EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, UK

           

Nigeria: Zoned out

Nigeria is a country which still looks to a fair and credible election as a clean break with the past

Nigeria is a country which still looks to a fair and credible election as a clean break with the past. After Laurent Gbagbo's defiance of the popular will in the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, still had something to prove both to itself and to the region. It is too early to say whether it has passed this test.

The incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan bolstered national institutions to ensure credibility. He appointed a respected academic, Professor Attahiru Jega, to chair the Independent National Election Commission (INEC). Prof Jega has acknowledged the faults of previous elections, such as the snatching of ballot boxes and missing names on the register, as embarrassing challenges. And the first two polls of the election season, the National Assembly vote on 9 April and Saturday's presidential poll, went better than past elections, although neither was free of violence or claims of electoral fraud. Jonathan himself, who has an unassailable lead of 10m votes over his nearest rival, will not declare victory until the results are announced by the INEC. So far so good.

But if he has bolstered the process, Jonathan has also swept away an unwritten power-sharing agreement called zoning. It was decided by a clique in the ruling party, not the electorate, and it ensured that the People's Democratic party (PDP) dominated Nigerian politics whichever candidate won. It was profoundly undemocratic, but it kept the ethnic peace and provided predictability. Under this informal agreement, the presidency alternated for two terms between the Muslim north and the Christian and animist south. A president from the north should have been in power until 2015. That was cut short by Umaru Yar'Adua's death, and Jonathan, a vice-president from the south, should have stepped down after completing his predecessor's term of office. He did not, and went on to defeat a northern Muslim challenger, former vice-president Atiku Abubakar, for the party's presidential nomination. Try as Jonathan did to woo the northern elites, he was unable to hold campaign events in the north.

There was an obvious danger. The PDP no longer represented the north, and should the supporters of a northern candidate decide that the election was rigged – whether the INEC blesses the process or not – violence could erupt. This appears to be what was happening yesterday. The north largely voted for the losing candidate, the former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari. Yesterday his supporters set fire to homes bearing ruling party banners in Kano and there were reported to be numerous deaths in Kaduna. One police spokesman there described the fighting as an uprising. Let us all hope he is wrong.

AV referendum: The Dave and Dr No show

If you want to know why you should vote yes in May's electoral reform referendum, just listen to Dr John Reid's peroration for the noes yesterday

If you want to know why you should vote yes in May's electoral reform referendum, just listen to Dr John Reid's peroration for the noes yesterday. He damned the alternative vote not on reasoned grounds, but "above all" because it was "not British". Tony Blair's warhorse had been wheeled out of retirement to help the Conservative prime minister argue that the way the UK does politics should be left just as it is. The two men stood together and made an impassioned case for the old political class, which is itching to forget all about the electorate's refusal to entrust any party with a mandate last year and get back to business as usual.

Dismal as the pitch is, it is making inroads, at least according to today's Guardian/ICM poll, which has the naysayers 16 points ahead. Reformists have just 16 days to transform things, by countering a campaign of unremitting negativity, whose garish posters are explicit in saying that because the NHS matters democracy doesn't, and carry the implicit message "vote no or the baby gets it". The yes side must stop indulging in its own fear-mongering, with its irrelevant British National party fixation, and instead get stuck into the half-truths and flat falsehoods that were served up by David Cameron and Lord Reid yesterday.

With faux atonement, Mr Cameron admitted John Major had roundly deserved the boot in 1997 and warned that AV would have prevented the clean sweep of the Commons that the country had wanted. In fact, all the projections show that in a year when the Tories were virtually nobody's second choice, they would have taken a still bigger hit, arguably even too big. Moving seamlessly on, and needing his full measure of Etonian nonchalance to avoid embarrassment, the coalitional prime minister spoke of his grave fear that AV would result in more coalitions. Most brazenly of all, Mr Cameron, who owes his own position to a succession of preferential votes within the Conservative party, redefined the founding principle of democracy. Instead of being that everybody deserves a say, the acid test suddenly becomes that no opinion ought to count for anything except where it is boiled down to a single cross. Dr Reid weighed in with his amplifier here – the reformers wanted, he said, "to usurp the right to an equal vote".

This is tosh. Bringing second preferences into play where first choices are disappointed is not the same as allowing multiple votes. The Liberal Democrat Jo Swinson memorably dispatched this slur on Question Time recently, where she explained to a reactionary fellow panellist that if she had agreed to pick her up a Mars from the canteen but returned with a Twix because they had sold out, she would still have one chocolate bar. Sadly, few of the arguments made on the yes platform yesterday were landed with the same punch. Perched alongside Labour's Alan Johnson and Ed Miliband, Vince Cable looked as if he was enjoying himself more than he has for some time. Planted firmly back on the progressive side of the political divide, he cracked some gags about the voting rules on Strictly Come Dancing. Mr Johnson breezily explained how first past the post had become an anachronism in a country where ever fewer voters identified with the big political tribes, while Mr Miliband showed bravery in returning to the reformist fray in a contest that many of his fellow partisans would rather see him use to punish Nick Clegg.

The modest electoral change on offer will not deliver proportional votes, and does not easily lend itself to inspirational oratory. Certainly, none was heard yesterday. It is, however, a first step in restoring the severed link between the governing and the governed. If the shop stewards of the old politics are allowed to prevent it now, they will dismiss all potential future reforms as obsessions of the chattering class. Instead of rationalising our political rules, we will be told to stop moaning and get used to them, because – after all – they're British.

In praise of … the Peak District

Britain's first national park deserves support in its battle to balance the needs of locals and protection of the environment

The Peak District national park, 60 years old this month, famously lacks any peaks and isn't a park. But as Britain's first national park, and almost certainly its busiest, it has played a proud part in preserving a special part of the English landscape and encouraging the public to enjoy it. The high gritstone Dark Peak countryside remains a true wilderness, even though on a mist-free day you can see the fringes of Manchester and Sheffield from its tops. The soft limestone countryside of the White Peak is still quietly rural, and a refuge for the millions of visitors who come each year from the Midlands and beyond. As Roger Redfern's country diary records twice a month on these pages, the Peak District is part of the life of the cities on its borders, and has been since well before the famous Kinder mass trespass of 1932, which saw ramblers demand their right to walk across the Duke of Devonshire's shooting estate. The national park authority has often found itself caught in the middle of a debate between access, development and preservation, and has done a decent job at all three. With limited resources, it has restricted quarrying and tried to balance the needs of locals for new homes with the protection of a delicate environment. It deserves strong support in this battle – as do the rights of all national parks, reported to be under scrutiny in a crowdsourcing exercise to test red tape. This Easter, there can no better place than the Peak to tramp the moors or wander past meadows and spring lambs.