It is over two decades now since the military blew the bugle of their retreat into the barracks. However, Nigeria is still light years away from viable democracy.
In Nigeria, the electorate cannot always change or retain leaders through the electoral process. Also, the country’s economy is in shambles, a process that is responsible for the low standard of living of the citizenry. There is also the collapse of all the institutions that support democracy: education, the press and the non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Apart from the fact that some criminal gangs have taken over public offices, some apparatuses of government-judiciary, police, Directorate of Security Services (DSS), have one time or the other, been doing the bidding of the government in power. Most disastrously, opposition, in the past 2 decades, has not been effective. In spite of this gloomy picture painted by a cross section of critics interviewed by ZN, many still see some positive sides of Nigeria’s democratic experiment.
One of the hallmarks of democracy is the ability of the people to vote out a government or leaders that failed to fulfil their electoral promises or, through the same electoral process, retain rulers who performed in order to ensure continuity. Unfortunately, commentators lamented the travesty of this exercise over the years. This is so because of the compromising nature of individuals who man the electoral bodies like Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and State Independent Electoral Commissions, SIECs.
The truth, according to Odia Ofeimun, poet, social critic and pro-democracy crusader, is that the people are never counted in Nigeria elections. He traced the origin of this vice to the moment the British put in place the political parties which brought up the coalition that “thereafter always works towards an answer which is to say once they got the power, every other election that takes place in the country, would be working towards an answer.”
What Nigeria needs to do, as the critic maintained, is to consider how to deal with characters, who are in power, who are in charge of the electoral commissions and who should, therefore, ensure that results are announced as actual results. Amongst all the electoral umpires in Nigeria history, Maurice Iwu, will remain the worst umpire in Nigeria, given his compromising attitude to the ruling party.
Ofeinmun came down hard on a former Senator, Senator Oluseye Ogunlewe, who said on television that it is the business of every politician to rig and that spending money to buy those who are in charge of the electoral process is the order of the day. “He was suggesting that you needed to apply Option A4 and so on, but he was deceiving himself because, you see, elections are rigged in Nigeria, it is not simply because people were not properly counted. Elections are always rigged by those who, with impunity, add votes to the ones that were actually counted”.
According to Prince Chudi Chukwuani, National Chairman of National Democratic Party (NDP), who spoke to ZN, recent events, particularly the Ekiti State governorship election some years ago, had clearly demonstrated that Nigeria had not been able to bring itself to the level that it could supervise a free and fair election, because as, he put it, that was a very bizarre event which nobody had ever seen before. “How can you make laws and also lay claim to the rule of law and still flagrantly disobey those rules and then pronounce results from illegality as legitimate? It is not possible,” he said.
Chukwuani said the mindless rigging in Ido/Osi and other areas during the rerun election in Ekiti State that year rubbished the claims to rule of law by the government of the day. That electoral charade was supervised by Mrs. Ayoka Adebayo who, at a point, resigned on principle but made a volte face when the federal government twisted her hand.
What happened in Ekiti-vote rigging and violence generally-could hardly have been avoided. The ruling PDP then, made the point that it was going to settle for victory or nothing in the election. The then governor of Osun State, Olagunsoye Oyinlola vowed to supply soldiers and guns needed to scare Action Congress (AC) faithful from poling centres so that thugs and other would-be vote riggers would have a field day in subverting the electoral will of the Ekiti people. It was also learnt then that the AC did not just fold its arms, “it strategised day and night on how to make rigging difficult for its bitter rival. The slogan: “Rig and Roast” was meant to drive the message home that it was time to deviate from rigging, as the consequences would be grave for the vote rigger.” In the end, the Ido/Osi figures were manipulated to give Segun Oni an unlikely victory.
This, coupled with the vote rigging that characterised the 2003 and 2007 elections, in conformity with former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s do-or-die electoral philosophy, makes 1999 to 2019, two decades in which the sanctity of the ballot box was recklessly trampled upon.
