It is inaccurate to suggest that since 1999 most Nigerians have found their countryโs democratic record fascinating. When ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo won the 1999 poll, the opposition secretly harboured the desire for poll abortion. When Umaru YarโAdua won a fractious poll in 2007, admitting along the way its failings, condemnations rang out that democracy was troubled and undesirable. When Goodluck Jonathan won a bad-tempered poll in 2011, massacres broke out in parts of the North, with the losers indirectly instigating the crisis. And when Bola Tinubu won the poll in 2023, beneficiaries of past poll victories, including Chief Obasanjo who ruled between 1999 and 2007, worked for the abortion of the polls or, worse, a revolution. Incited and tormented, opposition supporters and religious and ethnic bigots seized the opportunity to call for a coup dโetat or revolution. Nigerian politicians and past or party leaders who advocated for drastic actions to undermine democracy because of defeat reflect the uncomfortable truth that despite achieving 26 years of unbroken democracy, the idea of civil government is yet to take firm root. To them, democracy is dispensable.
In celebrating more than two and a half decades of democracy last month, a few Nigerian political leaders and commentators promised that democracy had come to stay. They are wrong. Neither the passage of time nor the purity of a democratic system promises the survival or longevity of democracy. Under the Weimer Republic system (a federal system comprising 18 states, and electing a president every seven years), Germany turned to democracy in 1918 after the disastrous World War I that led to the collapse of the Second Reich. Fifteen years later, in 1933, German democracy was gone, its death knell sounded by the events that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929. As the election of Donald Trump is showing in the United States, with his relentless demyelination of the US constitution to wear it down in favour of the rule of the strongman, nothing guarantees the permanence of democracy. Russia also enjoyed a brief period with democracy, starting with a parliamentary election in 1989, and on to the election of Boris Yeltsin in 1991 and 1996, Vladimir Putin in 2000 and 2004, and Dmitry Medvedev in 2008. By the time the presidency reverted to Mr Putin in 2012, after he had made Mr Medvedev a placeholder for four years, the office and all pretence to elections had turned Mr Putin into a dictator. Democracy in Russia simply suffered escalating denudation.
Nigerians may be celebrating 26 years of democracy and promising themselves that it had come to stay, the truth is, however, a little different and more unnerving. Since the 2023 All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential poll victory, opposition leaders and closet ethnic champions have refused to accept defeat despite clear evidence they had no path to victory. They argued implausibly that the poll was grossly undermined by electoral fraud. They also turned a blind eye to the fact that the winner, President Tinubu, lost his base, Lagos, lost his predecessorโs base, Katsina, lost his presumed state, Osun, and equally lost Kano and Kaduna where he was backed by powerful party chieftains, all pointers to the integrity of the process. The controversy over Rivers votes did not indicate that the overall presidential election result would have been substantially different nationally. Nevertheless, the opposition has kept up a barrage of incendiary messages likely to be sustained in 2027. Worse, the opposition is laying the foundation for deploying ethnic and religious propaganda as well as threats of violence in the coming poll.
If Nigeria surmounts the oppositionโs general lack of sensitivity to the delicateness of its democracy and the overweening politics of the ruling party, it will still not guarantee the survival of democracy. Tragically, there is the axis of revolt going on in parts of the country: banditry is laying the Northwest waste, foreign and even local herdsmen attacks are pursuing their genocidal and land seizure goals in the Middle Belt, Boko Haram/ISWAP insurgency is suffocating the Northeast, and unknown gunmen are bleeding and retarding the Southeast. These agents of destabilisation are all ramping up their attacks, and it may be safe to assume that should they not be sufficiently checked in the months ahead, they will constitute a huge threat to the integrity of the coming polls, not to talk of the peace and stability of the country as a whole. In fact there are days when it looked dangerously possible that both the political opposition and insurgents would have the upper hand. In an election year, if the tactics of the insurgents and the political opposition are not altered, it could spell disaster.
The problem of Nigerian democracy is not so much its imperfect constitution, which is admittedly more unitary than federal; the problem is the political elite who are unable to sensibly gauge the troubles assailing the rest of the world in order to moderate their often disruptive and fanatical quests for power. The US has abandoned its traditional role in the preservation of world order, thereby rendering the world less safe; the Sudan has imploded after uncertain steps in the direction of democracy, while the Darfur is ravaged by genocidal militias pursuing ethnic cleansing agenda; Somalia has proved difficult to weld back together after decades of chaos; Russia and Ukraine are at daggers drawn, with no hope of peace in sight; and the Middle East has in the past two years been turned into a killing field, threatening to get far worse than projected. If the global economy, now subjected to repeated stress, should tank and create the kind of conditions the world experienced in 1929, world peace would be significantly impacted. Unfortunately, the Nigerian political elite are unable to read the signs of the times. Their exuberance and general political dereliction have created a national powder keg waiting to explode at any moment.
It is cold comfort that the Nigerian economy is on the path of recovery after hovering for years on the edge of collapse. But the fallout and harsh impact of economic crisis on the lower and middle classes have become fodder for the opposition. For a democracy that continues to teeter dangerously on the brink, it is catastrophic to see the Nigerian political elite engage in brinkmanship capable of triggering a huge explosion. In addition to the role being played by the political elite, it is also frightening to imagine all kinds of apocalyptic possibilities that could shatter a democracy undergirded by a weak constitution and even weaker institutions. Democracy is not an abstraction; it is in some ways the sum total of a peopleโs cultures and ambitions. It will not survive simply because it is 26 years old, or because the people wish it to survive, or because God so loved Nigeria. It will survive if the country would stop living in denial, and embark on erecting powerful guardrails for its survival, including creating a balanced and durable political structure that factor in ethnic, religious and regional differences.
Credit:The Nation