The Governance Predicament:
Poverty, Terrorism and Democracy
Lecture Delivered At Freedom House, Lagos, Nigeria
By Larry Diamond
June 30, 2014

I would like to begin by thanking Governor Asiwaju Bola Tinubu for the honor of his invitation to deliver this lecture, and for his record of developmental performance during eight years as Governor of this dynamic state. Because Nigeria has largely squandered staggering natural resource wealth and human potential over more than half a century of independence, there is a chronic tendency here and abroad to see its national prospect asnearly hopeless. But Nigeria is not condemned to suffer endemic corruption, waste, ineptitude, and insecurity. These are the products of deficient institutions and a culture that has grown up around them. People make institutions. People produce and reproduce cultural norms and expectations. And people can change them.
I was interested to discover that Governor Tinubu and I are of the same generation, born a few months apart. Around the time he first visited the United States I first visited Nigeria.At similar points in our lives, though from very different perspectives, we have seen the promise of democracy in Nigeria swell and recede. We have seen the military come and go from government.We saw the Second Republic gasp for breath and then collapse under the weight of unchecked political greed and staggering fraud in the 1983 elections. We have seen military rule bring this country to nearly total ruin, and along the way, arrest and imprison the man elected, under its very auspices in 1993, with a broad popular mandate to fix the mess. We saw that man, M.K.O. Abiola, die needlessly and almost certainly avoidably in prison. We both then watched from outside Nigeria while the worst tyrant in Nigerian history, General Sani Abacha, took plunder and abuse of power to unimaginable depths.
At this time of growing disaffection with the performance of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, it is important that all Nigerians—even young Nigerians who have no memory of those days of dread and depravity—appreciate this lesson of their own history, and that of other countries: However troubled the national situation may become, however scandalous or inept may be the performance of elected government, there is no hope of reform or renewal under military rule. The core problem of Nigeria today is the chronic deficit of honest and effective governance. We have learned in Nigeria, and in Pakistan, and in Thailand, and in so many other countries around the world: There is no military shortcut to governance reform. The challenge lies with the civilian institutions and actors of democracy: parties, politicians, legislators, judges, civil servants, and civil society. Like all other elements of the Nigerian state, security institutions—the military, police, intelligence—are in need of reform and modernization, including significant investment in training and equipment for the challenges they confront. But it is the civilian political actors who must summon the will, the strategy, the resources, and the credibility to lead this process.
Likemost Nigerians, I am worried about the future of constitutional government in this country. I have been asked to speak about the challenge posed to democracy by poverty and terrorism in Nigeria. But the core problem in Nigeria is not one of poverty. Neither is it one of terrorism. These are manifestations of a deeper and more diffuse malignancy: bad governance. Governance that is not addressing the central policy challenges of the country. Governance that has produced a weak and feckless state. Governance that is not producing an effective response to the growing challenge of terrorism, and that many Nigerians believe lacks the will to do so. Governance that cannot distinguish between the public trust and the private treasury. Governance that has seen, by some estimates, public officials and their co-conspirators steal and wastehundreds of billions of dollars of the country’s wealth over the last several decades.
The phenomenon of Boko Haram and the violent, nihilistic rampage it has been on represent only one symptom of the problem, and it is not an unfamiliar one in Nigeria. During the late 1970s and early 1980s another violent religious millenarian movement, led by Maitatsine and emerging out of the very same northeastern state from which Boko Haram has sprung, wrought havoc on the north, leading to several thousand deaths. When I was teaching at Bayero University, Kano, in the last year of the Second Republic, I was struck by the depth of inequality and poverty, and the hunger of ordinary talakawa not just for jobs, services, and basic goods, but most of all, for simple justice. That is the hope that the People’s Redemption Party, founded by Mallam Aminu Kano, represented. It was at the heart of the polarizing struggle that led to the impeachment and removal of Governor Balarabe Musa in Kaduna State. And toward the end of the Second Republic, in the 1983 national elections, even some of the more technocratic and progressive elements of the northern establishmenthad come to see the need to rein in the feeding frenzy of corruption under the ruling party, the NPN, and deliver better governance. This is why elements of that group took what was for them the difficult step of forging an alliance with the principal opposition presidential candidate, Obafemi Awolowo, giving him his vice-presidential candidate..... http://www.scribd.com/doc/232013988/The-Governance-Predicament-by-Prof-Larry-Diamond