Democracy, or whatever we may call what Nigeria has been doing since May 29, 1999, is not working, at least not for the common man and woman. There’s no question about this. Now, after eighteen years of farcical leadership at all levels of governance, inept institutions, intermittent socio-political turmoil and sustained economic depression for a vast majority of the population, the only thing left to ask is what to do with our failing democracy.
Some contend that we should jettison the whole thing and get ourselves a good Abacha; “Nigeria needs a benevolent dictator who can whip people back to shape,” said controversial entertainer, Charly Boy, in 2015. Others believe that we should be grateful for what we currently have “despite its limitations and challenges,” as former Vice President Atiku Abubakar put it on this day, in 2016. There’s another option though, and that is to create a new kind of democracy.
To create a new kind of democracy in Nigeria, we must first appreciate what makes our current system untenable. Save for the regularity of elections and the standardisation of office titles, there is little else that our democracy gets right. The Alaafin of Oyo, at the height of his monarchical supremacy in the 18th century, was perhaps more answerable to his subjects than our current political leaders are to the citizenry. The rule of law exempts the rich and powerful, and even though our politicians often declare power to the people, in practice, the people they are referring to are a coterie of elites.
The consequence of such an anomalous democracy is an inequality that has spiralled out of control, the normalisation of oppression in all its forms, a constant susceptibility to socio-political crises and the loss of a sense of nationhood. The good news in all of this, however, is, that democracy isn’t the problem, our approach to it is.
All we need to do to make democracy succeed in Nigeria is to rethink it right from its fundamentals, and that begins with addressing political participation. In the 2015 General Elections, the voter turnout was 42.40 percent, the lowest ever since the 1999 elections. The message is clear; the citizenry is increasingly losing faith in the political process.
Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix to rebuilding people’s faith in the electoral process, but rooting out money from politics would be a great start. Campaign finance is one of the least talked about aspects of our democracy, but it has the greatest impact on the attitudes and priorities of our leaders. “The high cost of political campaigns for office seekers and the present ways of meeting the costs ties the hands of elected officials because they must recoup their investments by pandering to the whims of moneybags, godfathers and special interests who funded their campaigns,” wrote Bámidélé Adémólá-Olátéjú in the Premium Times. “A politician cannot represent the interests of his or her community/constituency when he has solicited and taken contributions from special interests to finance a costly election. Such politician can only be governed by a sense of obligation to his/her benefactors,” he added.
So, what if we compelled the full disclosure of all the money that a politician or political party raises and spends for election campaigns, radically brought down the amount an individual can donate (currently at N1 million), restricted candidates to taking money only from registered voters in the area they are vying to represent (a senatorial candidate should only take money from registered voters in his senatorial zone) and tightly regulated the practices of political action groups. Certainly, this would go a long way in ensuring that our political leaders are only indebted to those who vote them in.
Closely tied to the problem of money in politics is the media. A bulk of the astronomical figures spent in campaigns goes into paying the media through adverts. But, nobody should make money from politics, not even the media. So what if we stopped media houses from treating politicians and political parties like private sector clients. We could ban (or at least strictly regulate) political ads in the media, legislate equal airtime and balanced coverage across public and private media stations for all candidates, restrict campaign media spend to the printing of fliers, sending of emails and text messages, and the publication of manifestos. Such measures would not only cut down campaign expenses, they would also ensure equal media access for all candidates, a prerequisite for free and fair elections.
Rooting out money and the influence of special interests in our politics will go a long way in cleaning up our democracy. But the problem with our democracy isn’t just about what has corroded it, it is also about what is lacking from it; one of which is ideology. Given that our political parties don’t stand for something, it is only expected that they will (routinely) fall for anything, from corruption to ethnoreligious bigotry. If the most that our political parties can offer in ideology is the mouthing off of empty slogans like “Change” and “Transformation,” then we need new vehicles for the actualisation of a true democracy.
We need political parties that have concrete socioeconomic ideologies, clear political frameworks and, most importantly, for their goals and objectives to be closely welded to the interests of ordinary and working people. It shouldn’t be just through gestures and overtures but also through discernible pragmatic policies. For example, if the current ruling party was such a party, one would be able to tell it apart—in policies and outcomes—from the former ruling party, and if its goals were welded to the interests of working people, there’s no way that the minimum wage would still be N18,000 and millions of workers would be forced to live with no or halved pay.
A new kind of democracy also demands a new kind of economics. There is a direct correlation between our flawed democracy and our failing, poverty-stricken and inequality-riddled economic system. This is because democracy isn’t just about the right to vote, it’s about opportunities for individual and collective progress being available to everyone regardless of ethnicity, class or academic background. As Mitchell Hunter finely puts it in his Argument for Socio-Economic Redistribution, “the right to vote and participate in the political process is dependent on having enough money get to the voting station, to have access to news media, to run a campaign. Secondly, an unequal education system results in some citizens lacking the knowledge of what rights each citizen has and how to access political and legal institutions.”
Thus, to achieve a new kind of democracy in Nigeria, that is, a democracy that works for Nigeria, one in which all citizens have guaranteed and fully respected rights and privileges, our politics must become intensely focused on tackling poverty and inequality whilst prioritising the delivery of shared prosperity, social cohesion, legal protection and societal progress. Our current kind of democracy, which revolves around the ethno-regional tussle for power among the elites, won’t cut it.
