Democracy in the Wilderness

BY CHIDI AMUTA

History seems to have a way of playing Nigerians a curious trick. Twelve months to the 2015 presidential elections, the test then facing our democracy was that of a peaceful transition to another elected government. That transition needed to reflect the consensus of popular assessment of the outgoing government. The unifying anthem and collective political wish of most Nigerians then was simple: Change. It was a two-fold change. Democracy needed to validate the wishes of the majority of Nigerians who wanted anything else but the Goodluck Jonathan style. Secondly, the nation needed to transit from one elected government to another in a manner that would neither be disruptive nor threaten its strategic stability.

These twin larger objectives were achieved. The Jonathan administration was roundly defeated and chased off. Nigeria survived and witnessed a peaceful transfer of power to a new administration under a different party. The prospects of democracy surviving and taking roots in Nigeria were vastly improved, if only the incoming administration listened to the inner yearnings of the people. Therefore, the political burden of the then incoming administration of Muhammadu Buhari was well cut out.

The successful 2015 election and the painless transition did not automatically confer on Nigeria the status of a working democracy. It merely improved the chances of advancing the frontiers of democracy through a government that worked for the people. The nation needed to quickly progress from the routine rituals of periodic elections to building a democratic culture among the populace. The right to vote and be voted for needed to be complemented by an entitlement to the rights and freedoms that people in a democracy are entitled to. Most importantly, the social and economic conditions that enable the growth of democracy needed to be rapidly improved.

In tandem, the electoral system needed to be upgraded to ensure that future elections were not only freer and fairer but also more credible. Even more overwhelming was the challenge of instituting a governance structure that would guarantee a national environment in which Nigerians would enjoy the full benefits of living in a democracy. People needed to be safe and secure. People needed to be free to pursue the dream of a better life in the hope that it is an achievable goal in a life time. Those were the hopes and aspirations embedded in the support and mandate accorded Mr. Buhari in 2015. 

Now again in 2022, less than a year to the end of the current administration, history seems to have put on a garb of cruel irony. Nigerians are once again face to face with an even more tragic and desperate unifying imperative. Today, seven years after the triumph of “CHANGE”, an administration that was ushered in by a wave of democratic euphoria has burdened the nation with depressing legacies that place obstacles to the growth of democracy. 

Politics and governance under Buhari’s APC have divided a once united nation into factions, regions, sects and creedal enclaves. Those we elected into power and office have splintered the nation along all known lines. The most basic freedom of democracy, the freedom to move around the country has been abridged by the fear of death in the hands of agents of violence.

The hope of a more frugal economic management of the nation’s resources has been replaced by a more rapacious culture of corruption and waste.  In seven years, a new debt burden has been ratcheted with debt service obligations threatening to gulp 100% of revenue. An unprecedented level of poverty has seen over 100 million Nigerians migrate into a new republic of the poor. A rapid decline of the core social services of education and health has seen public schools, colleges and universities shut down for months on end for want of better conditions of work. A mass exodus of Nigerian doctors and nurses to Europe, the United States and the Arab world has left most public hospitals unmanned in critical care areas.  As we speak, no one remembers when last any Nigerian public university was open for teaching and learning as the umbrella union of university teachers has been on strike than at work for years.

Yet, despite these threats and limitations, there is a new consensus among Nigerians. Our travails may be divergent. Our anguish may be coming from different sources. The intensity of our cries may be different. But our plea that is powering the 2023 presidential election drive is the same loud and familiar one. It is the oft repeated anthem of peoples who have witnessed holocausts, genocides and similar such collective tragedies and historic misfortunes. Today, most Nigerians are heading towards the 2023 elections with a common refrain of that familiar note: NEVER AGAIN!

After seven years of Mr. Buhari’s bumbling rule, the quest for a new leader is driven by a singular wish never again to allow the Buhari model of leadership happen ever again in Nigeria. The historic irony of this moment is that Mr. Buhari, a man granted the most generous political amnesty in Nigerian history and trusted to deliver a better nation seven years again has ended up as the poster man of degenerate governance and abysmal statesmanship.

While historians and commentators are bracing to deliver an inevitably blistering assessment of the Buhari presidential tenure, we can simplify the interim assessment by looking at the fortunes of democracy itself in the last seven years.

No doubt the ritual of periodic elections has been observed routinely in the last seven years. To a great extent, the regularity of these elections and the reliance on them to furnish successive governments for various levels of government in Nigeria would qualify Nigeria as one of the world’s functioning democracies. To our credit, after over two decades of electoral democracy, the great majority of Nigerians have come to a consensus that democracy remains the only viable means of renewing political leadership and pushing for changes in the character and quality of government in the country.

Accordingly, aside from seasonal general elections, stand-alone off-season state governorship elections have been held in Ondo, Edo, Anambra states and the Federal Capital Territory with commendable outcomes and commendably tolerable levels of credibility. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has continued to fine- tune the processes and procedures of our elections, revising laws and technicalities in line with changing circumstances. Limited applications of new technologies like the use of biometric identification and recognition of voters through the use of electronic voter’s cards, card readers and the B-VAC technology have reduced the old reliance on manual fault riddled procedures. Acrimonies resulting from human errors and deliberate mischief have drastically been reduced. In these isolated state elections, the delivery time for results has vastly improved even if errors resulting from the manual tabulation and transmission of results have persisted in some place.

