The political horoscope of Nigeria is full of foreboding and unhappy tidings. With the old west rumbling with intent once again, those who have been asleep in the past fortnight can return to sound snoring. It is said after all that the heavens cannot fall on one individual alone.
It is just as well, then, that we return to these labours this morning with world and country seemingly out of joint. As this column is wont to assert, you cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam tubers. In any case, a rotten fruit does not fall very far from its parent tree. There is nothing magical about liberal democracy as it is handed down by our western patrons. It is a function of unceasing practice and ceaseless self-surpassing.
But there is a basic conundrum. You cannot procure democracy in a society where authoritarian impulses and illiberal passions run deep. Even in the west, pious fictions about democracy abound. Our repeated failure to inaugurate a functioning and passable democracy is not a function of a genetic disorder but institutional failure. The west also cries. There is as yet no ideal democratic nation in the world. What is on ground is often different from what is on paper.
While on holiday, avid readers of this column continued to badger the columnist with the query: in the light of current and contemporary global development, is the so called liberal democracy not overrated and overvalued? Of what use is a system of governance which brings misery and impoverishment to the greatest number, which allows the few elite to get away with blue murder even while proclaiming itself as the classic instance of people’s power and inviolable will? Is democracy synonymous with ordained mass suicide?
While New Zealand under the leadership of the youthful Ms Jacinda Ardern and Australia to a lesser extent continue to shine as exemplars of civilized procedures and purposeful governance, a British postcolonial establishment nurtured on abject cronyism and what one of its leading columnists aptly described as a “chumocracy” appears set to unravel. In France and Canada, Macron and the younger Trudeau are fighting for their political life.
These questions and queries about the continuing viability of liberal democracy are no longer restricted to beer parlours and pepper soup joint punditry. They are beginning to find their way into the hallowed sanctuaries of western intellectual power-processing and many global think-tanks. In some learned instances, liberal democracy is dismissed as nothing but a glorified dystopia with habitants of many so called western societies living in appalling conditions and unspeakable human degradation.
This past week in this newspaper, a former colleague and an intellectual of the highest calibre echoed these concerns about the failure of liberal democracy while referencing this columnist’s constant allusion to the selectorate in Nigeria. It is heart -warming to note that this phrase has found its way to the portals of online dictionaries.
As the demise of the Roman Empire has taught the world, a great nation does not die from a single stab wound but from multiple injuries. Since they do not arise lightly but out of the womb of significant events, empires and great societies do not dissolve easily either. It took almost two centuries of unrelenting adversity to topple the Romans.
Yet it is always possible to pinpoint when a nation’s highest possibility has been reached and when irreversible decline must set in. The Trumpian debacle, the Covid-19 malediction as well as the humiliating exit from Afghanistan, have showcased America’s drastic political, economic and military decline for the rest of the world. Never in the history of the modern world has a great superpower been made to eat such a humble military pie while watching a malign virus devastate its populace. There is something grimly biblical about it all.
Now with a Russia resurgent with Slavic hyper-nationalism running rings around America and NATO in Ukraine and the Crimea, with the Chinese dragon threatening to put American economic nose out of joint, with the rogue North Korean leadership unwilling to submit to any western tutorial about national self-interest, and with a fiercely independent India asserting itself through an almost hysterical Hindu revanchism, a new global order is taking shape right before us.
Elsewhere in what is known as the Third World, the situation is even more depressing and uniformly unoptimistic as the denizens of several Latin American countries appear to have completely lost faith in the colonial cartography that produced nation-states. Hunger and privation have forced many to abscond from their ancestral homestead in an epic migration which makes the biblical exodus look like a child’s play.
As usual, Africa appears to be the worst hit with several decades of post-independence rule producing neither passable economic development nor the genuine liberalization of the political space. There are very few honourable exceptions to this continental logjam of hybrid autocracy. While paying lip service to the virtues of liberal democracy, most African rulers behave like tribal tin gods, often changing the rules of the game at will or shifting the goal posts at their whim and caprice. When all else fail, they resort to egregious rigging to have their way.
Most of the time they get away with this desecration of the will of the people either through the docility of the supine and superstitious masses or through the complicity of the civilized world which tends to look the other way rather than open a Pandora Box of civil wars and primitive genocide. When these authoritarian leaders are stopped in their track, it is either due to countervailing mobilization or superior military force or a combination.
This combination of fragile nationality and fraught democracy is perhaps the most injurious legacy of western imperialism to postcolonial Africa. It is like trying to wake from a nightmare only to find yourself sinking deeper in the horrendous quagmire. Like a bad dream, the men on horseback are gradually returning to the centre stage. But rather than being stoned or pelted with sachet water, they are being welcomed as heroes and garlanded as avatars of political restitution.
In the past eighteen months several military interventions have smashed the political process in many African countries. In Chad upon the death of Idris Deby, the military hierarchy terminated a process of democratisation that was well underway to install his son, a three-star general. There have been aborted military uprising in Niger and last week in the narco-state of Guinea Bissau. In Guinea, Mali and Burkina Faso military rule has returned with vengeance.
The spectre of re-militarization has begun to haunt the entire continent. As was alluded to at the beginning of this essay, a substantial segment of the continent’s political and intellectual elite has begun to raise posers about the efficacy of liberal democracy and even its desirability as a panacea for the continent’s crisis of political and economic underdevelopment.
What Chief Augustus Meredith Adisa Akinloye famously described as the other party in the struggle for political supremacy is beginning to gain considerable traction. A democratic audit of the beleaguered continent shows that even where the military are not directly in charge, they are responsible for installing civilian regimes and for superintending their overpowering presence. Zimbabwe, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Guinea Bissau, the old Portuguese plantation, come to mind.
