Beyond the Pomp and Festivities

BY CHIDI AMUTA

(FROM PREVIOUS EDITION)

A quarter of a century down the path of democracy, Nigeria’s steps are still largely those of a toddler rather than the strident steps of a confident adult. Whatever gains democracy has made in this place are hard to acknowledge and tenuous in nature. Indeed, 25 years after the recovery of the country’s democratic heritage from the clutches of the military, the world now counts Nigeria as a democratic state. But many Nigerians will look at better democracies and argue that it is not yet Uhuru here. Of course, there are other Nigerians who would concede that given where we are coming from, some progress is on record.

Yes indeed, the outlines of formal democracy are everywhere now in evidence. Periodic elections have taken place every four years at federal, state and local government levels. All manner and levels of elected officials hold the reins of power and authority at the various levels of government. The pomp and festivity of state are on full display as well, giving the observer the assurance that indeed democracy is alive and well in Nigeria.

The vocabulary of public discourse has also come to feature the terminologies and manners of democratic society. People now insist on ‘constitutional rights’ and ‘due process’. The courts insist on the rule of law as the take off point for judicial interventions in most disputes especially those between the state and individuals and among arms of the state and their institutions. A younger generation of Nigerians that have gone to school in the past two and half decades are however ready to rehash their rights under the law and use this awareness to challenge the agencies of state in their daily dealings with the civil populace.

Twenty-five years of formal democracy is a commendable duration given the history of the country which went through over four decades of sporadic military despotism. This inglorious past has left lasting imprints on the disposition of the populace. People still expect governments to act with ‘immediate effect’, the dispatch of battle commanders. There is still a general intemperance in the attitude of the people to the value of forbearance as an attribute of democratic conduct. People are impatient with authority to bring about desirable goals. In relations between the military and the civil populace, violations of civil democratic rights are often not questioned legally. Civilians get beaten up in public places while persons in uniform tend to see themselves as higher in entitlements than their civilian compatriots. Of course, some progress has been made in relation to earlier years.

Yet in the global headcount of democratic states, Nigeria occupies a prominent position. And for many good reasons too. First, we are too many to be ignored. A nation of over 200 million people that opts for a democratic form of government should at least be acknowledged in a count of democratic states. We come after India in the ranks of populous democracies, slightly behind Brazil. We choose our leaders through a periodic electoral process, imperfect as it often is. The three arms of government are on full display with an implicit separation of powers that, in our case, very often entitles the executive to ride rough shod over the rest.

In addition, Nigerians are noisy by nature, which conveys the impression that we are a robustly free people. We are compellingly aggressive and very competitive which inevitably conveys a high degree of economic freedom on our society. We are diverse and have a permanent tendency to be chaotic and even unruly, which often justifies the recourse of governments to draconian methods. Therefore, governing Nigerians according to the rules of liberal democracy can be a nerve-wracking undertaking that constantly sends rulers back to the drawing board or exposes them to ridicule by a battering public opinion.

In spite of the outlines and appearances of a democratic polity, Nigerian democracy suffers four major setbacks that ought to occupy the attention of statecraft and scholars in the years ahead. Firstly, our democratic institutions do not have resilience and therefore are subject to bend to the whims and caprices of changing leaderships and power merchants. Presidents and governors have often privatized the police, the judiciary and even the apparatus of state bureaucracy to serve purely private ends. These institutions tend to yield to the manipulations of incumbents and, to that extent, fail to serve the wider needs of the nonpartisan populace. We have seen judges rule on the side of incumbents on matters of a political nature. We have seen the police commandeered into domestic chores of people in power or with excess money. A democracy in which the institutions of state are not sufficiently resilient to check the excesses of incumbent executives cannot serve the needs of a constitutional republic committed to equity. In such a state, the institutions exist to serve private needs while the commonwealth becomes an extension of the private fiefdom of politicians and moneyed oligarchs.

Incidentally, of all the institutions of democratic society that ought to undergird democratic conduct, it is perhaps the presence of a fairly free and independent press that has tended to keep democracy on its feet. But Nigerian politicians have in recent times learnt to ignore journalists. As recently as the Tinubu government, there have been police and military abductions and detentions of journalists for no justifiable reasons.

Secondly, because of the frailty of our democratic institutions, elected leaders tend to constitute themselves into laws unto themselves. In the contest between people in power and the institutions of state, we have tended to have a dominance of ‘strong men’ over feeble institutions. Our post -military democratic history has been mostly about strong men, some of whom were former generals, at the expense of institutions. It has been about Obasanjo, Buhari, Jonathan and now Tinubu. The tendency has been to allow the emergence of virtual kings and absolutist monarchs who bend the rules of the constitutional republic to amass powers, privileges and benefits to varying degrees of excess. This is made worse by the repeated emasculation of the legislature through material blackmail and partisan muzzling.

