Written by:
Rev. Fr. Patrick Udotai



CIVIL RULE NOT DEMOCRACY

It is late into the night of May 28, 2009. It is exactly 10.50pm. It strikes me that in just on hour ten minutes Nigeria’s civil rule will be exactly ten years old. A part of would like to say “Congratulations Nigeria!” but a greater part of me is holding me down and taking my mind round the state of affairs of our ten years of civil rule. I hate to call it “Democracy.” It seems so strange that ten good years have passed and we as a nation are still groping in this political darkness and wandering in this wilderness of social circumlocution. The tick of the Nigeria political scenario points clearly to an irreversible stagnation and mediocrity. Among so many indictors, the inability of Nigeria (sorry, INEC) to conduct a credible election in only 65 wards of 10 Local Government Areas in Ekiti is the recent most revealing episode of our democratic backwardness and political ineptitude. This is very worrisome. We are still appalled at the abrupt reversal of conscience of the Res
ident Electoral Commissioner, Mrs. Ayoka Adebayo aged 74, who had earlier declined to announce the Ekiti election result because of ‘undue pressure’ that were piled on her by some unnamed influential powers. In a pulsating speed of morality Mrs. Adebayo had sent in her resignation letter to the President because to remain in office and announce the result as those powers demanded was against her Christian conscience. That was both brave and exemplary. But that act never lasted till sunset. Before Nigerians could give her the applause, our septuagenarian had a chameleonic twist of morality and pledged an unalloyed allegiance to the “INEC family” and announced the same result she refused to announce earlier. That is the true picture of our ‘democracy.’ How such a simple election could be so difficult (or impossible) that so many had to be injured with some loosing their lives is unthinkable after ten years experience. How could INEC be still so arrant and unlearned after all t
hese years that an election in an area less than one State could cause so much disaffection that old women had to stripe half-naked on the streets to protest the broad-day denial of their franchise and legitimate choice? What happened that over two thousand police men could not stop the nefarious activities of election fraudsters? Or was the deployment of so many policemen necessary in the first place? How could such an election with such magnitude of malpractice be accepted in a democracy? The victory of Oni in Ekiti is a victory of injustice over justice, might over right, minority over majority, failure over success, and civil rule over authentic democracy. What is more worrisome is this: If the election in only some part of a State brought such frustration, devastation and destruction, what will happen come 2011?

Like many Nigerians there are so many things to worry about. The collapsed infrastructure in the country, the dysfunctional educational system, hospitals without basic equipments and medicine, the lingering Niger Delta crisis that has turned the entire region into a coven of monsters with treacherous instinct for evil and destruction. Now the executive and the legislature in a corporate conspiracy have vowed to exterminate the Niger Delta people in the name of eliminating the militants. What about the reckless display of affluence and misbegotten wealth by politicians? Statistics from UN report says that about 60% of employable Nigerians are unemployed. This is scaring as every indicator points to more deteriorating records in the future. Many Nigerians are still poor, hungry and homeless. We are now back to the queues at the filling stations. Our highways are still flooded with policemen, soldiers, and other military and paramilitary officers who seem to be escorting armed r
obbers and kidnappers to their targets. There is a general nonchalance and apathy in the country, whereby peoples’ attitude to work is at best noncommittal. Even religion that is supposed to be a binding cord of unity has been manipulated, politicized, commercialized and dressed in an ethnic apparel to become a double-edged sword that tears us apart.

Are you not worried about the failed promises that have daunted and tainted our hopes since the birth of our civil rule? When we began this journey in 1999, Obasanjo’s rhetoric on his zero tolerance against corruption; promise to light up Nigeria via thorough revamping of the power sector, etc deceived us to believe that he was repentant of the havocs he and his military cohorts caused this great nation over the years. We all hailed the Oputa panel and the EFCC, among others as veritable organs for righting the wrongs of yester-years and restoring our pride only for them to turn out to be mere fripperies of colossal deception just as similar commissions before them. If anyone had prophesied in 1999 that we would still be groping in the dark in 2009 in search of electricity, most Nigerians would have banished such prophet from the land. It seems that for the past ten years we have been going round the circle and now we have reached the point we began in 1999. Then we had queue
s at the filling or gas stations, there were riots and demonstrations, killing of innocent Nigerians, then our doctors were on strike, then ASSU was on strike, the level of insecurity was at its zenith, people were exiting from the land because of political threats. These have all returned after ten years of self-rule, including indiscriminate kidnappings. These are the indices of our progress on this political journey.

How sad that ten years after the promises, and two years after the over-orchestrated 7-point agenda, our country is still pregnant with political contradictions and the ordinary Nigerian is yet to eave a sigh of relieve. Let us not forget that for democracy many Nigerians paid painful prizes. Obasanjo, the greatest beneficiary of our democratic struggle, in one of his 2001 “Democracy Day” speech acknowledged that for Nigerians to enjoy democracy, many people had lost their lives, many exited their homeland, some were cowed and those who dared a voice of opposition were thrown into the prison for manipulated reasons. Unfortunately that observation was as good as just being said. How many politicians in power care to recall what many others went through for them to be where they are? The common practice is that you see them when they need you and the moment they assume office they become as available as a mirage: unreachable and unapproachable. Today we have a president whose w
ork ethic and input have crawled the entire nation to a snail-speed progress. The national assembly has no less than 58 bills that are yet to be properly debated and passed. A situation where over 140 million people are held captives by the idiosyncrasy of one man who swore to serve the people as a “servant-leader” is nothing but very disturbing.

