Segun Ayobolu
After negatively demolishing the logical bases for the perpetuation of the Gowon dictatorship in any guise, Professor Dudley then positively stated the case for the kind of societal and political arrangement he and the NPSA advocated for Nigeria. In doing so, he made a distinction between what he calls a ‘closed society’ and an ‘open, competitive’ society. According to him, “The politics of the closed society, and by definition any society which is not open and competitive is closed, is the politics of deceit and sycophancy. It is the politics which dehumanizes the individual person and enslaves the intellect. For a Nigeria which is self-avowedly committed to change and development, the politics of the closed society hardly can be an acceptable option”.
Professor Dudley contended that he was advocating the return to an open competitive system not because “I have an idealistic attachment to the ballot box and competitive electoral politics”. Rather, “I do so because, first, it is the only form of politics which in principle, gives every citizen of the State an even chance…Second, it is the only form of politics which enshrines the principle that it is the right of the electorate to choose its own leaders unfettered by contrived constraints and attempts to maximize the right. Third, if we accept that leadership qualities are randomly distributed throughout the society…then we must also accept, that in principle, no other system can be better calculated to generate the leadership which Nigeria needs than an open, competitive political system”.
But it would appear that neither in the first, second, third nor this fourth republic has Professor Dudley’s thesis been proved right in Nigeria leading to the country’s protracted crisis of democracy and underdevelopment. In this dispensation, for instance, it cannot be said that since 1999, the democratic process has thrown up the best materials for leadership at all levels and has been a vehicle for promoting development in any meaningful sense.
Money, for instance, plays an inordinate role in the electoral process such that only very wealthy persons or those backed by the proverbial ‘moneybags’ can contest and win elections. Even winning local government chairmanship elections requires investment running into hundreds of millions of Naira. The gross poverty in which the vast majority of Nigerians are immersed makes them vulnerable to selling their votes to the highest bidder in elections. Those who win elections, in turn, utilize state power to recoup their investment through massive looting of public resources, which again retards development and worsens mass poverty.
Primordial considerations such as ethnic and regional origin as well as religious affiliation of contestants for public office also have considerable influence on voter behavior to the detriment of merit and again with negative consequences for development. There is thus a huge hiatus between Nigeria’s immense resource endowment, particularly the humongous amounts she has reaped from oil exports over the years, and her level of socio-economic and infrastructural transformation.
The civil liberties and human rights that liberal democracy promotes and protects are negated by the mass poverty, gross inequality and ever deepening underdevelopment that are the consequences of the perpetuation of a neo-colonial order since attainment of nominal independence in 1960. No one who watches the tragicomedy of the massive looting of the resources of the Niger Delta through the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), for instance, which is just one example of the ongoing plundering of public resources by members of the ruling class across the board can nurse any hope that liberal democracy can be a vehicle for eradicating poverty and transcending underdevelopment in post-colonial Nigeria.
One of the most far reaching attempts to eliminate or, at least, drastically minimize the ills which militate against the practice of wholesome, development-promoting politics in Nigeria was undertaken by the military President, General Ibrahim Babangida’s comprehensive and convoluted Political Transition Programme between 1985 and 1993. The regime banned those it described as ‘old breed’ politicians from politics, encouraged the entry into politics of those it described as ‘new breed’ political actors and even created brand new political parties, the defunct National Republican Convention (NRC) and Social Democratic Party (SDP) located a little to the right and left, respectively, of the regime’s neo-liberal ideological centre.
Incidentally several leading Nigerian political scientists including Professor Sam Oyovbaire, Professor Adele Jinadu, the late Professor Eme Awa, late Professor Omo Omoruyi, Dr Tunji Olagunju, Professor Humphrey Nwosu and Professor Isawa Elaigwu among others were active designers of and participants in different aspects of the regime’s political transition programme. Long before the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential elections that brought IBB’s long winded political transition programme to an end, Professor Aaron Gana of the Department of Political Science, University of Jos, however, had foreseen the inevitable failure of the enterprise.
In the Convocation Lecture he delivered at the University in 1991 titled ‘The Limits of Political Engineering: A Critique of the Transition Programme’, the radical scholar disagreed with three of his colleagues who, in a recent book had written that “The IBB era is a radical departure from the state of the nation during the first two and a half decades of independence…The commitment of the administration is to what it believes to be the proper path to true independence, unity and progress of the country, and it has, despite the vagaries, turbulence and contradictions of the nation, adhered doggedly to this commitment”.
Offering a differing view, Professor Gana, who incidentally was a Nupe man like IBB but from Kwara state declared, “I have no doubt in my mind as regards the commitment of the administration, and in particular, the President to pull this country through the quagmire of a deepening economic crisis and chronic political instability. I am however skeptical about the efficacy of the instruments chosen to effect this transformation from dependent capitalism into an auto-centric and self-reliant economy…What I seem to see is the erection of structures whose foundations are rooted in the same institutional matrix of the first and second republics”.
With remarkable boldness for a dictatorial military dispensation, Professor Gana declared “The political visibility given to some of the most prominent in the discredited Shagari administration; the decoration of prominent members of the ruling class (whose track records as public servants are known to border on criminality) with the highest honours of the land, and above all the perversion of justice by men and women entrusted with the sacred duty of managing public affairs, all provide a background to 1992 and beyond that does not instill confidence in the future. Indeed Orwell’s 1984 has descended on us with full force, wherein we have ministries of information that specialize in dis-information and mis-information, ministries of agriculture that promote hunger, nay, ministries of justice that specialize in the subversion of justice.”
After an exhaustive analysis of the country’s political trajectory from colonization to federation as well as examining what he described as the dialectics of the transition, Professor Gana was unable to recommend Dudley’s ‘open, competitive’ liberal democratic politics as the path to the future. Rather, he averred that “for us to transcend the present neo-colonial order, and move towards a truly democratic polity, we must lay the foundations for the construction of a socialist society. For the peoples of the third world, Nigeria inclusive, there is just no alternative if we want to remain in perpetual serfdom to the industrialized nations”.
When we consider the massive corruption in contemporary Nigeria, the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the executive, the profligacy and venality of the legislature, the moral degeneracy of the judiciary, the institutional fragility and philosophical barrenness of the political parties and the sheer inability of the vast majority of the people to identify and pursue what is in their own best interest, is it disputable that the prevalent diseased liberal democratic, neo-colonial order has reached a developmental dead-end?
Leave a Reply