By Adigun Agbaje
The quest by African newly educated elite for the democratization process, a new value system which offered a prospect of hastening their take-over of power from the out-going colonial masters was at the root of social dislocations experienced by the new emergent African nations in the second half of the 20st century.
Although part of the policy thrust of the departing colonial powers was modeling their new African satellite states after their own nations that had matured through feudalism, mercantilism and capitalism before embracing democracy, multi ethnic societies at different level of cultural development, hastily merged together for ease of administration, can however hardly be said to be an ideal fertile ground for a new value system that shifted attention from groups, the building block of most African societies to individuals who can now with their votes change the power structure and by extension economic structure of their largely agrarian societies.
It can be argued that the fact that most of the new African states collapsed barely five years into independence over struggle for spoil of office by the educated elite were evidence enough that the democratisation process was driven neither by patriotic zeal nor the love of the ordinary people who according to Chief Obafemi Awolowo, if given an option to choose between the educated elite, the traditional rulers and the colonial masters would have chosen in reverse order.
For the educated elite, the quest for democracy, many have argued was just a means to an end”. Jide Oluwajuyitan, ‘Democracy and its enemies: The Jonathan era (2010-2015)
Nigeria has since independence in 1960 engaged in a formal search for meaningful elections and democracy. Within that period, the country has appeared to be closer to its goal of substantive democracy on only a few occasions.
However, the majority of other occasions, including now, I dare say, comprising the obvious periods of military rule and the not-so-obvious obvious eras of party politics, elections and governance involving civilians, have largely been characterized by the tendency to use the appearances of the electoral process and democracy to subvert meaningful elections and substantive democracy (what some of us have referred to as electoralism and democratism). Thus, more often than not, the ideas and practices of elections and democracy in the normal senses of these words have become subverted, and the country is now further away from electoral and liberal democracy in my considered view than it was in 1960.
In effect, the ideas and practices of democracy, party politics, and elections have remained unsettled and contested in Nigeria’s public and not-so-public terrain over the decades, especially among the elite but also among the people, many of who have remained willing and not-so-willing tools of elite manipulations in contestations for power and its uses and abuses.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the public sphere, along with its institutions, stakeholders and practices, including the mass and lately social media, public intellectuals, professional and occupational groups, and civil society, has played the role of register, arbiter, instrument and advocate in these contestations.
It is against this background that I welcome this latest volume, a compilation of essays published in the media by respected and long-serving public intellectual and newspaper columnist, Jide Oluwajuyitan, entitled, Democracy, Party Politics, and the People: Nigeria and the Democratization Process – The Jonathan Years, 2010-2015. This volume, comprising the writer’s essays published in the period under consideration by The Nation newspapers, complements an earlier volume published in 2003, comprising a collection of his essays in The Guardian newspapers, under the title Nigeria under the Generals.
Jide Oluwajuyitan belongs to that rare breed of public intellectuals who daily toil to enrich and enliven our public space with their perspectives on current history. He started doing this in 1976 as a very young man and advert executive in the Daily Times newspaper Group, writing first for the Lagos Weekend, and then for the Sunday Times (1977), easily Nigeria’s most successful Sunday newspaper of all times, Evening Times (1979), and Times International (1980).
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He took his trade to the (then new) Guardian newspaper chain which he joined as pioneer Advert Manager in the early 1980s and wrote his column regularly in The Guardian until he retired as Executive Consultant (Editorial & Advertising) from the chain in 2008. He subsequently moved his column to The Nation newspapers where he served as a Director (2008-2010) and continues his craft to the present.
Many of us do not fully appreciate the extent to which newspapers and their columnists constitute a most important factor in the shaping of our country’s past, present, and future. As aptly put recently by Professor ’Wale Adebanwi (2014: xi), a former Nigerian journalist and columnist himself and currently Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at the University of Oxford,
One of the most resourceful ways of studying the social formation in Nigeria is through the newspaper press (as) archive. However, few scholars have produced monographs on the archive of the newspaper press in relation to newspaper (wo) men in Nigeria as critical sources of explaining and understanding Nigeria’s past and recent history.
More than at any other period in our collective experience as a country, it is now time for us, despite the increasing salience of social media platforms, to fully appreciate and begin to seriously draw lessons from efforts by newspapers and their columnists “to capture vital components of personal, institutional and collective memories” (Agbaje 2015:2).
It is for this reason, among others, that I commend this volume of over 400 pages of incisive and insightful essays to all Nigerians, friends of Nigeria and all those interested in studying Nigeria’s travails, opportunities and challenges in regard of elements of democracy, party politics and the people in the eventful period 2010-2015 that covers two major general elections and the Goodluck Jonathan presidency.
- Review by Prof. Agbaje of Jide Oluwajuyithan’s book – Democracy, Party Politics, and the People: Nigeria and the Democratization Process – The Jonathan Years, 2010-2015
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