- Why Democracy takes its time in Nigeria
Now that the elections are over, we can begin to pick up the pieces and commence the process of rebuilding bridges that have been destroyed by sectarian passions. It is not going to be easy. At the moment, Nigeria is a dangerously divided place.
In bitterly polarized polities, post-electoral reconstruction and rehabilitation are never an easy task. Elections are not designed to manage national schisms. Sometimes, they tear open the suppurating wounds with prospects of further bleeding and a messy mingling of gore and pus.
But this, ironically, makes the process of cleansing and healing faster. There is no point in hoping that a gaping injury left untreated may heal on its own. Gangrene and sure death often follow. Since democracy has not found a better way of gauging the mood of the people and aggregating the will of the nation other than through periodic voting, we must get on with it, hoping that constant practice and eternal vigilance will lead to “more perfect” elections.
The phrase “long revolution” captures the strange and contradictory ways history progresses in the direction of higher evolution of humanity. It is in fact an oxymoron, or what a friend will dismiss as an oxymoronic balderdash. A revolution is a brisk, brutal and bloody affair, usually over in a matter of hours, days or at most a week. How then can you have a “long revolution”?
But there you have it. Historical development does not obey the law of straightforward linear progression. Neither does democratic progress. There are detours, digressions and diversions along the way. Unfolding events often do not make much logical sense. It is only when things are viewed from a long retrospective glance, rather than a short prospective query, that the longer sense of it all begins to emerge.
There is no country in the world as yet that approximates the ideal of democracy. Countries are said to be more democratic or less democratic depending how far they retain a fidelity to certain cardinal features of democratic rule, such as freedom of speech, respect for gender equality, freedom of association and gathering, freedom of the press, respect for the rule of law and periodic elections. While a few countries in the advanced democracies pass muster, others trail in many significant aspects.
The last election in Nigeria was quite a revelation and it accurately reflects the dilemmas and dialectic of democracy in a troubled country. It was a topsy-turvy and contradictory jumble indeed with bright prospects in some spots and equally dim possibilities in others. Many western sources dismiss the whole election as a farce; a costly charade. One went as far as insisting that what is going on Nigeria is not democracy but an electoral autocracy.
This may be true in the shortest run, but it fails to take on board the longer perspective that electoral autocracy is unsustainable in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation. Nigeria’s genuine friends abroad must nudge the country in a healthier direction rather than firing destructive salvoes which may tip the country into anarchy and chaos. It took Britain almost four hundred years to achieve full suffragette and in America the blacks were denied voting right for almost three hundred years.
Perhaps more helpful and constructive was the Washington Post which gave criticism and praise in equal measure. While deploring the violence, the occasional ballot-snatching, the widespread thumb printing and abduction of electoral officials, it also praised the poll for its surprising openness, its competitiveness and smashing of stereotypes. The paper concluded by recommending the Nigerian model as worthy of emulation in a subcontinent where gun-toting soldiers are back on the rampage.
Judging by the last elections, Nigeria may be teaching the world a lesson in the uses of adversity: how multi-ethnic nations can convert the stumbling blocks of multi-ethnicity and religious polarization to the building blocks of competitive and countervailing self-rule or multivalent democracy. All the glaring fault lines that have hobbled Nigeria’s march to organic nationhood reared their head in the last election.
But by some devious logic, the deployment of the ethnic card in certain quarters provoked an equal if not greater degree of ethnicization in other quarters; the weaponization of religion provoked an equivalent degree of religious mobilization in some quarters and cultural animosity bred cultural animosity, all eventually cancelling out each other. As this column warned a few weeks earlier, the circling of electoral wagons in some quarters was bound to induce a similar psychosis in other quarters.
This is the tragedy of the “Obidient” Movement despite its veneer of youthful idealism and the promise of mass mobilization with a pan-Nigerian momentum. But you cannot give what you don’t have. It has nothing to offer beyond the political neurosis of its wild and screaming adherents as they roil in hate and petty animosities. In the coming weeks as its momentum finally splutters to a whimpering halt, it will be discovered that its driving agenda is too restrictive and constrictive, redolent of political 419.