As usual, it is in Nigeria, the biggest and most populous Black nation on earth, that the factors driving this continental slide towards the delegitimization of politics and the democratic process assume their most interesting and perplexing dimensions. Twenty two years after the departure of the military, the nation continues to fumble and wobble its way towards some passable form of democratic rule.
But if there is any broad agreement among the nation’s fractious and contentious political elite about the true worth of post-military rule, it is that the meddlesome soldiers have at least been confined to their barracks. Even here, loud murmurs of disapprobation are beginning to be heard everywhere in the country. What purpose is a so-called democracy that does not bring food to the table or security to the nation?
The reasons for this rising tide of national disaffection and disillusionment are not far-fetched. If the truth must be told, the past six years have been a trying period for most Nigerians, what with escalating insecurity which has brought domestic and political terror to every sector of the nation, the virtual collapse of the economy which has turned the nation to a global poster child of poverty, the rise of ritualized poverty and its Stone Age bestiality and the polarization of the nation along regional, ethnic and religious lines in a way nobody has thought was possible up till now.
With a posse of criminalized state actors and a police force that is beginning to look like an alternative armed robbery cartel, it feels like a perfect storm for Nigeria. Trapped in its cocoon of ineptitude and incompetence, the government appears to have thrown up its hands and given up completely.
Increasingly lame duck and stripped of his mantra of holiness and piety, the president has taken up futile photo-ops abroad. Nobody is impressed. When a government still has about eighteen months to go and it is already written off by many compatriots including its own original core supporters, a dangerous void appears in the horizon.
It was not like this when it all began six and a half years ago. There was a glorious feel in the air. It was like a dawn of probity and national accountability. Brilliantly captured by Femi Adesina, the then newly appointed Press Secretary, it appeared as if a new sheriff was truly in town. Many were those who were willing to trade General Buhari’s insistent provinciality and primordial instincts for his steely reputation for integrity and astringent incorruptibility.
Unfortunately, it has turned out a damp squib and with colossal collateral damage, too. There were many who thought that the teaming up between the dominant segment of the progressive and libertarian old west and the new hegemonic arrow-heads of the conservative north would lead to a harmonization of vision about the state of the country and its future direction.
This was not to be. Buoyed by General Buhari’s anti-democratic populism, his inability to conceive the modern nation as an organic community of equal stakeholders and exploiting some fatal chinks in the ideological armour of the progressives, the hegemonic party in the coalition simply steamrolled the other legacy parties turning them into mere office seekers and cheerleaders rather than political warriors of a new order. It has turned out that many of those parading themselves as progressives are mere moles in the tendency, mercantile reptiles looking for the next meal.
But there is a stiff price to pay for this betrayal of the people’s trust which always makes one to wonder at the political intelligence of these soulless smart-alecks. The conservatives have little to lose. They know the price of everything but the sum total of nothing, hence all is well. It is those who parade themselves as bearers of a new vision of an egalitarian and progressive society who have gone rogue that have everything to lose.
Here is the trap. The devaluation of politics such as we have witnessed in this Fourth Republic leads to a progressive emasculation of alternative visions of the country. In such circumstances it is progressive politics that is harder hit. It will be an irony of momentous proportions if the attempt to link up with the north eventuates in the complete demolition of the progressive platform.
This is why events unfolding in the old west should sufficiently exercise the mind of all remaining patriotic stakeholders. It always starts like this with the west combusting with fratricidal bloodletting which then sucks in and mops up the rest of the country. The fractious and tempestuous children of Oduduwa are at it again, tearing at each other like killer ants in a roiling cauldron. The political prompters and remote controllers as usual are wearing an unaffected grin and a mocking grimace. But as it happened before, it is the devil that will have the last smile.
It is important for the extant traditional and religious institutions in Yorubaland to broker a truce and call on the political gladiators to sheath their swords. There are weighty and murky allegations from all sides. There is evidence of abhorrent nepotism and misdirected preferment which signpost a Yoruba relapse into full feudalism as it makes its way down south via political contagion.
This development should be of great interest to future historians and political scientists investigating the debacle of the Fourth Republic. It is akin to a seed falling on hard soil. There is a mismatch of political habitat and a clash of countervailing cultures.
Despite their own feudal history, the Yoruba people have managed to evolve a measure of meritocratic norms which extends to their choices of traditional rulership. This has been buoyed by seventy years of the crusade for free education pioneered by the old Action Group. It is a political consciousness which cannot be summarily abolished or suborned by whimsical fealty.
This is probably why there is growing resistance and open rebellion all over the place. A political party defines itself and refines its ideological modus operandi through constant debates, internal intellectual dialogue, a healthy harmonization of contending views and unending consultation with all stakeholders.
This was the case up till the Second Republic. It is now obvious that the two dominant parties have been deprived of this organic nourishment to a point that there is a consensus that they are two sides of the same coin. It is a particularly cruel denouement for a nation groping in the catacombs of political and economic underdevelopment.
It is noteworthy that while all the spat in Action Group was going on, not for once did the much-maligned Samuel Ladoke Akintola subject Chief Obafemi Awolowo to unworthy public scurrility, obscene denunciation and crude castigation. This was because their quarrel was based on differences of strategy and ideological direction and not on office sharing.
The imperfect foundation of the post-military republic in Nigeria, particularly the mode of party formation, recruitment, patronage and preferment, have now returned to haunt the country even as the selectorate busy themselves shuffling their cards of malign personnel reorganization. It is akin to rearranging the sitting order in a sinking Titanic. God help us in the coming months.
