•Book title: Rituals of Democracy
•Author: Mike Omilusi
•Reviewer: Opeyemi Samuel

IT is tempting to think of Nigeria’s presidential elections in terms of a secular decline since 1999, and as this important book (Rituals of Democracy: Reflections on the 2019 general elections in Nigeria) points out, they arguably are in terms of overall participation. Even though the current dispensation has avoided the fate of the First and Second Republics, it has alternately suffered from debilitating cynicism and deceptive optimism. Hardly any subnational data are available for the flawed 2007 elections; hope sprang eternal from the 2011 elections even though improved administration masked dark realities of violence; and the 2015 elections delivered an historic defeat but people remained removed from their own democracy. Where does Africa’s great experiment in governance stand after 2019?

Unlike the First Republic, the Fourth Republic has persisted – and I believe it will continue to do so. But regime persistence is quite different from democratic consolidation. For readers unfamiliar with these classic conceptual distinctions in political science, this book does a great service by characterizing the cultural and political milieu in terms of democracy’s stumbling blocks globally. The issue is not so much if Nigerians are unique, as to demonstrate that they are not alone in their frustration and marginalization. Politicians want to stay in power and they usually succeed in doing so. Democracy in our political imaginations, however, is a place where they lose the privilege of governing when schools don’t get built, roads are riddled with potholes, or when promises are broken (a subject carefully examined in an excellent chapter here on party manifestos).

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Mike Omilusi has done the next generation of Nigerian scholars a great service by grounding his analysis of electoral administration, political competition, and voting behavior in comparative perspective. In places, such as his examination of secret ballots in Ekiti State (in Chapter 8), some readers may question whether such studies are truly representative of the experience elsewhere. Yet by asking new questions and moving across different units of analysis in a complex case, he has helped inform a research agenda for the next iteration of elections research and brought both nuance and generalizability to our understanding of Nigeria. He finds that more than two-thirds of voters (67.6 percent) made up their mind about who to vote for “months before the election day.” In Nigeria’s not too distant past, readers might have seen this as an encouraging sign of ideological fidelity, an indication that citizens will remain loyal to a party even if other candidates show up with a modest “dash” to go in their pocket. Instead, now we must ask if this premeditation is a symptom of Nigeria’s deepening political polarization evident in much of the book’s other analyses: when most people have already made up their minds, how can new information improve political competition by changing voting preferences? In a similar fashion, Chapter 4 sets up a dilemma with no easy resolution: declining voter turnout is a sign of citizen cynicism, which a mélange of civil society groups and donors address through voter education and public campaigns. Yet cynicism may be the cousin of the healthy skepticism that Nigerians will need to heal their ailing information ecosystem.

The 2019 election, writes Omilusi, “showed how fake news, through social media, could bring an already fragile country to the precipice of disintegration and anarchy.” Rather than breeding constructive cognitive dissonance, moments where the discerning denizen might reconsider her beliefs after a conversation with a neighbor or reading a particularly persuasive blog, Nigerians watched a thousand falsehood bloom as this new media environment frequently reinforced preexisting beliefs. Thus, PDP sympathizers saw the defeat of Boko Haram as imminent in 2014 and cattle herders as the spear of an Islamist conspiracy in 2018, just as the All Progressives Congress today sees political subversion in every voice lifted against the brutality of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad. Omilusi calls this media ecosystem for what it is: the architecture of our “post-truth” era, where the president and his ministers can deny repression at Lekki, experienced by hundreds (if not thousands) and witnessed by millions.