In Nigeria power alternates between the north and south. It’s a poor way to run a country

It is good in principle to end the zoning system. However it will not work in practice as there is low trust between the North and South.

Zoning does not affect the quality of leadership. They are competent people from every part of Nigeria.

What is important is that the political system is reformed: That elections are free; that the power at the centre is reduced, that the dead weight of government economic intervention is lifted etc.

Then it would not matter much who is president and where he comes from.

The article reduced Nigeria to the People Democratic Party (PDP), the ruling party. PDP has reach and awesome capacity to dispense patronage, but does this translate to popularity? I doubt. If the elections are free and fair, the incumbent president may still win, but with much reduced majority, and effective governance will compel a need to consult and sell policies across partisan lines, and possibly reduce the influence of party apparatchiks on the president. The incumbent president may well lose. whichever scenario a free and fair election delivers will strenghten our democracy.

"At that time, Christians from the south of the country feared being shut out of power by the more numerous Muslims of the north".are you serious? where does the economist get her figures?this coming from the mouth of a british newspaper that want to see us christians under the rulership of muslims for ever.have you given thought to the fact that
muslim leaders did the last counting and this country has being mostly under the brutality and dictatorship of muslim rulers.before you write any further fake news on nigeria , i will advise you to
visit that country first.

Zoning was just a means to entrench democracy, in itself it wasn't a solution that is why it has only led to fraud, election rigging and all round dissatisfcation. I know it maybe difficult for some, like Oyewole, to imagine a Nigeria without zoning or the "political correctness" that is exhibited through "qouta system" and 'equality of states" but that is actually the ideal that most Nigerians aspire to yet find it difficult to vebalize or express because it may not sound realisable.
The fact the zoning is even up for debate is evidence that the system has failed Nigeria and will soon be dispensed with. For most Nigerians who grew up in a failing state, the root causes of the failure are hard to indentify but looking at a successful african country like South Africa and seeing how state patronage , quota system and the like - all in the name of black empowerment or 'reversing the effects of apartheid'- are putting that country on a slow but sure path to failure, then the case against zoning is clearly made.
If Nigeria were to dispense with zoning in all strata of society, the results would be startling and quite positive.
Kudos to the ecnonomist for this spot-on article. And yes the zoning (quota) system that plays out in organizations is indeed baffling.

There is an alternative. If Muslims and Christians cannot get along they should go their separate ways. It is my view that if the better educated and more competent(then not neceassrily now)Igbos were allowed to secede in the 60s we would've had a far better situation today for all parties.

I am convinced this will happen anyway as both sides embrace a more extreme version of these two foreign faith systems. The once easy-going, moderate and tolerant Islam of the Black African is being gradually but inexorably replaced by the the more virulent and vicious formats brewed in Saudi Arabia and Afpakistan. One of the saddest sights of change is to see for the first time proud Hausa and Fulani girls draped in Saudi nikabs in the searing heat of the African summer. Few symbols look more out of place; more foreign in Africa than a niqabified Black woman.

On the Christian side the 'white massa gawd' of the European colonialist was an insult to the Black Man but fairly benign in its impact. What is happening in Black Christian Africa today is a byproduct of the general corruption that affected every facet of post colonial Africa. Many of the new evangelical churches combine very modern corruption with ancient indigenous forms of superstition to drive their congregations to the edge of madness. Sacrifices, witch-hunting, possessions and plethora of other tricks are used to control and then rob the poor. More seriously it fanatises the Believers turnining them into potentially dangerous mobs.

Add all of this to our(purely African) adherence to tribe and the mix is a potent vortex of Tsunami that could break out anytime. No places in Africa is more ripe for this kind of societal calamity than Nigeria.

So why not consider peaceful separation now while you still can?

Zoning or not,this is not a pressing issue.They should pay the starving workers.Massive strike actions engulfed the nation,both in health and education sectors.

http://gbooza.com/group/labour/forum/topics/why-fg-cant-pay-minimum-wage

Christians and Muslims, the north and the south- there seem to be nothing but gaps all throughout Nigeria. Zoning may have helped establish a sort of democracy, but that's all it really does. It doesn't by any means, make the system fair at all.
If this system is failing, as this article suggests, then it is best to rid of it, but not too quickly so that when the new president takes office, he will be faced with country-wide confusion and imbalances (more so than now).
Wouldn't it be more important to reform the political policies itself, such as breaking the tradition of using power in the short term? It would be more prudent to start up higher in the scale of influence, trickling down to fix the changes in the voting system.

