LET THEM EAT DEMOCRACY

By: Moshood Ademola Fayemiwo

I remarked in my last piece in this column that Nigeria is far from a country ready for honest leadership. The current peculiar mess caused in Ekiti State by the vultures of the ruling party and its cavalcade that descended on that state during the gubernatorial re-run last month bespeaks the organized chaos Nigeria is enmeshed after the confusion caused by the military in nearly four decades of regimented psyche and cauterization

. Any perceptive analyst of the Nigerian conundrum would know that nothing fundamentally has changed since those of us who put our lives on the line to drive the military away departed that cursed nation. Now the situation is worse because hapless Nigerians have the illusion that because citizens cast votes-which are meaningless because election results are ready before, people go to the polls-then there is democracy and the Nigeria media have compounded the situation by inventing the ludicrous epithet” dividends of democracy.”

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While Abacha was about to be taken out by the “powers that be,” in 1998, few of us in the Gulag were being told that MKO Abiola too would be “removed” and a Yoruba man would be installed as Nigeria’s president. This was in summer 1998; Abiola was still alive, while Obasanjo was still under incarceration yet it had been “decided” by this clique that Obasanjo would be released to become president to appease the Yoruba people of Western Nigeria. That was when I knew my time was up in Nigeria. The tragedy was that the pro-democracy movement bought into this simpleton idea that once Abacha was removed, democracy would be achieved. But how I wished Abacha had not been killed and Abiola had been alive because the war to liberate Nigeria from internal colonialism would have been waged once and for all. We would have known what to do with Nigeria either as a nation with equal opportunities for all tribes and nationalities or a splintered nation where every tribe would have gone its separate ways. Now the country is in far more trouble because all those “bad guys” holding that nation perpetually diminished have smuggled themselves back to power by shedding-off their epaulette for civilian garb. Just take a look at the characters destroying that nation; they are still in power through the back door and we saw some of them at Ekiti State the other day. This second internal colonialism invented by Gen. Ibrahim Babangida in 1988 when he proposed diarchy by sending Col. Anthony Nyiam and some military officers to Santiago, Chile has now been accomplished through the political barracuda known as the PDP-People’s Deception Party.

The truth of the matter is that there is no “democracy “in Nigeria, period! What the rapacious elite did was “lease” out power to Obasanjo for eight years to give Yoruba people a “sense of national belonging;” widen the political base as a façade for de-exclusion and yet hold firmly the nation by the jugulars. Here in America, we call it the “okey dokie”- a reduplicated phrase invented in the South in 1932 which means all is well but actually it is meant to swindle and deceive. You see that in Nigeria where they are being told that “O! Let’s move forward, everything is fine!” But the reality is that Nigeria is politically and economically hemorrhaging right before the peoples’ eyes.

My senior colleague in South Africa, Dr. Kole Omotoso in one of his books lamented that the “Trouble with Nigeria” is “unpunished corruption” while Africa’s bard, Chinua Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria is leadership. To Achebe” Nigerians are corrupt because the system under which they live today makes corruption easy and profitable; they will cease to be corrupt when corruption is made difficult and inconvenient, The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership.” Karl Maier’s This House Has Fallen: Midnight in Nigeria fused both with tribalism as triangular banes that would destroy that nation. Yet, each time we talk about corruption in Nigeria, we think about the tons of pilfered public money and mouth-watering billions that end up in private pockets everyday without thinking about political corruption. Both economic and public corruptions are cancerous Siamese Twins that destroy nations.

The aim of any government, according to Abraham Lincoln, is to achieve for each and every citizen what each citizen cannot achieve on his or her own. This is what distinguishes members of the Homo sapiens from animals in that our coalesced common interests in communal living achieve the greatest good for the common good of all. To achieve maximization of such individual interests in collective ambience of mutuality, few are chosen periodically to represent the rest so that society can function. This is the beginning of democracy but not the end, for democracy is just the means to achieve such collective good and communal interests. Those who thrust themselves into such roles are called public office holders and society holds them to high moral standards. But when that mechanism is subverted by the very people society collectively entrusts such enormous responsibility, society is doomed. The current Ekiti cliff-hanger should be located against this disturbing background. Reading President Umaru Yar’Adua’s interview with the trio of Oloja, Abati and Adesina of The Guardian last week with a parting shot to institute the rule of law as his most enduring legacy was re-assuring even to a Law Student like me who know that the beginning of rebuilding Nigeria should start from the basics of instituting the primacy of rule of law yet Umaru Yar’Adua lied barefaced to his country men and women when he said he would not send steel helmeted soldiers to Ekiti during the gubernatorial re-run; tampered with the Resident Electoral Officer’s statutory duty to announce election results; approved the bare- knuckling and knee jerking moves by his party to “re-capture” Ekiti State at all costs.

The Ekiti tragedy is emblematic of Nigeria’s national rot and a presage of the outcomes of future elections. If political corruption is combined with economic corruption as Nigeria under the PDP is nearly succeeding, Nigerians are in for more hellish times.

Political corruption is the most toxic and inimical to national progress and political stability because you need political power to curb public corruption and malfeasance but when political corruption is legitimized, anarchy reigns because, politics, as Easton (1953) noted, is the authoritative allocation of scarce resources in the modern state. Because of paucity of resources to serve sundry human needs, the modern state as Huntington (1968) explained, needs political institutions to allocate these resources equitably “Without political institutions, society lacks the means to define and realize its common interest. The capacity to create political institutions is the capacity to create positive interests” (p.24) .Consequently, when the mechanism of such allocation of state resources are unethical, seen to be compromised and not transparent, public confidence is eroded and society collectively suffers. This is why political corruption is the most dangerous in any society.

There is a nexus between poverty and political corruption. Political corruption is a formidable foe of wealth, faith, truth, justice and confidence. Corruption of whatever hues, according to Danny Leipzinger, Vice-President, Poverty Reduction & Economic Management Networks at The World Bank “discourages private investment, retards national growth and inhibits poverty reduction efforts” (2007).

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About 100 years ago, Australia was regarded as the most corrupt nation on earth because of the level of corruption in Down Under. The Aussies turned their fortunes around through massive investment in education and wealth creation. Nigerians must come to terms with these debilitating predicaments of adding political corruption with unpunished economic crimes, official larceny and stratospheric elite thievery. One Korea couldn’t survive it and had to be partitioned; Big India couldn’t survive it either so Pakistan and Bangladesh had to be carved out of the behemoth; ditto for the Balkans, some Asian archipelagoes and many more.

Nigeria cannot be a historical exception. Time is running out.