Beyond opportunistically tapping into a cocktail of ethnic, economic and demographic resentments, it has no broad liberating vision of the nation beyond an anarchic disruption of the process. Nor has it been able to come up with any radical blueprint for the economic transformation of the country beyond mouthing syrupy shibboleths. With the youths deserting in droves as their mind adverts to the gigantic swindle, the movement will be drained of its subversive energy as the leaders eat the crow.
Minority populations in multi-ethnic nations must learn how to deal with bigger entities rather than flexing ethnic and religious muscles in an electoral war which can only end in humiliation. The countervailing electoral neuroses simply cancelled out each other and it is the candidate with the least polarizing baggage that must prevail. That was how the presidency was won and lost.
The last election showed a country in a state of electoral flux. But it also confirmed that after winning three presidential elections in a row, the ascendancy of the ruling APC government is no fluke, whatever its internal problems.
While nursing its wounds, the PDP also managed to punch a massive hole in the APC escutcheon by virtually annihilating the ruling party in the two western Yoruba states of Oyo and Osun, hitherto regarded as the bastion of progressive politics. Politics having been substantially de-ideologized, it is how attractive a personality is to the electorate that now seems to matter more than doctrine. It is a deep psychological injury for the APC.
The ascendancy of the politics of personality has led to the dramatic rise of new kids on the bloc. There is a twenty five year old legislator-elect from the north. He was said to have drawn the ire of an important member of the legislature by lampooning him in the social media. Rather than mourning and bemoaning his fate, he carried the battle to his tormentor by contesting against him. He won.
All over the country, many political giants with feet of clay have been toppled from their high pedestals. Dynasties have crumbled. Temples and templates of authority and entitlement have collapsed without warning. The Saraki political monarchy in Kwara seems to have been eviscerated by hostile forces besieging the castle. After a political career distinguished by betrayals and unrelenting perfidy, Aminu Tambuwal seems to have met more than his match in Sokoto State.
When social contradictions mature and reach their tipping point, nothing can stop the implosion. There is a delightful play of ironic portents across rigid binary divisions. Who in his right political sense would have thought that it was the conservative, feudal and gender-unfriendly north that might produce the first authentically elected female governor in the whole of the country?
That was going to be the case until Senator Aishatu Ahmad relentlessly advancing rollercoaster was suddenly halted outside the gates of the gubernatorial mansion in Yola. But the genie is already out of the bottle. For a woman in a male-dominated and unfriendly environment, this is quite a significant feat. No matter what happens in the subsequent supplementary election, things will never be the same again on the plains of Adamawa.
The rise of a culture of political iconoclasm in the conservative north and other regions of the nation is bound to give fillip to and deepen the entrenchment of a more democratic way of life, particularly in the north. This is as long as it is realized that a conservative and feudal culture cannot transform into a full blown democracy overnight and in one fell swoop.
It must be noted that the departure of ideological politics from these climes holds very dark and dire portents for political developments in the nation. Unlike the situation in the First Republic and up to a point in the Second Republic, the devaluation of ideology in politics owes its origins to the incursion of the military who seem to fear all “isms” more than ISIS itself.
Yet the uncontestable fact remains that all wise countries and matured democracy hold the ideological delineation of political parties very important for the forward march of their political culture. Politics is essentially a bitter and brutal contestation for power which enables the allocation of resources and values to take place.
It is ideology that gives politics the veneer of refinement and sophistication which in turn cloaks politics with the aura of nobility and sacrifice. When the gloves come off, politics is a brutal struggle for raw power in which no weapon fashioned for offensive is considered morally or ethically offensive.
This is why the deployment of ethnicity, cultural grandstanding and the weaponization of religion become principal weapons of politics in ideologically neutered societies with grave consequences for national cohesion and inclusive politics. The effect of this ideological meltdown on the polity is better imagined. It is the vacuum that has encouraged rogue groups to come forward as putative liberators of a nation in distress.
As soon as it is practicable, the new government must set about a comprehensive reorganization of the ruling party and imbue it with an ideological soul and spirit which will distinguish it from other parties. Without a guiding ideology, politics is stripped of its magical gloss of civilization and enlightenment. Idols of the tribe crawl out of the woodwork.
This ideological re-engineering of party formation in Nigeria should not be an exercise in doctrinaire dogmatism. The world has long left that behind. Rather, it should be an economic and political roadmap for plotting Nigeria’s path back to its founding destiny as the leading black nation and beacon of hope to many injured and marooned Black souls all over the world.