Chukwuani attributed this terrible situation to lack of sincere leaders who cannot tell the truth and be bound by it. True, in Ghana, the party of the then sitting President, John Agyekum Kuffuor was defeated by the opposition and he refused to manipulate the process. Also, in South Africa, former President Thabo Mbeki was asked to resign by his party for complicity in the case against Jacob Zuma and he did. “These people did not say that heaven would fall or the counting would be destabilised. But that cannot happen in Nigeria. We do not have sincere leadership”, he reasoned.
Nigeria has, indeed, been facing some international ostracism on account of this. When then United States President Barack Obama visited Africa, Ghana was his first port of call. In the words of Chukwuani, Obama chose Ghana instead of Nigeria because he had decided that what was the point in “wasting his time on a nation that cannot even deliver to her citizens free and fair electoral process?” Yet Nigeria ought to be the most important country at least, in West Africa. But Nigeria has become a country not many black men and women, including Obama, can be genuinely proud of.
With regard to how Nigerians have fared in the past years, in the area of standard of living, the constitution under which the current democracy operates says in Chapter 11 (entitled “Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State Policy”) section 14 (b), that the “security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government…” The constitution, in Section 16, goes further that the state shall, within the context of the constitution, harness the resources of the nation and promote national prosperity and an efficient, dynamic and self-reliant economy; control the national resources in such a manner as to secure the maximum welfare, freedom and happiness of every citizen on the basis of social justice and equality of status and opportunity…”
When he attended and delivered a paper at the South South Economic Summit, Richard Joseph, a professor of Political Science and an authority on Nigerian power play, came out with a formula of how the people could be effectively taken care of. As he stated: “In Calabar, I called this Nigeria Dial 811. I don’t know what it is here but in the US, we dial 911 when there is trouble, emergency. I will say Nigeria dial 811 for opportunities and the 811 is that Nigeria has three tiers of government. The federal government, 36 states and 774 local governments and these represent 811 areas and I called these potential workshops of developmental governance in Nigeria.” He added that the geo-political zones, borrowing the words of Professor Pat Utomi, would be a political configuration at the sub-regional levels to address issues that really cross borders.
In the country, however, successive governments at these different levels, have shirked this responsibility.
President Muhammadu Buhari, many years ago, in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), Hausa Service, condemned Nigerian leaders for “failing to improve the lives of the people, despite the huge resources that accrued to the nation from 1999 to then.” He added that it was bad that some villages in the country still lack schools, hospitals and other basic social amenities. He affirmed that the nation could “not develop as long as leaders continue to fail in the discharge of their responsibilities to the people.”
Between when he left Nigeria after teaching at the University of Ibadan and now, Professor Joseph said the problems of the country had become larger. He repeated the statistics that a colleague of his mentioned at a meeting in Washington that between 1980 and 2005, the poverty rate in Nigeria went from 36 percent to 72 percent. “Now if you think of all the resources that came to Nigeria during that period, so as the population is growing (the Nigerian population that is 50n percent greater than it was when I left here …) we are not really advancing in certain ways in terms of developing a productive economy, in terms of employment, in terms of youth development and there are so many fundamental areas.”
One of these, according to him, is electricity and the power situation. Richard, therefore, wondered why a major country like this cannot get some things as fundamental as electricity and power supply working. For eight years, former President Olusegun Obasanjo could not fix the sector. Even a House of Representatives committee, probing alleged misappropriation of funds in the power sector, headed by Ndudi Elumelu, is today being tried over a N6 billion financial scam by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
Dr. Junaid Muhammed, a social critic, in his appraisal, said whatever economic developments there were between 1970 and 1999 had been consumed by higher population growth, incompetent, irresponsible and corrupt leadership and that the rate of urbanisation which in other parts of the world leads to industrialisation and economic growth has not done that in Nigeria. “What we have in Nigeria are massive cities of peasants which are badly planned and are lacking in basic infrastructure like electric power, water, rail and road transportation network and security,” he lamented.
