Nigerians celebrated 15 years of the country’s return to democracy on Thursday, May 29. This is the longest time the country has had uninterrupted civil rule since independence on October 1, 1960. That in itself calls for celebration and the government would have rolled out the drums but for the security and other sundry challenges.
Some Nigerians believe there is absolutely nothing to celebrate. I beg to disagree. Some progress has been made since May 29, 1999. We are definitely freer today than we were under military rule. We have a free press. There are no arbitrary arrests, no institutionalised torture.
No matter how bad things may seem, a civilian government is more responsive than even the most humane military junta.
Because there is more freedom, Nigerians ask more questions than ever. There are pockets of development here and there and some governors are showing that with the right calibre of leaders, the country’s huge potentials can be realised.
But despite all these, it would be disingenuous for anybody to say that this democracy is working optimally. Are Nigerians better off today than they were 15 years ago? The answer is no. Many are poorer now than they were in 1999.
The system has created pockets of billionaires in the past 15 years, and more citizens own private jets and posh cars. But many others have slipped below the poverty line. Though members of the political class who have access to the national treasury live larger than life, unemployment has skyrocketed despite claims that the economy is growing at a robust rate. Many of those employed are actually under-employed.
With the rebasing of the economy, Nigeria may well have overtaken South Africa as the largest economy on the continent and the 26th largest in the world, but the reality on the ground is that diseases, hunger, and abject poverty have never been more in the ascendancy.
More private schools charging mind-boggling fees have been built in the past 15 years but many more children are out of school today than ever. A conservative estimate is that over 10 million Nigerian children, mostly in the North, are out of school. They roam the streets.
Healthcare infrastructure is so decrepit that medical tourism has become one of the biggest drains on the economy. Over 90 per cent of members of the bourgeoisie who have died in recent times died in foreign hospitals.
Rather than promote security of lives and property, life has become brutish and short. Except during the civil war, at no time in Nigeria’s history – pre and post colonial – has so much innocent blood been shed than in the past 15 years.
Rather than promote peace, democracy has unleashed primordial tendencies and ethnic cleavages that were in retreat or reined in by the military. The fissures that are the bane of the Nigerian state are more evident.
In the past 15 years, corruption has had a free reign than at any other time in this country. Some may disagree. For them, the military is the worst purveyor of corruption.
To such people, Ibrahim Babangida and the late Sani Abacha elevated the vice to a totem. While that may be true, the fact remains that what has been stolen from the system since the return of democracy, in spite of the so-called war against corruption, makes whatever happened during the inglorious military era a child’s play.
No day passes now without mention of billions, of not only naira but dollars, stolen from the system without trace and without anybody being punished for it.
The consequences of unmitigated corruption are dilapidated infrastructure, near collapse of the healthcare system, education falling into pieces, poverty, hunger, frustration and anger in the land – which, in a sense, are at the root of the low intensity war in the North East.
Fifteen years of democracy has led Nigeria to war, literally.
This is a big irony, a contradiction of sorts. Democracy is touted as the best form of government which primary essence is to help mitigate these ills. Why is the reverse the case in Nigeria?
The worst mistake we made in 1999 was to entrust our fledgling democracy to a non-democrat and a pretender, Olusegun Obasanjo, a General who had ruled as military Head of State between 1976 and 1979.
Democracy is the government of the people, by the people, and for the people. At the core of it is the inalienable right of the people to choose freely those who will superintend over the affairs of state. That is why sovereignty resides with the people.
I was in Jos in 1999 at the first national convention of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The party had been formed a year earlier by tested democrats, led by former Vice President, Alex Ekwueme. But at the convention, the military oligarchy, led by Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar, imposed Obasanjo as PDP Presidential candidate. Obasanjo was in Abacha’s gulag when the party was formed in 1998.
While Abubakar was in Aso Rock as Head of State, Babangida relocated to Jos, set up office in the house of Yahaya Kwande, from where the “coup” against democracy was executed. To impose Obasanjo, party rules that stipulated that a presidential candidate won the vote in his constituency were jettisoned. Obasanjo lost election even in his ward.
That was the beginning of the rot that has made it difficult for democracy to work for Nigerians. The people element, the most fundamental in a democracy, is thrown to the dogs. The will of the people is hijacked by godfathers.
The tragedy of our so-called democracy, or is it pseudo-democracy, is that votes have never counted in the choice of who governs.
Many who complain about the lacklustre administration forget that in a free and fair contest, the Umaru Yar’Adua/Goodluck Jonathan ticket of 2007 would have been a mirage. Neither aspired to govern Nigeria.
Yar’Adua had decided to take up a teaching job at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria after serving two terms as Katsina State Governor. Jonathan was getting set to contest for Bayelsa State governorship.
In a free and fair contest, neither Yar’Adua nor Jonathan would have won the PDP ticket. But Obasanjo imposed them, and the rest, to borrow a cliche, is history.
Thus, as 2015 approaches, those seeking to occupy public office are not looking in the direction of the people, they are looking up to godfathers; and because they do not get their positions through the sovereign will of the people, they owe the people no obligation.
That is the crisis of the Nigerian state. Democracy is distorted and bastardised and therefore cannot promote public good as it does in other climes.
But the situation can be reversed and democracy can still work for the country. Nigerians must take a cue from India, the largest democracy in the world, and the seamless elections it held recently; or even South Africa; and ensure that in 2015, their voices are heard through the power of the ballot box.
It is only when leaders are accountable to the people that the dividends of democracy can be assured.
That can only happen when leaders owe their position to the sovereign right of the people, and when they look up to the people, not to godfathers, to win elections.