16th December, 2023
By Mark Adebayo
“Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education”.
– Franklin Roosevelt
Democracy as a philosophical concept of governance is certainly not sacrosanct. In my opinion, since its inception in the 5th century BC in the Greek city of Athens, democracy seems to be static or the most slowly evolving political system in history. It’s just about elections and those who contest or contend.
The only two elements that seem to endorse a democracy are periodic elections and majority rule which in themselves do not guarantee good governance. The decision of the majority via the ballot does not make it right as has often been demonstrated in elections even where they are free and fair. The majority may, as they are wont to, decide to go for the worst of the available choices. That’s why democracy is sometimes described as the tyranny of the majority. According to George Bernard Shaw, “The minority is sometimes right ; the majority always wrong”.
Mehmet Murat Ildan put it frankly when he declared that: “When a stupid government is elected in a democratic country, the best thing about this is that you learn the number of stupid people in that country!”.
Democracy has gone through multifarious interrogations and critiques over the centuries and that process will continue for as long as man quests for a system of governance or leadership recruitment process that best protects his interests and person.
In Africa, democracy is becoming increasingly and unbearably, even annoyingly, monocratic. This is more telling in Nigeria where democracy seems already totalled or is a mere comedy of the absurd far distant in its conceptual praxis from what Cleisthenes, historically credited as the father of democracy, envisioned for society.
God-fatherism in our political lexicon is a monocratic mentality of political influencers who arrogate to themselves perpetual power hostaging that solely determines who governs at whatever level and who succeeds them in office and who succeeds their successors in a concourse of tyrannical-cum-political pickpocketting in which even the will of the majority must bow to the whims of the god-father.
In Pluto’s Republic, it would seem that Socrates was critical of democracy as not the ideal system of government because he deemed it inferior, for instance, to monarchy but superior to tyranny. However, viewed critically, one would discover that Socrates was not against democracy, per sé. He was only critical of the ways the Athenian democrats were mismanaging or manipulating democracy and, thereby, bastardizing its intrinsic or schematic-ideological weightage. That manipulative tendency of politicians has been elevated to ridiculous heights in Nigeria and robbing our democracy of all its natural identity and quality.
I think it is high time that political scientists interrogated whether democracy is actually a system of government or a mere process of leadership recruitment. Because it appears to me that democracy ends where elections terminate. Once you elect a person into office and he takes hold of power, you have little or no role in how he manages the affairs of his office especially in our kind of democracy where we have people who have constitutional immunity and cannot be questioned for as long as they remain in office.
Therefore, democracy cannot be said to be a system of government but a process of getting people into office and out of it through majority choice at polls. A presidential or parliamentary or diarchical or totalitarian system is a form of government, democracy is not, methinks. H. L. Mencken was right when he wrote that “Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey-cage”. He seemed to have foreseen, centuries ahead, how democracy would be messed up in the world, especially in Africa – Nigeria in particular. Mencken went ahead to say “Democracy is the worship of jackals by jackasses”. LoL!
The current Wike-Fubara saga further accentuates all that is wrong with our brand of democracy. But I have a feeling that it would blow over somehow and Nyesom Wike, who believes that he is even immune to the dictates of nature, would be the major loser. He has become who Professor Wole Soyinka described in his 1972 bestseller, The Man Died, as “The dramatist overdramatizes himself once too often”. In almost all instances, people – no matter how powerful, influential or wealthy – who don’t know when to stop always end up in the purgatory of society where survival or repentance may be too late.
There are a lot of Tinubu wannabes in Nigeria’s political landscape because the latter has managed to maintain a stranglehold on the succession chain in Lagos state’s governorship. Therefore, many governors have developed an insatiable if not crazed obsession with god-fatherism syndrome that has proven ever and anon to be counterproductive because the successor would eventually aspire to his freedom and reject the yesmanship of preelection desperation to be governor or whatever.
Like most power-drunk politicians, Wike doesn’t know when the game is over and quit the stage honorably. From the reaction of the Rivers people who have decided to pitch their tent with Wike’s estranged political godson, Governor Simimalayi Fubara, the former must realize that his iron grip on Rivers state politics has loosened fatalistically. There is time and there is season to everything in the world. But, like the 14th century monarchs, politicians zonked in the tantalizing mirage of power play God until humbled by the reality of the transient nature of power and everything that seem timeless.
If Wike doesn’t withdraw from this battle that he is already losing, he’ll suffer devastating humiliation and subject himself to avoidable ridicule by his political enemies who are by no means small in number, especially the Atiku camp in PDP whom he has fatally injured in the last presidential election. I don’t know what the gameplan he and President Bola Tinubu are marshaling against Governor Fubara, but any attempt to remove that Governor unconstitutionally will backfire irreparably and may even pull the trigger that will bury this floundering democracy of ours. The ill-advised and ill-timed decamping of 27 PDP lawmakers sympathetic to Wike to the APC few days ago was a strategic faux pas that could prove injurious to them ultimately. It was against the Constitution and commonsense.
Nigerian rulers are fundamentally disconnected from their people and, therefore, oftentimes preoccupy themselves with things that are of no priority whatsoever to the people. They lose touch with the people easily and go astray from things that should most benefit the people.
All they know how to do is to manipulate themselves into power, abandon what’s most dear to the people, once awhile whitewash public mentality with white elephant projects that have no direct bearing to the people’s essential needs, flash stolen wealth on their faces and loot the treasury. That, essentially, defines a typical Nigerian public office holder except for an infinitesimal few among them.
Unaware that the people see them as public enemies number one, they continue to alienate themselves further from the people as a way of burning the fortune of their own candles on both ends because whenever the people arise in intractable anger, no power of state can stop them.
For instance, they allocate trillions of Naira to change their cars and wardrobes, to feed themselves and their families amidst widespread hunger of Nigerians, trillions more to refurbish their official residencies in order to be more comfortable whilst millions of Nigerians are homeless and two-thirds of the 200 million population are multidimensionally poor according to World Bank and National Bureau of Statistics numbers.
The people are angry – a bottled up anger that is more lethal than hydrogen bomb when exploded. For now, they are suffering and smiling. But that smile may turn to atomic explosion in a bit and smash everything to smithereens.
Nelson Mandela put it succinctly when he declared in 1961 that “No power on earth can stop an oppressed people determined to win their freedom”.
American writer, Mark Twain, wrote that “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it”. That sounds a little scary and an echo of the hidden manipulative corporeality of elections generally.
God-Fatherism in Nigeria’s politics has proven to be an unsustainable charade and the earlier power desperadoes realize this and allow elections take their natural, social course, the better for our democracy, our country and all of us.