Nigeria’s Democracy Day – A Celebration of Death or Birthday of Democracy? By Abimbola Lagunju

The celebration of Democracy Day in Nigeria reminds me of some lines from two poems written by two different authors. Oscar Wilde in his famous Ballad of the Reading Gaol wrote,

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Nigeria so much loves democracy as is being practiced in other countries that we imported it (just like our elites import expensive toys from abroad) and put it into practice without adapting it to our own realities. Like all imports, which have not been reengineered (acclimatized) to work in our climate, it required expensive maintenance to make it function. We could not maintain it and it went into a permanent state of disrepair. Typical of Nigeria, the “act before and think later” approach was adopted to fix democracy and in the process, it got killed here in Nigeria. Each man kills the thing he loves! What we have now is a fake – something that looks like the original, but it is not it. It is something to appease the international community, even if it is to the detriment of Nigerian people. Nigeria, being a country where fake products abound did not surprise the world with its fake democracy. After all, this is a country of fake drugs, fake spare parts, fake doctors, fake engineers, fake men of God….. Everyone is riding along waiting for the moment when this fake ideology will fall flat on its face and Nigeria will fall will it.

What we have in the place of democracy is an oligarchy that manipulates the people every four years to troop out to vote. And they are not bothered about the outcome of the process; they already know it, having bought it either in their party caucus or directly from the gullible electorate. The electorate is discounted in the course of governance and the system is skewed to placate and serve pockets of oligarchic interests and groups. The people cease to exist immediately after elections.

In order to permanently shut out potential troublemakers with good intentions, the club of the Nigerian oligarchs has restricted access. Not everyone can join. The cost of a nomination form for primaries for an elective post is so prohibitive to discourage anyone of legitimate means and income. Their system of selection of party-colour bearers for any election is engineered to produce those that have many corruption skeletons in their wardrobes – the true oligarchs. And sometimes, election primaries’ process is a charade; the candidates are selected outrightly by the leaders of the oligarchy. And people ask why the Nigerian parliaments at all levels are made up of Honourables and Senators, many of whom with unknown legitimate sources of income! The Executive on its part recycles people of dubious character and questionable professional history and career paths in key posts of governance just to keep the oligarchy intact and happy.

Ultimately, there is no difference between the political parties in Nigeria. PDP changes to APC at will and both change to whatever shape and form they fancy whenever it suits them.  They are one and same, fielding and recycling the members of the Nigerian oligarchy either in the parliament, the executive or the judiciary. When you vote, you are electing one of the oligarchs, who by obligation must ensure the survival and enrichment of their group irrespective of their party. Governance is not about the citizens in Nigerian Democracy, it is about the survival and sustenance of the oligarchy. The people don’t exist.

And to delude the unsuspecting populace into believing that they have a genuine currency of ideology, Nigeria rolls out drums to celebrate Democracy Day! Although it is a historical fact that the military were sent back to the barracks and the civilians stepped in on 29^th May, 1999; but democracy was absent on this day. It had been killed in negotiations prior to the elections that produced Chief Obasanjo as the president in 1999. Democracy was killed with bitter words, flattering looks and deadly kiss. And with it also died peoples’ immediate aspiration for a better Nigeria under a new governance system. Each man kills the thing he loves!

What therefore does Democracy Day mean? Is it a death anniversary of Democracy? A Rebirth? Or a Birthday?  For the oligarchs it is a moment to make important speeches to make us think that democracy is alive, but among themselves, they dance on the grave of democracy which they murdered long ago. For the common man, whose hopes and aspirations for a better life have been murdered on all fronts, the day represents the mourning of a loss; the loss of Rights to live as decent human beings, the loss of Rights as citizens of a nation and the loss of rights to hold our politicians accountable. For the international community that sees through the ruse of Nigerian oligarchs, today represents another step towards the inevitable self-destruction of the oligarchs and with them, the Nigerian State.

The second poem titled, “Strange Meeting” was written by Wilfred Owen. The famous line from the poem, which says “I am the enemy you killed, my friend” represents the ultimate lines of confrontation between the murdered peoples’ aspiration and the Nigerian oligarchy.

When this finally happens, we will witness the rebirth of Democracy in Nigeria !

