The Maturation of Nigerian Democracy, 1999-2019
Ik Muo, P.hD;
Department of Business Administration, OOU, Ago-Iwoye
Towards the end of
2018, I decided to run for the presidency of our great country, a post for
which I am indubitably more qualified than many of the contestants ( see Muo
for President; Business Day, 26/9/18 and 2/10/18). However, looking at what has
happened in the past one month- the bizarre, the bad the ugly and the very
ugly, I am glad I threw in the towel even before the race began. I would
have lost everything, including my sanity. You see, when the irrepressible Fela
described Nigerian democracy a
demonstration of craze and said of all those involved dem
all crazy, people thought that he was the crazy one. A review of
political practices and attitudes in Nigerian from 1999 to 2019 shows that the
demons have actually gone crazy and we all know what to expect from a mixture
of demonism and craziness
I was two years old when Nigerian became independent in 1960
but thanks to the ability to read and write and a natural spirit of enquiry, I
now know a lot about what happened. We had politicians, who, though they were not saints, had some vision of the
future, took politicking as a serious business, uttered several quotable quotes
and were committed to the Nigerian dream. Along the line, the political crises
in the West occurred( a primitive version of what is happening now), the
soldiers came calling, initially to deal with the ten per-centers and install Awolowo asthe
Prime Minister, then a counter coup,
which was totally northern, a police action which lasted 3 years and then the Gowon era and the failed 3Rs.
The soldiers, who had tested the forbidden fruit, continued with the political
relay race until, Shagari and NPN came on board. That era of political
flamboyance was cut short by the soldiers who eventually handed over to one of
them, a soldier turned civilian, a militician, the one and
only OBJ. OBJ started saying and doing the right things but before long, he
enthroned the do-or-die political
model and became infested spirit of
third term. It didn’t work out for him and he wanted to rule by proxy by
imposing Yar’Adua on the country. UMYA
offered servant-leadership, publicly declared his assets, admitted that he
was the beneficiary of a flawed electoral
process and went to work to clean up the system. It is not easy to assess
his tenure because everything was
overshadowed by the politics of ill-health, cabalism and death. He was survived
by GoodLuck, the Niger-deltan who went to school without shoes and whom either did
not know how to deploy the powers he had ( Nigeria has the most powerful
presidents in the world) or was determined to do politicking differently or was
determined to make history. And in 2015, the APC, an amalgam of desperate and
disparate politicians cut short the proposed 60 year reign of the PDP, accusing
Jonathan of cluelessness among other
things. The APC promised CHANGE and offered everything, including turning the
desert into a riverine area. But they did not tell us the cost of these changes and some of us were
so carried away with their smooth stories that we did not interrogate their
proposals.
In 2019, the APC-appointed INEC conducted an
election that has so far lasted one month. Everything that could conceivably go
wrong with elections has gone wrong with this election. Inconclusiveness and
supplementary elections became the key features; elections and collation of
results were cancelled, suspended and/or,
postponed. Over-voting was observed;
violence was commonplace; INEC officials were kidnapped or coerced to announce
results and the soldiers became the new face of democracy in Nigeria. People
who were anxious to vote in the national election abandoned the polling booths in the
subsequent elections because he who
fights and runs away lives to fight another day. For now, the tribunals and
their shareholders, the lawyers, have taken over. We experienced bipartisan democracy in places
like IMO and Ogun states, where the governors belonged to two parties . We also
had democracy by remote control in a place like rivers where APC contested
every inch of the way even when they were not in the ballot. Of course, the
president had told the world that APC won Osun State through remote control!
People have complained against the various
aspects of the elections and some of these complains were coloured by
political, ethnic or religious considerations. Some rational and pro-National
issues have also been raised, especially
how the 2019 election has been the worst
in recent time, how the monies spent were wasted because the votes did not count and the voters were not allowed
to have a say. CSOs who always poke their noses into what does not concern them
complained that the 2019 election was a step back from that of 2015, with one
of them, HURIWA accusing INEC of committing more crimes than Evans, the billionaire
kidnapper. Our philosopher, Douglas Anele certified democracy dead andwent on
to conduct a coroner’s inquest while Ango Abdulahi saw the election as
monumental failure. Members of the APC and their supporters are not
complaining, except in places like
Zamfara and Rivers, though their jubilation has been subdued.
However, I have
examined the 2019 elections and the practice of democracy especially since
1999, with the eyes of an elder and I
strongly believe that our democracy has matured, with its principles and
practices. That is the good news. However the bad news is that anybody who expects that the principles of Nigerian
democracy will be similar to what obtains elsewhere will surely be in for a rude
shock!( To be continued)
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