Nigeria’s democracy and the landlord’s amnesia
By Bruce Malogo
On October 1, Nigeria went through the motions of another Independence Day – a national performance we have rehearsed every year since the flag first rose in 1960. As part of the usual seasonal rituals, my local church hosted a public forum with an ambitious, almost martial title: Walking Over to Takeover, with WOTO as acronym. The theme was heavy, carrying the weight of a perennial crisis: Faith and Governance: From Election to Nation Building.
I sat on the panel. The moderator turned to me first, throwing a neat, expectant softball to break the ice: “Do you think the Nigerian electorate is well-informed?” he asked. I didn’t smile. I simply shifted in my chair and said, “Well, let’s just pretend, for the benefit of this discussion, that we are in a democracy.” The moderator was unmoored by this opening line. You didn’t need a trained eye to see the cracks in his composure. He demurred, and then repeated my words back to me, perhaps offering a lifeline to walk it back. I didn’t take it. I meant exactly what he heard, and I repeated it for emphasis and as a conviction.
My point was simple: Nigeria’s democracy is an amputee, primarily because the people around whom the governance system is built are absent from the architecture. We are told and we believe, even from practice, that the people are the central pivot of democracy. That sovereignty belongs to them, and that the system thrives or crumbles based on how informed, active and vigilant the citizens are – or how they choose to be. Strip away the political theatre and democracy is beautifully simple: the people hold all the cards. In corporate idiom, citizens are the ultimate employers; politicians are merely temporary staff hired to execute the public will.
Nearly 33 years after the historic June 12 struggle, and through 27 years of unbroken democratic practice, that truth is still missing in the maze. Nigeria’s democracy is buckling under the weight of widespread ignorance. The electorate remains ignorant of the vital information required to demand good governance. Instead of acting as custodians of power, millions view basic public services as benevolent favours from ruling elites. This profound lack of civic literacy has transformed elections into a marketplace, reducing the sacred right to vote into a transactional commodity.
At the heart of this is a massive deficit in civic education. A significant portion of the populace cannot distinguish between the constitutional duties of a local government chairman, a state governor, and a federal lawmaker. When citizens do not know what their elected officials are legally obligated to do, accountability becomes impossible. Because the electorate does not understand its constitutional privileges, it unwittingly signs away its future for short-term survival.
This information gap manifests in devastating ways: citizens demand immediate personal handouts instead of sustainable public infrastructure; public goods like paved roads, clean water, and functional primary healthcare centres are misconstrued as political favours; and lawmakers escape scrutiny for failing their legislative duties by sponsoring occasional, superficial community giveaways.
The core logic of democracy dictates that the servant can never outrank the master. Yet, because the vast majority have been starved of basic information regarding their rights, this relationship has suffered a bizarre inversion. We have traded places in the dark: the hired help has moved into the master bedroom, while the rightful owners have been reduced to beggars at their own gates.
In a true republic, sovereignty resides entirely with the people; leaders are merely caretakers holding a temporary power of attorney. Yet most Nigerians do not understand this fundamental math. It doesn’t even require much critical look to appreciate that this ignorance is by no means accidental. It is wittingly designed and weaponized by a political class that thrives on the helplessness of the very people they are supposed to serve. Political scientists would call it the principal-agent problem. Peel away the jargon and it says plainly that the landlord has relapsed into amnesia; that he has forgotten he owns the house. When the owner forgets his status, the caretaker locks the front door and treats the landlord like an unwelcome squatter.
To understand this absurdity, let’s look at the theatre we call representation. Lawmakers – states and national – infrequently visit their constituencies, and when they do, it’s always entirely at their own prompting and convenience. At their arrival, they do not just invite their constituents, they summon the people for what is obviously a parody of community briefing or town hall meeting. Notice the perverse inversion of civic grammar: the servant summons the master. The people are gathered to hear vacuous and vainglorious rhetoric. At the end, they are tossed a patronizing handful of cash and miserable measures of rice in small, makeshift bags. That pathetic ritual is all their “citizenship” buys them until the next time around. This next time could be the next election cycle, when the honourable members deign to return to harvest votes through the usual political fleecing.
All of that is because a majority of our countrymen and women are handicapped in their knowledge and understanding of civic rights and duties. When people understand their rights and duties, they are not easily deceived, and they are responsive to matters that affect them personally and directly. You don’t have to beg them, bribe them, or even resort to threats just to get them to do the basics – such acts as simple as registering to vote or actually stepping out to vote. They understand that these are their civic duties, the end of which will deliver their deserved dividends.
But we are constantly pleading for participation because too many people are in the dark about these matters. As the old, enduring saying puts it, “Knowledge is power”; and the Good Book tells us that “…a man of knowledge increases strength.” Even those who know better, those among whom we can ascribe knowledge, a different kind of tragedy prevails: they’ve either traded such rights for short-term survival or been intimidated into inertia by the system.
We can account for this ignorance, this lack of information as a deliberate and sustained strategy. By underfunding public education and keeping civic studies out of mainstream consciousness, the ruling class keeps the voter vulnerable. Communities are impoverished, then bribed during campaigns with the very resources stolen from them. Routine infrastructure, paid for by taxpayers, is presented as personal generosity demanding lifelong loyalty. And when citizens begin to raise their voices about poor performance, politicians deploy identity politics, using tribal and religious biases and loyalties to obscure the people’s shared suffering and their own administrative failure.
When politics is about possession, an informed citizen becomes a liability. He asks questions. He asks why a primary healthcare centre funded in 2022 remains a foundation in 2026. He asks to see the budget. He asks for accountability. Those questions threaten politicians – the cartel. Therefore, the system is incentivized to keep the citizen exhausted, broke and hyper-focused on the next handout. The rice and stipends are not benevolence; they are maintenance costs. It is infinitely cheaper to distribute food bags every four years than to build systems that make citizens self-sufficient – and therefore demanding.
This is the grim reality faith must confront. Governance without an informed public is not governance by any stretch – it is management of a herd. A church that merely prays for “good leaders,” or simply those in power, but fails to teach that power belongs to the people, has failed its civic ministry. Faith communities are among the last places in Nigeria where people still gather voluntarily and listen. If the pulpit does not teach the theology of citizenship – that power flows from the pews to the state, and that accountability is a moral mandate – who will?
To disentangle Nigerians from this political cluelessness, the electorate must transition from seasonal, casual voters into engaged, informed citizens. Civic education must be aggressive, continuous and decentralized, far beyond occasional media campaigns during election weeks. Civil society, independent media and community leaders must break down the Constitution into local languages. True liberation will only occur when the average Nigerian realizes his vote is a contract, not a meal ticket, and that public officials are servants, not rulers.
Rather than more patronizing voter sensitization, we need a civic reawakening. The people do not serve the government; the government serves the people. Until we correct that sentence in our minds, every October 1st will remain a contradiction: a grand celebration of independence alongside a democracy we are still only pretending to practice.
- Malogo is a director at Oscar and Halliday Media Company, and a member of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE) bruce.malogo@gmail.com
