JUMADAL THANI 9 1430 A.H.
WEDNESDAY JUNE, 3 2009
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Democratic consolidation in Nigeria: Issues, challenges and prospects (II)
The tradition of popular participation in the democratic emancipation of Nigeria has its great advantages. Ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed no coincidence that when the issue is fidelity of the vote, two centres stand out as oases of hope in a depressing desert in Nigeria. These two centres are Kano and Lagos. Despite the mass allegation of vote stealing and mandate robbery that has been the hallmark of this Fourth Republic, the elections in Kano and Lagos have largely reflected the will of the people. That has translated into stable governance and stupendous development in the two states. With all modesty, ladies and gentlemen, the case of Lagos (of which you know I am part and proud of, being in this new dispensation, the first and two-term governor of the state from 1999-2007) is a national success story. The Kano-Lagos story just shows how a stable polity and legitimate leadership, endowed with the right vision, thinkers and doers, can radically translate into prosperity and economic transformation.
Let it therefore not be assumed that Kano and Lagos came to their present level of voter sophistication by accident. Kano owes its voter sophistication almost solely to the heroic efforts of Mallam Aminu Kano (I refuse to refer to him in the past, simply because his ideas and ideals are still very much alive and true today as they were in those radical days of talakawa struggles against the prevailing order). Mallam Aminu it was who virtually committed class suicide to pull, by the proverbial bootstrap, the Kano masses, even against the wishes and preferences of the nobility that he belonged. It is a tribute to his strivings that a man that lived a humble life and died a humble death has remained a giant in our hearts. If Kano has been able to police its vote and insist on the will of its electorate in the face of rampant vote robbery, it is a tribute of Mallam Aminu’s acute vision and grim determination.
The story of Lagos is, of course, all too known: it was a bridge head against colonial domination; and nursery of fierce nationalist rhetoric and action which bred the likes of Herbert Macaulay, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and Anthony Enahoro among others, not discounting a fierce and uncompromising press, when the subject was local rights against foreign colonial domination. It is this legacy of political liberalism and unabridged citizens’ right that we in Lagos are proud to buy into and take to the next level to the glory of a united, democratic and prosperous Nigeria.
Permit me, ladies and gentlemen, to go back into some historical tie-back on political evolutions in the country to put in the proper context the crisis of democracy and democratization in Nigeria.
Prelude to democratization
After 10 straight years of civil rule, is Nigeria a democracy? That is doubtful, if both sides of the argument would be true to themselves. If it is not yet a democracy, is it democratizing fast enough? If not, why? Answers to these posers would be impossible without a historical tie-back.
In Nigeria, it is an irony of monumental proportion that barely five years after flag independence, civil rule became an interregnum; while military rule, which ought to be the natural interregnum, became the norm. The collapse of civil democratic rule after independence in January 1966, was followed by 13 years of military rule. Civil rule resumed for four years (1979-1983) after hand-over in 1979, only to prove another brief civil interregnum, to be followed by 16 straight years of harsh military rule.
That period, the second bout of military rule (1983-1999) was home to the most traumatic period of our country, since the tragic civil war. It witnessed three military coups (1983, 1985, 1993), three attempted coups (1985, 1990, 1997), an annulled presidential election (1993) and the death in office of a sitting military head of state (1998). After all these tumultuous events, the Nigerian military had sapped itself and burnt its goodwill over a costly political escapade. From an admired if naïve institution that blundered into the political jungle in January 1966, it had by 1999 become a scorned, graft-grubbing bully deserving of everyone’s hate and contempt. We say to them: never venture into the political terrain again!
Besides, the whole country was in torment and in ferment. The rubble of economic ruins and stench of social dislocation that the military wrought assailed every nostril and triggered inevitable anger. The annulled 12 June 1993 presidential election, beyond the veneer of military rascality, had a tincture of ethnic tension and suspicion, if not outright domination. That had externalized an otherwise local conflict, with the escapades of the opposition National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) and its dare-devil Radio Kudirat, exposing the stinking underbelly of the crumbling political military establishment. The death in prison of Basorun MKO Abiola, at the end of military rule, almost tipped the country over the edge. But the earlier death in suspicious circumstances of Major-Gen. Shehu Musa Yar’adua and what many called the “judicial murder” of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his doomed Ogoni comrades, had over time underscored the unsavoury fact that the Nigerian military machine had come tragically unstuck in the field of politics and governance, and that something fast needed to be done to save it from imminent disgrace, if not outright collapse.
That was the situation when a negotiated pact became imperative. The military had exhausted itself and its historic possibilities. But it would be in no one’s interest if it was humiliated out of power. On the other hand, the political elite brimmed with vim and vigour to take its pound of flesh. But it knew, in the sick bazaar of humongous private fortune at public expense, it had been out of power for too long to match the stupendous wealth and peer cohesion of the military class. So, there was need for some compromise to ease out the military, while at the same time install a regime that would watch the flank and rear guard of the retreating column.
The fundament of that pact was the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria which though bore the preamble of “We the People”, Prof. Adebayo Williams dismissed rather irreverently, in one of his pieces, as a “patchwork of incoherent rambling and recipe for future chaos.” Williams posited the arrangement was aimed more at protecting a military past rather than shape a democratic future.[vii]
Even if Williams was rather harsh in his assessment, the conduct of Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo as elected president, left little or no doubt that there was a sort of “Army Arrangement” (apologies to Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the late Afro-Beat musician). His style was gruff and dismissive. He barely disguised his contempt for democratic finesse. He openly and unrepentantly subverted due process. He, without end, blackmailed the National Assembly on some bogus pretence to higher ideals of patriotism. With his gruff and sour temper, he was best suited to manage a “democratic” dispensation run on military temper. That might have protected the retreating military interests. But it did not in any way promote or ingrain democratic ethos. Indeed, instead of laying a solid foundation for sustainable democracy, it was an epitome of wasted opportunities.
That explains the paradox of a 10-year civil rule appearing to have internalised more the ethos of impunity and dictatorship rather than suavity and civility that thrives in a democratic civil administration and that gives elected governments untrammelled legitimacy.
The grandest irony of Gen. Obasanjo’s much vilified administration was that whereas he succeeded in the formal de-politicization of the Nigerian military, he came spectacularly unstuck in the demilitarisation of the democratic polity. To ensure his self survival, the ruthless purge of the political elements in the military, which the media hailed as the purge of the “IBB boys”, was perhaps the most lethal tactical move to rid the military of political careerists clothed in military fatigue. Since the forced exit of officers who had had more-than-decent exposure to politics and all its plums during the military era, all appear to have been calm on the military front. The Army itself appears to have taken fresh pride in re-professionalising itself and taken political power as sweet poison.
But in the more strategic turf of implanting democracy ethos and effectively purging the polity of ruinous militarisation, Gen. Obasanjo as civilian president fell flat. He not only had an anti-democratic temper, with a penchant for viewing dissenting views as enemies to be crushed, his authoritarian streak vaporised his putative authority. The one who started out, affecting a Mandela-like father of the nation ended up a Robert Mugabe-like scoundrel, a raven Samson who would not mind the whole democratic structure crashing on his head simply because he could not get his way in illicit term extension.
