Musa Odoshimokhe
Former Minister of Education, Convener, #Bring Back Our Girls Dr Obiageli Ezekwesili has urged Nigerians to practise democracy in the right way.
She said the country must work toward the elimination of monopoly democracy.
Speaking on Monday in Lagos at the #FixPolitics conference organized by the Robert Bosch Academy, she said Nigeria was in a fix over the type of democracy that was gaining currency in the country.
According to her, old brigade politicians have dominated the polity, noting that nothing suggests they are ready to quit the stage.
She called on the youth to brace up to the challenges by ensuring that they curtail the growth of monopoly democracy. She added that the academy was ready to train Nigerians in best way to practice democracy, noting that no fewer than 3000 youth would benefit from the project.
She said: “When you look at the degree of participation in a democracy, it will tell you whether such democracy is participatory or a monopoly. A monopoly democracy is more dangerous than an economic democracy. To have a monopoly in how the system functions is to retard the system.”
Ezekwezili said the country was not properly guided on how the various ethnic groups could coexist, nothing that the country was rather patched to surmount the challenges that would arise from its masqueraded unity.
“In Europe, statehood is about people with similar language coming together. In Africa, it was the Berlin Conference that marked out the territories. In Nigeria, administrative convenience propelled the colonial authority to bring the people together. It was a patchwork.
“Nigeria emerged made up of people who had nothing in common. There was no common identifying point of reference beyond the colonial power’s administrative convenience.”
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She said the country could overcome the challenges of the forced amalgamation of the Northern Protectorate and Southern Protectorate in 1914 if the right things were done at independence in 1960. She added that the immediate post -independence leaders should be blamed for not renegotiating the terms of existence.
“In gaining independence, there was something that needed to happen that did not happen. There needed to be a dialogue between these people that were brought together by the colonialist the external force. That did not happen. The fact that we failed to hold a dialogue on how to live together constituted a gap. These failures and gaps continue to hunt us till this day.
“The failure of the independence nationalists to at the end of colonial governance, to discuss and peacefully agree their self-negotiated terms for shared values and unified vision of nationhood prevented emergence of an agreed framework of a minimum common identity as a “New Nation” of multi-ethnic, multi-religious multi-cultural and multi-lingual diversity of people who have negotiated the basis for Unity. These failures and gaps haunt the country and its people up until today.
“Elections and other political processes are pivotal to the quality of a country’s governance and can either advance or stagnate or decline the short, medium and long term prospects of a people. All citizens in a democracy who qualify to select those that govern their society are inherent possessors of political power.”
Speaking, Delta State All Progressives Congress (APC) 2019 governorship candidate Prof. Pat Utomi said must ensure that professionals dominate the political space. He noted the failure of stakeholders to encourage their participation was responsible for the dilemma in the political space.
“Nigeria is in a terrible place because the country has people who don’t understand public service occupying public offices. The only thing that can bring Nigeria back to the right track is for professionals to get involved in politics. Our challenge in Nigeria is to bring in people with values into politics,” he said.
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