The reason, according to him, was that the Nigerian government failed to invest in strategic areas of national economy which historically have been what is called growth loci, which are absolutely indispensable to development. These are: investment in airport, sea port, dams, canals, oil distribution pipelines and electrical grid. “Without these investments, it is little wonder that Nigeria’s development has been grossly stunted,” he stressed. No wonder, he said, that in Kano for instance, over 80 percent of the factories have closed down for one reason or the other with serious consequences to unemployment situations. This sorry situation is repeated in Lagos, Port Harcourt, Kaduna, Enugu, Ibadan and very many other urban centres. Many industries have shut down, some leaving Nigeria to go and do business in Ghana.
With youth and graduate unemployment at such a high rate, Muhammad argued that no one should be surprised at the poverty level in Nigeria. In fact, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), revealed that the rate of poverty in Nigeria today is over 75 percent among youths with secondary school education and university certificates.
But why do Nigerian leaders care less about the welfare of their citizens? The truth, as Ofeimun put it, is that “if people can come to power without depending on the votes cast by the electorate why should they worry about the electorate? They have finished with them, they are already in power. The only thing left for them is to service their own interest and that is usually what they do”. As Ofeimun argued, the two chambers of the National Assembly always find it easy to discuss their remunerations without looking at the National Incomes Policy, without considering for instance the idea of a living wage, without considering the welfare that they ought to provide.
Another major factor that has adversely affected the advancement of democracy in Nigeria is the collapse of the major structures that support it. In other words, the institutions (the media, NGOs and even the academic community, comprising lecturers and students) that ought to challenge the leaders are not equal to the task. A senior journalist complained to ZN that the media is so shamefully compromised that if a medium writes a somewhat unpalatable report about a politician, some journalists would approach the same character for “packaging”.
Ofeimun has a different perspective to the situation. The truth, according to him, is that the Nigerian press is a lame leviathan in the sense that it is a huge animal which can keep watch over the whole society. But the commentator put in a caveat that the press is not the police, they are not members of the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC), they are not soldiers, they are just providers of information and opinions, and therefore the “media are always dependent on the existence of the organised groups”. In a country where there are no such organised groups, the media, according to the crusader, are in a quandary.
The NGOs of Nigeria have, as Ofeimun maintained, managed to bring up all these intellectuals who would have been jobless if there was no NGO culture in the country. “But that is glaring, glaring in big quote,” he argued, adding that most NGOs have very poor political saints. “By that I mean they are not power oriented organisations, because organisations that seek for taking over of power are different from organisations that are merely providing information. Some kind of mediocrity is what we have.” That is, they can dominate the society with their information and their ideas but the media is different from the NGOs.
The academia is in the same position. But they are also handicapped by the fact that the academia no longer exists in a way that they can support what the media does, Ofeimun reasoned. That means an ideal situation where universities are behaving like universities in which one can see very serious research being done, which can unearth and try to see that there is enough information for the media to work on is not present. Unfortunately, Ofeimun said, the most controversial cases have not been properly investigated by either the media or the University. He cited some of the most complicated issues in Nigerian history: about 1941, a period when they said tribalism entered politics in Nigeria or 1951 when people crossed the carpet from one party to another or in 1959, when the Igbo people in National Council of Nigerian Citizens, NCNC voted in coalition with the Action Group, AG but that coalition did not take place. Nnamdi Azikiwe, rather, formed the coalition with Northern Peoples’s Congress, NPC.
“Those are well investigated instances in the history of Nigeria which shows that information gathering and information dissemination could affect the Nigerian society,” he said.
This is also in line with the position of another intellectual, Adewale Maja-Pearse who said that part of the reason that the country is underdeveloped is “the poverty of ideas and the poverty of the average Nigerian academic intellectuals”. Thus, Ofeimun took off from there that the kind of research and the kind of reportage in journalism that will unearth the very basic problems are not being done. He attributed this to ownership and the corruption pressure. In spite of this, the media, according to him, still do a job of providing information and taking some hard positions in politics.
