includes Nigeria cutting off the 90% of Niger's electricity that they provide (if that's changed, I can't find up-to-date info on it). As an aside, Nigeria has been barely able to sustain their own power supply, which has led some to claim the electricity blockade against Niger is mostly covering their own lack of capacity.

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