Part of the reason Nigeria faces such difficulty in being a real democratic state is because of all the corruption in the government. Public discontent with the government fuels problems in Nigeria. The issue here isn't the zoning system but rather legitimacy. As stated, Nigeria's candidates for president are picked alternately from north and south behind closed doors and then presented to voters in rigged polls. What reason does the public have to believe that these "presidents" have the right to rule? To ensure political, economic and social stability the public must believe that its leader has rational -legal legitimacy. However, rigged elections and zoning systems make that legitimacy impossible. How can a country be united when leaders differentiate between regions? For example, a northern leader is automatically at a disadvantage with the southern region. Likewise a southern leader faces the same difficulties in obtaining cooperation from people in the northern region. Although ethnic killing is down, problems have not yet been resolved. In fact, problems will merely intensify if all of Nigeria doesn't reach the consensus that they are, in fact, ONE nation. However, this sense of unity must begin with the leaders of the nation and with the end of the zoning system.

The system of zoning in Nigeria maybe a bad idea but to what happended before in Africa is the lesser of evils.

Economist wrote:

"At that time, Christians from the south of the country feared being shut out of power by the more numerous Muslims of the north. To reassure them, the bosses of Nigeria’s dominant party—which, in this flawed democracy, runs the show—set up a system of presidential rotation known as “zoning”...."
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Chimaoge 1 response:

The above comment by the Economist is utterly false and shows poor research and laziness on the part of the article's author. The zoning matter has more to do with ethnicity than religion. It had nothing to do with Christian fearing that they would be shut out of power. Southerners do not accept that Northerners are numerically superior because commonsense suggests that people nearer the coast and tropical rain forest are more numerous than people out in sparsely populated Sahara desert. Census figures in Nigeria are always cooked. The most recent official figures show that Northern Sahara desert state of Kano has a population slightly greater than that of densely populated Southern city-state of Lagos!!! According to the 2006 official census figures, Kano State has a population of 9,383,682 while Lagos State has population of 9,013,534 !!! The Lagos State government declared the 2006 census figures a joke, asserting that the population of Lagos according to their own state-organized census is 17,553,924. International agencies and media organization recognize the Lagos State government's figures as the one closest to reality in one of Africa's most populous cities.

Going back to the zoning issue: one must remember that M.K.O Abiola, a Southern (ethnic Yoruba) Muslim who was supposed to be our democratically-elected President back in 1993 had his election victory annulled by military regime controlled and dominated by Northern Muslims. After General Abacha's death, it was expected that M.K.O Abiola will be released from his 4-year long incarceration to claim his democratic mandate. Unfortunately, he died in suspicious circumstances while being persuaded to drop the mandate so that fresh elections could be organized. To compensate the ETHNIC YORUBA community of South-west Nigeria for the death of M.K.O Abiola and head-off possible political unrest, the Northern power barons went into their conclave and decided that a retired Army General and one-time military ruler Olusegun Aremu Matthew Obasanjo should become the new civilian president in the emerging democratic dispensation of 1999. In their reasoning Obasanjo, a Yoruba Christian will be a perfect compensation to Southwest Nigerians for the loss of Yoruba Muslim M.K.O Abiola and at the same time ensure that money and investments made by the corrupt Northern barons are safe-guarded. This was how Zoning came into the Nigerian lexicon.

A parliamentary system would have given us stronger alliances along religious and ethnic polarities...

However, it is not likely that Hausa/ Fulani elite will like to negotiate as partners, rather than the kingmaker role they have historically occupied....

...And as for the population size as quoted by the economist, and with the failure of population planning to convince polygamists on position sanction by Islam, I think critics of Economist should wake up and smell the coffee. Or read Lebanon...

Say what you will about Nigeria, but the fact that it has been trying to create a power sharing agreement that most of its citizens understood as maybe not desirable but ultimately necessary is a huge, nuanced step in bringing the African giant to a level it can fully reach its potential.

Compare Goodluck Jonathan to The Gambia's Yahya Jammeh and Nigeria looks very stable as this article on how democracy is about to be totally gutted from the political lexicon of The Gambia.

Please peruse this URL (http://escapefrombanjul.blogspot.com/)