Nigeria: From Tragedy to Redemption?

This opinion piece, written by two long-term students of Nigerian politics, proposed a different course to the one taken following the death in mid-1998 of a military tyrant and the elected president he had imprisoned. It called for the creation of a caretaker national government of respected civilians that would address the mounting woes of the country, heal the deepening ethnic and regional divisions, and gradually transfer power to elected representatives. In place of military-supervised transitions, it called for a civilian-devised constitutional system. That course was not followed and all the well-known sectional and governmental ills soon returned to bedevil the Fourth Republic