By Ussiju Medaner
Last week, we rolled out drums to celebrate yet another democracy day; it was the 25th. But we failed to seize the occasion to ask pertinent questions. For instance, are the people, the citizens in control? How much say do Nigerians have in the determinations of the affairs of Nigeria? Is it really the government of the people, by the people? We have had government after government which somehow deceived the people into gruesome suffering and partitioned the country into divided entities that make democracy impossible for the nation.
Democracy was a choice we made; a part of our societal administration that we have chosen for ourselves in 1999, the dawn of the Fourth Republic. We want a government of the people by the people and for the people, and we got it. In the early days, we called it nascent democracy – it was indeed a budding one. We choose to hide the fact that we have refused over the years to allow democracy to evolve in a healthy manner and for it to take a firm root and work for the people and the nation of Nigeria. Twenty-five years later, we cannot freely say our democracy is nascent, but we moan and groan at the fact that after this long period, the country has not yet developed its roots to grow a blessed and sustainable system that hands down the government to the people in reality.
What we generally term dividends of democracy has continued to elude us; and as much as the current Administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is strategising to salvage the national system and set a new pace for democratic rejuvenation of the country, both national and individual developments remain seemingly unattainable for us, except for a very few. We had grown a society that was increasingly partitioned into the politicians and the non-politicians population; the rich and the poor. Those who were opportune to occupy and coordinate the democratic movement have unfortunately made a mockery of the system and arrogated vast power and influence to themselves, thereby rendering the dreams of the masses and their expectations of societal development driven by functional democracy a mirage. We will continue to hold on to the hope of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu government, to see through its Renewed Hope promises to realign the country on the part of a real democratic journey.
It is about time we accepted that as good as our political cum democratic system is theoretically, its application is faulty in our domain. It is high time we converged on an understanding that we need to unravel the hindrances to effective and purposeful governance via democracy in our country and what needs to be done to salvage the soul of Nigeria and make democracy work for Nigerians. I do hope that we will, as soon as feasible, be looking at converging a national dialogue to discuss a working pathway to democratic development.
Whether we accept it or not, it will continue to haunt our capacity to organise a united front to address our many recurring and disruptive challenges. Today’s America is a destroyed political system regardless of what it continues to portray to the rest of the world. The polarised political climate created by former President Trump’s continuous lies that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from him, despite being debunked exhaustively by fact checkers and almost all the courts in the United States; yet, Donald Trump and his weaponised MAGA crew would only continue to fly with the falsehood he fabricated towards winning the upcoming 2024 election while deepening the polarisation of the United States.
Since the 2020 election, the country has become a shadow of itself. None of its systems work without the influence of the divisions created by the lies. The House of Representatives has failed to settle down to work for America but chooses to play politics; the Senate is also polarised, taking political sides, especially the divides created by Trump. The once beacon of democracy has become an apology of a nation to so many observers.
So many things, both from inside and outside have cumulatively demoralised and diminished the positive impacts of true democracy in the Nigerian nation. Rather than having the people’s say, and having the democratic system benefiting the masses in Nigeria, we grew a system that belongs to selected individuals who would do anything to monopolise the system and enshrine their permanent control over it.
Wasn’t this the same fate of Nigeria now? Peter Obi lost the 2023 presidential election; he exercised all his right to legal determination, all the way to the Supreme Court, without being able to change the outcome of the election result. Yet, like Donald Trump, Peter Obi decided to reject the result and sustain his claim that he won and the presidency was stolen from him. That inevitably weaponised his already toxic Obidient Movement, to destabilise and terminate all hopes of a progressive, united Nigeria nation.
As a result of Peter Obi’s cleverly chosen rhetoric of a ‘stolen election,’ a whole lot of his supporters, unfortunately populated by a singular section of the county, chose to hang on the false rhetoric of a “rigged and stolen” election, and the result, just like the January 6, 2021 gruesome attack on the US Capitol, the entire fabric of the Nigerian socio-political space has been of permanent attack since the end of the 2023 presidential election in the country. Peter Obi lost. He knew he lost, and just as the claims by the people in the close cycle of Trump, who quoted Trump as saying “I don’t want people to know we lost,” Peter Obi has continued to energise his mob with the lies that their votes were stolen in 2023 and they must constitute permanent threats to the current Administration.
Today, the majority of the people are divided in a manner that hurts the nation; and a people who cannot be united cannot guarantee an efficient democracy. When the system does not work, we must look back and ask people among us, like Peter Obi and his cohorts who are bent on using the little surprising support they had in 2023 as a tool to win the next 2027 election by using a mischievous storyline to maintain their support base.
But it is not only Peter Obi and other politicians’ conjured lies and formulated rhetoric along ethnic, religious and regional sensitive issues that are responsible for our woes as a people. Another unbelievable factor is the disposition of the Nigerian populace to the acts of the politicians in offices and out of office. We have become a bunch of blind followers who either do not see or have chosen not to question the misbehaviours and misconduct of the ruling class; rather, we insanely play the praise singer role, massaging the egos of the same people paralysing the democratic capacity of our country. We are just like the animals in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
We grew apathy as a unit of our many responses to national order; Popularity called the “I don’t care” attitude. The larger majority of our population aren’t bothered about what the corrupt leaders do with our commonwealth; they do not care like many of the animals became careless of what the oligarchic pigs do with the community of animal farms. We felt pains of bad leadership; we knew the system wasn’t working for us, but we chose not to participate. We fail again and again to vote when it is time to decide through the ballot who our leaders would be; consequently, we have local government chairmen, governors, members of legislatures and elected elements, who are projected on all of us by less than twenty per cent of our population, and have continued to be the albatross of our communal growth and development as a nation. Until that day, when we all know we must come out to decide who rules us by the power of the ballots, we would not have democracy working for us.
We continue to parade leaders across the sphere of democratic governance, who came in as advocates of democracy and equality, but always soon turn to the very elements of oppression they promised to overthrow. We keep failing to be wary of those who promise us a better life under democracy while they are only interested in power for personal gains. We must recognise our role as citizens in the process of national democracy. We are the people, we have the power to decide how we are led, and we have the power to reign in those we elect to administer the nation on our behalf. We must wake up and begin to demand full accountability from politicians and public officeholders. Now is the time.
Nigeria needs a total rejuvenation of its many critical systems. Our democracy cannot work for as long as elections are highly monetised, and a contesting Senator must dole out a minimum of two billion nairas across winning both primary and the main elections. How do we expect a governor who spent close to five billion naira to consummate an election victory, to be bothered by the feelings of the people? This is business; that is what our democracy is to those who occupy political positions. It is pure business. Where is the morality to blame them for disparaging our hard-earned democracy as we claim? Until our votes are no more for sale, and we all line up behind trustworthy contestants without expectations of monetary bribes and handouts before we vote, we have no moral base to desire real democracy and its benefits.
GOD BLESS THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA!
(Published In The People’s Daily Newspaper, Wednesday Column, 19th, June, 2024)