What about the scams and the probes? The Halliburton, the Siemens, the Health Ministry, the House of Representatives, the rural electrification or the power sector probe, the probe into the allocation of lands in the Federal Capital territory, name them? What have come out of any of these? Most of those at the centre of these scams and probes are State Governors, Ministers, Senators, and what have you. Elumelu, Ugbane and 8 others are currently facing trial for N6.2 billion Naira scam. Like the others we may not hear the verdict of the court. Some weeks ago 150 million US Dollars was found in an account of an eminent Nigerian, who pleaded not guilty because he did not know how the money got there. Tell me: where else does this happen in this world? Where is the zero tolerance on corruption? Why are these corrupt men and women so free in a country that is seeking for image rebranding? What happened to the recovered Abacha loot? Remember there are still so many unanswered ques
tions in the system: Who killed Bola Ige, a minister of the federation while in active service? Who killed Harry Marshall and the others? Who killed Ikhazubo? Why is our nation besieged by assassins, kidnappers, fraudsters and armed robbers when we have the military forces littering all our roads?

We could go on wondering and worrying without an end about this great nation that has been castrated and rendered effeminate by the very forces that ought to empower it. It is true that the causes of the above scenario are multifaceted and complex as they cut across the entire spectrum of our national life. But it is undeniable that politics and politicians have led us to this seemingly irredeemable ebb. At the beginning we set out to practice democracy, a system of government that has the people at the centre of its entire structure, objective and focus. From the point of view of the Social Contract philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, Jean Jacque Rousseau and John Locke, democracy, as a system of government, has its origin because of the interest of the people. It is made realizable by the delegated power of the people. It is aimed at improving the quality of life of the people and it is sustained by the people through active participation. It is simply a people-oriented system
of government. But the practice in Nigeria is a direct opposite of what a true democracy ought to be. Here the people are intimidated or outrightly denied the freedom of expressing their voluntary franchise, which is fundamental in a true democracy.

Where is that politician who passed through the peoples’ ballot box to his seat in Nigeria? In this country, since we began this journey, ballot boxes are hijacked, snatched and stuffed with votes without the people casting theirs. Since 1999 the electoral officers at various levels in a satanic connivance with the powers that be fabricate and forge figures for ‘successful’ candidates. I often wonder: why do politicians choose the crooked ways if truly they are out to serve the people? Must you intimidate, injure, maim and even kill the people before you serve them? The people should be allowed the right to freely choose their preferred candidates. Anything short of that is undemocratic. Part of the reason our politicians are insensitive to the people and living in superfluous squander mania is that the people did not contribute nor participate in their success. A system of government that extols godfatherism, consensus, settlement, thuggery, ballot box snatching and stuffing and the likes is inimical to democracy.

Our politicians are either too immature or not prepared to practice democracy with its inherent principle of “You can never win all the time” and “You win some, loose some.” It was disheartening to hear the chairman of the ruling party in Nigeria say that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will rule the country for the next sixty years before it hands over to another party. Another eminent Nigerian politician had once said that PDP’s victory at the polls is “a do or die affair.” No doubt the PDP has become a very big and powerful party thanks to the caliber of politicians in Nigeria whose principle, mission and vision is to satisfy their personal greed and therefore have to cross the carpet to where the pendulum of power swings irrespective of the ideology. Be that as it may, it has to be pointed out that the above statements betray PDP as a party that is not willing to do anything that will create common grounds for the other parties to participate in the quest for the avail
able political spaces in the land. The present situation smacks of political incapacitation and frustration of all opponents by the party in power in order to impose themselves on us for as long as they can. This easily explains why the energy and money expended on the reform of the 1999 constitution and electoral reform may just be like many other wasteful efforts in the past.

For our government to be what it ought to be – a democracy – there is an urgent need to resolve the inherent contradictions in our present civil rule. The peoples’ political consciousness has to be reoriented to understand the best ways to employ their democratic rights to get the best of what they want. They must freely delegate their chosen candidate through an unforced expression of their franchise. Where and when this is denied in any form, they have to rise up and wrest their rights from any political impostor. To the extent of challenging an unfair imposition, the women’s demonstration and indeed the entire Ekiti imbroglio is a positive sign for our political evolution. Since democracy cannot thrive where there are no functional democratic institutions, the government of the day, must demonstrate the requisite political will in building, developing and constitutionally empowering democratic institutions that will ensure viable democratic reforms. Nigerian politicians must realise that authentic democracy is filtered through the sifter of credible opposition, without which true democracy cannot evolve. To be able to achieve this, one is strongly in support of a formidable merger of the other political parties so as to produce a party that can match the party in power, in number, wealth and influence. Without a credible alternative the people are trapped in this vicious cycle of the devil’s alternative. The insistence on constitutional and electoral reforms should be seen as a sacred duty by all politicians, especially the legislators, and they should be prepared to sacrifice anything to see them through. This will serve as an irreplaceable legacy of this government. It is a high time the good men and women of this noble land stood up and join politics so as to make the much needed difference. Until we have men and women of integrity who are more concerned with the common good to the neglect of personal greed and self-enrichment, ours will continue to be a civil rule without a true democracy.

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