ABUJA, NIGERIA – If you want to find opposition to the elected administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria open any newspaper any day. Last week, for instance, almost the entire press was up in arms against his vice president, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, who too calmly turned away as his bodyguards beat into unconsciousness a photographer whose crime was to get too close at a ceremony to crown the new Oba of Lagos, or so the reporters present unanimously say. The state governor shouted himself hoarse begging them to stop but to no avail.

Cruelty and cold feelings remain part of Nigerian political and social culture 5 years after the fall of the ruthless military regime of General Sani Abacha who purged and pillaged until there was practically nothing left in the treasury, and those that prospered were the most corrupt. It became a dark satanic society more in the mould of Conrad’s Congo that in the cultivated spirit of the absorbed values of the Enlightenment and the sense of fair play that the first generation of post colonial leaders had imbibed in pukka British boarding schools and Irish mission stations. Obasanjo himself spent three years in a large and dirty prison where, finding peace in rediscovering his Christian faith, he became the unofficial chaplain to depressed inmates suffering torture and convicted murderers about to be executed and still found time, farmer that he had been, to develop a piece of prison land into a thriving source of vegetables and vitamins for guards and prisoners alike. In Nigerian society at large, whether the Christian south or the Muslim north the earnest and active religious spirit of kindness and brotherhood, which Obasanjo himself in his personal relations very much epitomizes, acts as a vigorous counter to the brutality, poverty and corruption that still pervades so much of Nigerian life.

It is this struggle between light and darkness that beguiles an observer. One day one is seduced by the sense of new governance, as when last week I traveled to Liberia with Obasanjo and watched the Nigerian peacekeepers in action, professional and disciplined, in marked contrast to the peacekeepers deployed in the same country 8 years ago by Abacha who gained a deserved reputation as rapists and looters. The next day one picks up a report by Amnesty International about the army’s killing of 250 civilians in the town of Odi four year’s ago and Obasanjo when questioned says he has nothing to apologize for. An optimist would like to conclude that at last Obasanjo is getting on top of the army and by replacing the worst commanders of the Abacha era and appointing types like the mild mannered commander of the operation in Liberia is injecting a new tone into military practice. A pessimist would say that an underpaid, under trained army can still do terrible things, whatever its commanders say, its emotions roused when its blood is spilt by protestors, and that Obasanjo, an ex general, backs up the army too readily.

Nigeria gets a bad press perhaps because the mood music is still grim- Africa, and no more so than its most populous country, Nigeria, is to most readers a dark continent where AIDS, economic decline and ethnic warfare dominate the news. Yet, as the IMF has just revealed in its new report on Tanzania, there are countries bucking the trend with healthy economic growth and a fast improving administrative competence. And Nigeria itself has many sprouts of success.

The last couple of years the cell phone revolution has swept every sizeable town. Even street vendors use their mobile. A Dutch telephone consultant I met in the president’s waiting room told me the Nigerians have done in two years what it took 20 years to do in Europe. Privatization is taking a country bogged down in red tape, featherbedding and misuse of resources and shaking it by the ears. The national airline that lost a fortune has been simply abolished. Privatization has been expanded rapidly to the banking, construction and oil marketing sectors. Next will come the railways.

The police, a source of popular discontent, are being are being challenged daily. Many corrupt officers have been sacked and the taking of bribes from motorists is under sustained assault. Only last week Obasanjo personally intervened to kick the police into action after two students were apparently murdered by a policeman.  The judiciary itself is becoming increasingly autonomous and self assured- last year making an authoritative and important decision on an offshore/onshore dispute over oil revenue allocation between the federal government and the states.

There is still a long way to go before the country turns the corner and reaches its potential to become another Malaysia. But with its oil and natural gas reserves it has all the capital it can digest. If Obasanjo before his second and final term of office is up in four years’ time can get more on top of the country’s culture of corruption and brutality no one should then be foolish enough to belittle Nigeria’s prospects. And where goes Nigeria, so perhaps does Africa.