Part of the introduction of a story about a pending ruling by an electoral tribunal in Nigeria tomorrow about its flawed 2007 election:
Just as Kenya’s electoral crisis eases, a battle is brewing over a deeply flawed and highly contested election in another fractious, ethnically and religiously divided African nation, Nigeria. But this time the fight is taking place not between ethnic militants brandishing clubs and machetes in muddy alleyways of slums and villages. The fight over Nigeria’s tattered democracy is being carried out in the hushed hallways of courtrooms, by men and women in black robes and powdered wigs, armed with stacks of legal briefs and forensic evidence of stuffed ballots and doctored tally sheets.
Who writes this kind of copy?
Lower down a Nigerian lawyer compares the legal battle to ‘Super Tuesday.’ He may have been too polite to the reporter, Lydia Polgreen, as he could have reminded her that it is closer to the ‘daylight robbery’ (another phrase he uses) of the 2000 US elections with its suppression of black voters, voter fraud and ‘faulty’ electronic voter machines and a President appointed by a partisan court; more recently large scale irregularities were recorded in the New York primaries of the Democratic Party.
But that’s not in Africa.
And it would have meant dumping the whole Kenya link: ‘Kenya’ that is now is a now stand-in for ‘ethnic militants,’ ‘clubs and machetes’ and ‘slums and villages.’ Every African story that involves political conflict of any kind will from now on have an obligatory Kenya reference and comparison. (Let me not start about ‘ethnic voting’ in the United States.)
If you still like punishment and disappointment, for the rest of the New York Times story on the Nigerian elections, go here.
However, if you want to be informed, go to AllAfrica.com, This Day, Africa Confidential or Africa Today.
(Oh, and the Britney reference: here)
The only thing worth reading in the NYT is the Style section. I kid you not.