Gen. Abacha has presided over a rapid deterioration of respect for civil and human rights. Although he has echoed the perpetual assurances of a return to civilian rule, he devised a protracted and centrally-controlled transition process guaranteed to keep him in power at least until late 1998.
Local government elections held in March 1996 were boycotted by pro-democracy groups which saw the tightly regulated poll as an attempt to lend legitimacy to Abacha's discredited transitional process.
The Abacha regime has detained, indefinitely, thousands of labor leaders, pro-democracy activists, human rights advocates, and other political opponents, including President-Elect Abiola and the former head of state, Gen. Obasanjo. Chief Abiola's wife, Kudirat Abiola, and others prominent in the campaign for justice and democracy have recently been the victims of assassination or attempted assassination. Efforts by minority groups to secure greater autonomy and control of Nigeria's natural resources have been brutally suppressed, particularly in the oil-rich southeast where the government executed writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other leaders of the Ogoni people in November 1995. At the same time, the country faces a deepening economic crisis, aggravated by the failure of World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment program and the systematic misappropriation of oil revenues by Nigeria's ruling elite.
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