The full first term general election in 2019 was arguably an improvement on the 2015 election. Inter party competition between the major parties, the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) remained as keen as ever. However, electoral felonies such as under age registration and voting, occasional ballot switching and the flagrant compromise of electoral officials and vote buying were widespread while laws and regimes of sanctions against electoral offences remained weak and ineffectual. A nation that celebrates tribunals for seeking electoral redress for untidy elections remains timid when it comes to setting up and activating electoral offences tribunals to punish electoral malpractices.

A most embarrassing feature of the electoral system that became rather pronounced under Buhari is the rather frequent recourse to the judiciary to settle electoral disputes. In a number of cases such as the Supreme Court judgment on the Imo State governorship election case that toppled Governor Emeka Ihedioha of the PDP and replaced him with Hope Uzodinma of the APC, it became a matter of grave public concern that the Supreme Court may have over reached itself. Judges usurped the functions of INEC by engaging in the mundane task of vote tallying! It became common for the Nigerian public to doubt the integrity of both the meddlesome courts and their suspicious judges on the one hand and indeed the entire electoral system itself. The numbing public question was essentially this: why hold elections involving millions of voters if the final electoral verdict would be left in the hands of a handful of judges who were probably in their chambers or asleep while the elections were taking place?

The existence of a viable nation is the minimum precondition for the existence and survival of democracy. The best democratic edifice will collapse and evaporate in the absence of a stable nation. When the institutions of state are threatened by the forces of anarchy and insecurity, a pretension to democratic observance becomes a hollow ritual. As the authors of How Democracies Die, have observed, threats to the state can become tools in the hands of an elected authoritarian leader who feels threatened by strict democratic conformity. Under Mr. Buhari, the Nigerian state has come under historic assault most of it simulated or even deliberate. Arguably, the systemic insecurity that has wracked Nigeria in the last seven years would seem to be partly simulated. With Mr. Buhari came certain unusual types of insecurity. The emboldening of the killer herdsmen who continue to ravage parts of the country is by no means accidental. Similarly, the spread of jihadist terrorism into a national menace that began in the Sahelian segments of the nation and has now spread to the North West, North Central  and parts of the Federal Capital Territory would seem to have taken advantage of a more friendly regime in Abuja. The coincidence between the emergence of these novel sources of insecurity and the tenure of the Buhari presidency is a bit uncomfortable.

For whatever reason, an insecure Nigeria cannot be democracy friendly. People who live in a democracy are first and foremost supposed to be free people. Once the freedom of movement is abridged, then it imposes limitations to the idea of nation space. The mobility of persons also connotes the mobility of labour and capital and the other factors of production. A nation space constrained against the free movement of persons and productive forces can neither be a democratic nor a prosperous space

To that extent, the inability of the Buhari administration to contain the nationwide insecurity has been the greatest disservice to the growth and development of Nigeria’s democracy. The cost of securing the various elections held in this period has been a major concern. Each of the stand- alone governorship elections held in the last seven years has assumed the appearance of a martial parade of security forces and warlike hardware.

The Anambra Governorship election of 2021 was garrisoned by 34,587 police personnel. Add Department of State security personnel, Soldiers, Civil Defense and other agencies personnel. All these for no more than 2.5 million registered voters. Similarly, the last governorship election in Ondo State was garrisoned by 33,780 policemen. The Edo governorship election of 2020 had a police shield of 31,000 personnel.

This is roughly the extent to which the spread of insecurity across the nation has converted democratic elections to controlled garrison exercises. Ultimately, these elections may indeed have been fair and fairly credible but they were not free exercise undertaken by free citizens in an atmosphere free from fear and intimidation.

Beyond physical insecurity, the deepening poverty in Buhari’s Nigeria has created the greatest distortion of our democratic landscape. The complete invasion of the electoral and political space by monetized corruption is the biggest tragedy of our time. The ongoing party primaries to choose candidates for various electoral offices for the 2023 elections in the system has raised one single headache: monetization of our politics. At no other time in our history has the political system been so subject to financial compromise as in the current season.

The scramble to become party delegates has been no more than a struggle to get a gate pass into a national casino of open bribes and pay off for delegate votes by various aspirants. Various media have documented the charade that went in the name of the PDP presidential primaries last week in Abuja. Vast troves of dollar cash were showered on delegates by the various aspirants. It has been speculated that the two aspirants with the highest vote scores also happen to have been the biggest spenders in terms of delegates pay offs.

As the nation awaits the presidential primaries convention of the ruling APC, we may yet witness the greatest reversal of the gains of Nigeria’s democracy yet. The President who is the leader of the ruling party has ‘requested’ state governors under the party to allow him the courtesy of ‘choosing his own successor’ irrespective of the democratic dictates of the internal democracy of the party. The outcome of this unusual request may indeed be the crowning glory of the contradictory democracy dividend of the Buhari presidency. This lame duck presidency may yet fatally injure our frail democratic gains.

CHIDI AMUTA With more than 30 years in reportorial and management journalism, Amuta has held senior editorial positions as foundation Member, Editorial Board, The Guardian; Chairman, Editorial Board and Editorial Adviser, The Daily Times Group and, until 1999, Chief Executive, The Post Express. Amuta holds a First Class Honours degree and a Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), where he taught Literature and Communications Strategies for ten years before moving to the University of Port Harcourt.