NGScorecard

The April 2007 general election that brought Yar'Adua to power, run by an INEC leadership appointed under the outgoing administration, was condemned by domestic and international observers as one of the least credible in Nigeria's history, marred by widespread rigging, violence, and severe logistical failures. Yar'Adua himself publicly acknowledged the election's serious flaws shortly after being sworn in.

Yar'Adua established the Uwais Electoral Reform Committee in August 2007, which delivered sweeping recommendations in December 2008. Only some were adopted, in legislation signed after his death, and INEC's leadership under Maurice Iwu remained unchanged for the rest of the term, leaving the institution's credibility only partially restored by the time of the 2011 election.

Niger Delta militant groups, chiefly the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), had escalated pipeline attacks, oil worker kidnappings, and sabotage through the mid-2000s, cutting Nigeria's oil production by hundreds of thousands of barrels per day and threatening the country's principal revenue source.

Yar'Adua's June 2009 Presidential Amnesty Proclamation persuaded over 20,000 militants to surrender arms in exchange for stipends and reintegration support, sharply reducing attacks and restoring lost production capacity for the remainder of the term — one of the clearest successful resolutions of an inherited crisis in this period.

Successive attempts to privatise the National Telecommunications Limited (NITEL) under the previous administration had failed or were mired in controversy, including a disputed 2006 sale of a 51% stake to the Transcorp consortium for $500 million, of which only a small initial deposit was actually paid.

Yar'Adua's government revoked Transcorp's licence in 2009 after it failed to meet its payment and investment obligations, but no successful new sale was concluded before the end of the term, leaving NITEL's ownership status unresolved and the company continuing to decline operationally.

Contracts awarded in the 1990s and early 2000s for the Bonny Island LNG project and various telecommunications deals were, by the mid-2000s, the subject of emerging international investigations into bribery paid to Nigerian officials by foreign contractors including Halliburton/KBR and Siemens, but Nigeria's own domestic accountability process had not meaningfully begun.

Yar'Adua's government began pursuing the matter more actively in its final years, with the EFCC filing charges against former officials linked to the Halliburton scandal in 2010. However, no convictions were secured within the term, and the bulk of the accountability process — including the pursuit of the largest implicated foreign firms — extended well beyond his presidency.

The previous administration's National Integrated Power Project had spent an estimated $10-16 billion on new power plants and infrastructure between 2005 and 2007, yet delivered little corresponding increase in electricity actually reaching consumers, leaving the sector's fundamental problems — gas supply, transmission capacity, and distribution losses — unresolved.

Yar'Adua's own pledge to declare a state of emergency in the power sector within six months of taking office was never acted upon, and generation capacity remained essentially unchanged at roughly 3,000MW for the rest of the term, meaning the inherited problem was passed on largely intact to the succeeding administration.

In the final days before leaving office in May 2007, the outgoing administration sold the Port Harcourt and Kaduna refineries to a consortium including Blue Star Oil Services at prices and through a process that civil society and industry observers criticised as opaque and underpriced, conducted with unusual haste ahead of the handover.

Yar'Adua reversed the Port Harcourt refinery sale within weeks of taking office in June 2007, refunding the buyers and returning the asset to full government ownership, citing the lack of transparency in how the deal had been conducted — one of his most decisive early actions.

The EFCC under its assertive founding chairman Nuhu Ribadu had opened investigations into several sitting and former state governors in the years before 2007, including Delta State's James Ibori, but these cases remained unresolved and politically sensitive at the time of the handover, given Ibori's influence within the ruling party.

Rather than allowing these cases to proceed, Yar'Adua's administration removed Ribadu from the EFCC in December 2007 and progressively sidelined him from the police force altogether by 2010. Cases against Ibori and other politically connected figures were repeatedly dismissed or stalled on technicalities in Nigerian courts for the rest of the term, and he was ultimately only convicted years later, in the United Kingdom.