Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa by Howard W. French Page A

the gaggle of cellular phones that he carried, which rang busily with calls from the unions, from lawyers and from reporters.
    Abacha’s government had announced that the venue of Abiola’s treason trial was being shifted from Lagos, the huge southern coastal city that was the stronghold of his Yoruba ethnic group and of the democratic opposition, to Nigeria’s answer to Brasília, Abuja, a city created in the center of the country in 1976, in large part to neutralize the Yoruba influence over the government. There was no precedent or legal justification for the change of venue, and the opposition was marshaling its forces in a courageous attempt to try to stop it. After a few days of following the street action in Lagos, I decided to fly to Abuja to take the temperature of the military leadership.
    My goal, of course, was to land an interview with Abacha. His interviews with Western journalists had been extremely rare, and were always given under the kind of carefully controlled circumstances that reeked of public relations deals. I knew it would be a tough sell, but I had a few contacts in Abuja and was eager to work them.
    Nigeria’s new capital is situated in the middle of nowhere, and its airport is far away. Closer to the desert, it was much hotter here than it had been in Lagos, but mercifully far less humid. Feeling mugged by the heat, I wanted to doze off, but my driver, a small, talkative Igbo— the country’s third-largest ethnic group, and Nigeria’s preeminent traders—was eager to hear about life in Ivory Coast, and he plied me with questions.
    The highway ran straight and seamless through a savannah of anthills and reddish earth. It was built by European companies at vastly inflated prices, with huge kickbacks for everyone involved, in the same fashion as any public project in Nigeria. We flew through this singed emptiness in the hired car until Abuja announced itself on the horizon with the presence of its grand religious buildings—an otherworldly mosque with a massive gold dome and an equally huge white cathedral whose shapes hovered in the afternoon heat like mirages. Later I learned that the scale of the buildings had been carefully matched, reflecting the ever-delicate balance between Islam and Christianity in the country.
    Abuja signaled its political ambitions through buildings like these, and through the dowdy formalism of its other structures, like the huge white gates at the city’s edge. Otherwise, it was an oddly unfinished place, an African Oz of immense boulevards and little traffic, of huge hotels and few guests, and of impressive-looking government ministries with no sign of the comings and goings of bureaucrats.
    A well-known American academic had previously introduced me to Adamu Mohammed, a senior national security advisor as well as confidant to Abacha, so I called him as soon as I checked into the Abuja Sheraton. He said he would come and pick me up later that evening. In a couple of prior telephone conversations with Mohammed there had been subtle hints that I might get to meet Abacha, but each of these discussions was heavily laden with bitterness about what he called the American press’s simpleminded approach to Nigeria. “You people fail to understand the complexities of this place,” he told me. “You think that you can simply take the rules of your society and apply them here, but that is a foolish mistake. Nigeria is a country of two hundred fifty ethnic groups. We have our own specific problems, and our own traditions, and people must appreciate and understand that before they can begin lecturing us.”
    On the surface it seemed like a reasonable enough, if not so original, gripe. The biggest problem with the grievances of this very sophisticated person, however, was that they were being proffered as cover for Abacha, a man whose claims to leadership rested on raw power, and on raw power alone. No amount of sophistry could hide the fact that Abacha’s dictatorship