Bad Governance: Sycophancy As One of Nigeria’s Many Diseases By Abimbola Lagunju

Sycophancy is a major hindrance to good governance in Nigeria. It is a disease of epidemic proportions afflicting Nigerians in all spheres of our existence as a nation. It traverses all social classes in the country. Sycophancy is not hero worship. We have no true living heroes in the system of governance of this country.  And sycophants have no heroes or principles they subscribe to or defend; they are just fawners who seek personal gain through creating an ego mountain from a small anthill of insignificance of their targets. A simple chain of hierarchy in any Nigerian public institution has been turned by sycophants at all levels of the chain into a praise and worship cult of the head of the institution

Armed with a false giant ego, the targets of sycophants believe they are really larger than life. They come to see themselves as the Alpha and Omega of their establishment. And they act the big man too! Convinced of their invincibility and believing in their own sycophantic prowess and their ability to grease the palms of politicians charged with oversight, these tin-gods commit crimes of fraud, harassment, recruitment malfeasance, outright stealing of public funds and many other crimes of bad governance. . The Nigerian followership through sycophancy induces bad governance and turns the people’s employees into primitive overlords.

Civil servants, who by their own appellation are servants of the people, assume the attitude of haughty benefactors to their employers – the people. Heads of military and paramilitary services as well as Director-Generals of government agencies are treated like tin-gods by their subordinates. And they act the roles too. They forget the statutory limits of their powers as heads of government institutions and assume new ones dictated by their many sycophants. And more often than not, they carry their egos beyond the confines of their establishment into the public space and expect adulations from the public. They react violently to any challenge to their ego and hapless civilians who cross their ways bear the brunt of their fury.

Elected politicians are prime targets of sycophants at all levels. These temporary employees of the people get so carried away with their induced overrated self-worth that they believe they have the power of life and death over their constituents. Our politicians wear their egos like clothes; any legitimate challenge or demand by a frustrated electorate is perceived and reacted to as a demeaning attempt from an inconsequential person. They unleash their fawning aides on the poor constituent.

And the places of worship? The sycophancy that trails the leaders of places of worship in Nigeria has made some GO’s and Bishops see themselves as gods. They get adulations from the lower clergy and the worshippers climb over the each other to fawn  the loudest. The pronouncements of some are in utter divergence from the Holy Books. They, as the new gods, write their own version of the scriptures and impose inconsiderate levies to milk the poor dry. They are also sycophants too; they cannot speak the truth to power, rather they hobnob with them and pat each other’s backs.

But for sycophancy-induced ego-ride, how could a civil servant have accepted that his shoes be cleaned in public by another civil servant? What else would explain the attitude of a high officer of the Nigerian Navy who unleashed violence on a harmless woman in the streets of Lagos? What could have driven a governor to talk down to the Civil Servants in his State? Or worse still, what could have possessed the wife of a sitting governor that caused a clergyman to be sacked because she was not considered first by virtue of her position to get God’s blessings through anointing? How could one explain the pronouncement of Bishop Oyedepo in the build-up to the last elections that the gates of hell were open to those who would not vote for Jonathan? These are examples that have been in the press, but there are many others that go unreported every day.

The probability that you, the reader of this article are a sycophant is very high. You are either a sycophant to a politician, your pastor, your boss at work or even to God. You mouth-worship somebody; you fill their ego-bag with your hot air so much  that they feel and begin to believe that they are God’s deputy. That is the way the Nigerian environment has reengineered your genes. It is called epigenetics – a science that studies how your environment affects your genes to enhance your survival. In other words, you are a direct product of your environment.

How did this scourge land in our midst? Is it imported or of local manufacture? Did our diverse cultures in any way contribute to its emergence in our modern system of governance? How do we undo this malicious gene that has rendered good governance almost impossible in our country?

Eleven Ideas for Bottom-Up Grassroots Democracy to Ensure Accountability in Nigeria By Abimbola Lagunju

It is a fact of our political experience that when it comes to responsibility towards the electorate, there is almost no difference between political parties with pre-election messianic fervour and parties with known evil intentions. The parties are one and same; the comprising politicians freely move between the two parties with the common intention to perpetrate evil in power. Akin to when the animals could no longer distinguish between the pigs and humans in Orwell’s Animal Farm, the Nigerian electorate can no longer differentiate between good and bad politicians – they are two bad sides of the same worthless coin. Nigeria faces a double jeopardy in having bad politicians and an inappropriate political system - a Catch-22 situation where we have inappropriate political system, so we have bad politicians and we have bad politicians, so we have inappropriate political system.