Unchallenged executive excesses have led to pseudo monarchical excesses. We have had presidents with interminable motorcades, where the first family becomes a virtual royal family with its members interfering with the functions of state and appropriating privileges that should ordinarily belong to either elected or duly appointed state officials. The consequent escalation of the cost of governance has led to inexcusable fiscal rascality that shows up annually in the abuse of the budget process. We have seen the allocation of scarce state resources to inessential costs like endless renovations of state residences and offices as well as the purchase and maintenance of fleets of expensive luxury vehicles, yachts and airplanes. Meanwhile schools, hospitals, social welfare programmes and poverty alleviation are starved of funds.

In the consolidation of the monarchical indecencies of the executive presidency, the republican essence of Nigerian presidential democracy is sacrificed. A president that was elected to be a fellow citizen becomes a man above laws, rules and norms. He becomes the law and rises above the common expectations of ordinary folk. Distance between the leader and the people is the greatest enemy of popular democracy. The direct communication between leader and people is replaced by the pompous pronouncements of glorified court minions empowered by the state.

Perhaps the third and most dangerous pitfall of our democracy so far is the failure of the system to invest in growing a culture of democracy among the general populace. A democratic country without a democractized populace is an empty shell. Form must be complemented by content in order to have that equilibrium that truly qualifies a state to be called really democratic. So far in Nigeria, popular awareness of democratic rights and norms tends to be limited to voter education during mostly election seasons. There is no systematic and continuous project for expanding citizen awareness of the major planks and rudiments of democratic behaviour.

The very constitution on which our democracy is anchored is a distant volume which is hardly read and understood by even the highly educated citizens. This contrasts sharply with what obtains in even the advanced democracies where citizen democratic rights are constantly in focus in schools, civil society organizations and daily life events. In such situations, awareness of democratic rights becomes part and parcel of daily living. People know, canvas and stoutly defend their democratic rights at every turn. And when those rights are transgressed, they go to court and expect justice instead of judgments as in most of our own case. Consequently, majority of Nigerians hardly know their rights in a democracy. People merely go out to vote when it is election season and then move on with their lives and wait for the next election season.

The final and perhaps most fatal flaw of Nigeria’s democracy to date is the unfortunate disconnect between the formal structures of democracy on the one hand and the more serious business of national development on the other. The essence of democracy ought to be the right of the people to choose their leaders with the corollary responsibility of those elected to deploy available resources to make the lives of the people livable and also advance the business of national development. The implicit dictum of every democracy is the obligation of those elected to leave the nation better than they met it through conscious policies and programmes. It also implies an obligation to further consolidate the state for it to safeguard the people in perpetuity.

In the Nigerian instance in the last 25 years, we have had the unfortunate scenario that each successive democratic regime seems to leave the nation a bit more degraded than they found it. In this regard, we can identify administrations of both long dark nights as well as those of bright flashes in the last 25 years. We have had an efflorescence of hope, optimism and decisive progress under President Obasanjo’s administration from 1999 to 2007. We have had a brief season of hope and principled administration under the short lived Yar’Adua stint.

Similarly, President Jonathan is mostly remembered for his epic indecisions, his adolescent grade knowledge of national issues and fickle handling of issues of high-level public-sector corruption. When we get to the Buhari administration (2015-2023), we are confronted with an incubus of incompetence, inefficiency and state capture by and on behalf of a section of the polity. Governance became lackadaisical and mostly absent-minded. The apparatus of state was left adrift while an indifferent sovereign went about his personal welfare from long overseas medical vacations to needless junkets to places where Nigeria’s interests were hardly in question. A national economy was run aground as debts piled and the Central Bank printed as much worthless Naira notes as it deemed fit to keep the bubble bouncing.

It would seem that the more Nigeria’s democracy has lasted and expanded, the worse the country’s record on the indices that define a working state have fared. In all of this, Nigeria under successive democratic dispensations in the last 25 years has been sliding back on most development indices. In many respects- insecurity, poor population, high cost of governance, inflation, exchange rate, cost of living, educational regression, healthcare decay etc., Nigerians can hardly find anything to cheer. On many of these indices, Nigeria has become a measure of most things negative.

It does not mean that democracy is antithetical to national development and progress. I suspect that Nigeria’s problem is twofold. The sheer cost of the Washington-type democracy that we have chosen is too high for an economy that is highly undeveloped and consumption oriented. More importantly, it does seem that somehow, Nigerian democracy has yielded an elite that is most interested in the perks of high office and not in the hard work of using public office to develop the nation.

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.