Closely associated with this is the lack of effective opposition, made so by the jack hammer approach of the ruling party to other parties.
In a piece appraising the 10th anniversary of PDP, Dr. Reuben Abati, praised the founding fathers of the PDP, saying they “deserve credit for helping to fire general interest in political activities. Ten years later, they can claim credit in this direction.” But Abati said he was sorry, “that is where it ends. In 10 years, the PDP had done great damage to Nigeria and its people”.
True. Between its creation and now, the party has grown into a monster, bullying its way into offices in the three tiers of government, a disposition that made one time National Chairman of the PDP to beat his chest that PDP would rule for 60 years. All that, is now history.
In October 2008, when the PDP celebrated its 10th anniversary, the party put together a stakeholders’ conference in Uyo, the Akwa Ibom State capital, where President Umaru Yar’Adua boasted that the party won presidential elections thrice (1999, 2003 and 2007), a feat which he claimed made the PDP “the majority party at all levels of governance in the states, local councils and in legislatures across the country”.
But Dr. Abati then, disagreed, saying that that the President needed to be reminded that this is not a sign of general acceptance of the party by the Nigerian people, but the result of the wizardry of PDP leaders and their agents in rigging elections. Abati added that the PDP had used the power of incumbency to… “intimidate, and eliminate the opposition”. In a country where politicians are opportunists, Abati submitted that the “bandwagon of the stomach had driven too many politicians in the direction of the PDP, creating the semblance of a one-party state”.
The consequence of this is that the PDP was able to appoint its own lackeys into judicial and security positions to do its bidding against the people and the opposition. Ofeimun put it this way: “They all come from having an executive that is distracted, that is unconcerned with the electorate, and what they do in the federal set up is to put in authority at strategic departments, all those on whom they have some tab, people who have either committed some corruption or some criminal performance in the past and who therefore will be fiercely loyal to people that appointed them.”
The results are that some members of the judiciary pervert justice, fulfilling the dictum that he who pays the piper calls the tune”.
Things are made worse by the fact that people with criminal antecedents find their way into government, executive, legislature and the judiciary-even the security service and the armed forces.
“What we need to do”, as Ofeimun maintained, “is to bring in organisations that can identify them openly and fight them along actual lines of criminality that they are involved in, which is to unveil all their hidden treasures and prove how they got them and how they destroy the country’s economy in that process”.
However, will it be right to say the past two decades has been an unmitigated disaster for Nigeria? A notable politician, James Igbinigie maintains that the country’s democracy is on course despite challenges.
He argued that in the past 20 years or there about, Nigeria had taken pains to rediscover itself as a nation, because, according him, the maturity of democracy does not come easy and cannot be done overnight.
He reasoned: “If you recall what happened under colonial rule and dictatorship, you will understand the pains our people went through. Some people are taking this for granted because they are not the ones fighting for it. Today, we have a relatively free press which you are in the vanguard of. You know how much you sacrificed for it and to ensure that democratic values are entrenched. We are getting stability which is needed for development. Ethnic sentiments and the usual divisive tendencies are surely going to give way with time”.
When the BBC asked him to capture between military rule and the state of affairs today under a democratic government some years ago, Buhari responded: “Democracy is the best form of governance especially if its tenets of free and fair election, and the rules will be respected”.
Another public affairs analyst, Osadebe Okonkwo argued that May 29, 1999 was not a mere single step; it was a giant stride after 29 years of military misrule out of 49 years of independence from colonial rule. He argued: “Similarly, in the past two decades, the democratic space has been relatively opened and widened; power and resources have been relatively de-concentrated from the federal centre and re-distributed to states and local governments; governance has been relatively more openly monitored by the media, the civil society organisations and the citizens; and public discourses and debates on national issues have been relatively more robust and incisive.” He added that most significantly, however, it is great that we have had over 20 years of civil rule “without witnessing total authoritarian reversal.”