That elected politicians disconnect from the people soon after winning elections in Nigeria is a disease of Nigerian democracy. Election campaign promises (if any) are dumped into the nearest waste-basket as soon as the candidate wins the ticket. One Southwest politician famously spoke the mind of many Nigerian politicians when she said that to be voted for was a short-term contract between her and the people. A contract in which she paid for the services of the people to vote for her. According to this politician, the people collected their payment upfront during the campaign and there were no further contractual obligations between her and the people after the election.

This is the mindset of most Nigerian politicians. After elections, the people are seen as a nuisance to avoid at all costs. These politicians, the ordinary people of yesterday, soon begin to hide themselves in bullet-proof vehicles with tinted glass-windows and harass the people with their convoys and sirens. Their convoys bump along potholed or un-tarred roads in the cities; huge amounts of money are spent on generators and diesel to provide electricity for themselves with no thoughts in their minds that they could and should make a difference. The indifference of these elected politicians cuts across all spheres and levels of expected service delivery and infrastructure development. It appears no Nigerian politician has ever heard of the word, ”accountability” to their electorate and if they ever did, to them it means getting fat constituency allowances into their bank accounts and the occasional distribution of worthless consumables to some of their most exigent cronies.

Experience has shown that there is very little we can do to make our politicians change their ways in the current system and the checks and balance system which the country has in place is subverted at different levels (executive, legislative and judiciary) to render it ineffective. In order for our politicians or change or be changed, the system has to change. Recent news carried some rumours of a coup. This is not the kind of change our system needs. The military can never be the solution to the political crisis of this country. They are part of the problem. They are at the origin of the present chaos. The kind of system change we need is one where the power truly belongs to the people and not to a small group either in civilian or military outfits. We need a paradigmatic system change away from the current situation where an elected individual believes that he is above the people and the laws of the land.

Democracy exists in different functional forms in different countries – the American system is different from the one practised in France, which is different from the one in the UK or in Germany and so on. Each society adapts the system to suit its good governance requirements. The bottom-line of all these versions of democracy is that power belongs to the people and the elected officials of the state see themselves as employees of the people and not as capricious benefactors.

It is unfortunate that Nigeria, despite being the most populous country in Africa and the largest concentration of the black race in the world has not been able to contribute to democracy as a system of governance. Rather, it copied verbatim a system that has proven its worth in another country and corrupted it. The resulting bad governance has become the bane of Nigeria and the cause of its many problems which has led to militancy in all its forms and calls for restructuring and in some quarters, for outright dismantlement of the country. These hardware solutions are tantamount to cutting off the head to cure a headache. Nigeria has not exhausted all possible software solutions that might bring desirable good governance, peace, prosperity and stability to the country.

It is time to rewrite our constitution and exorcise the military from our system. And when we eventually get down to this, here are some useful ideas that may cut the costs of election and improve accountability:

1. Scrap Governorship and Presidential elections as we know it today

2. The people elect Local Government Chairmen and council members through a simple open ballot system.

3. The people elect members of a unicameral national parliament through a simple open ballot system. Scrap the senate; it’s of no use.

4. LGA Chairmen and members of the National Parliament in each State elect their governors.

5. Governors and Members of the National Parliament elect the President for a single term on a rotational basis among the six geopolitical zones.

6. A vote of continued trust is organized every year - 40% votes of no-confidence by LGA Chairmen and Members of the National Parliament of that State can sack a governor.

7. A vote of continued trust is organized every year - 40% votes of no-confidence by Governors and Members of the National Parliament can sack a President

8. 25% votes of no-confidence by the people can sack a LGA chairman

9. 25% votes of no-confidence by the people of a constituency can sack a Member of the National Parliament.

10. All elections and votes of trust are conducted under simple open ballot system.

11. The judiciary operates a jury system at all levels for all cases of bad governance, corruption and crime.

Hopefully, someday soon, accountability will be a rule rather than a rare exception in Nigeria.