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Power to The People |
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Tuesday, 30 August 2005 |
Chris Ngwodo
One wonders sometimes, if democracy in Nigeria with its disparate ethnic, parochial and often competing interests will not reduce this nation to a kind of Babel _ an abandoned project of nation-building like the biblical tower of that name. The builders of the ancient tower deserted the ambitious project because they could not overcome their differences.
The late Bola Ige once observed that Nigeria had not yet attained democracy, merely civilian rule. Understanding the distinction between both will enable us place this period of our national history within its proper context in light of our sociopolitical evolution.
Whenever scholars and critics want to underscore the degeneracy of the Nigerian nation since independence, and more precisely since the oil boom era of the late seventies, they often employ a comparative analysis of countries that were at the same level of economic development with Nigeria during the sixties and the seventies. Asian countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore are often cited for this purpose. These nations rose meteorically as the Asian tiger economies that stunned the world in the eighties and have not looked back since then. Nigeria, on the other hand, followed a tragically divergent course.
One important, though understated element of the Asian miracle is that for the most part, it was not performed by liberal democrats but by autocrats. Where there was a semblance of democracy, it was more in the mode of Indonesian President Sukarno’s “Guided democracy.” Lee Kuan Yew who is credited with leading Singapore from third world underdevelopment to first world economic superpower status ruled that country for thirty-one years from 1959 and was reelected severally in a series of “highly controlled” elections. These “guided democracies” were for many years effectively one-party states. Their societies were far removed from the liberal democracies of the west. Human rights were not accorded the sort of canonical status that that they have in western democracies and yet it was these less than wholly democratic governments that launched Asia into the first world.
A few points are obvious from this historical insight. One is that democracy is not a requisite for economic progress. China, the world’s fastest growing economy is a contemporary embodiment of this truth. The reverse implication is that autocracy will not necessarily destroy an economy. It might have been with this in mind that Nnamdi Azikiwe once quite seriously proposed a diarchy – a synthesis of military and civilian authority as a possible system of government for Nigeria. Consider that as at 1993 when Kim Young Sam was sworn in as president of South Korea, that country had recorded 32 years of military rule. By 1999, when President Olusegun Obasanjo was being sworn in, Nigeria had clocked 29 years of military dictatorship.
The key difference is in the quality of the men that ruled in Africa and Asia. While Asian autocrats were mostly committed to transforming their countries for good, their African counterparts apparently lacked even the most basic nationalist instinct. While authoritarian civil or military dictators were engineering the Asian miracle, African nay Nigerian dictators were plundering their own nations. Past Nigerian military rulers are reputed to have stolen over £220 billion.
Today the Asian nations cited above are more democratic than they were in the initial heady days of the economic miracle but there is yet another point to be drawn from their experience. In the course of a nation’s evolution, there is room for guided democracy as with Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, civil dictators like Suharto and soldier- statesmen such as Turkey’s Kermal Ataturk and De Gaulle of France.
The ultimate failure of military rule in Nigeria was the inability of any of our past heads of state to elevate himself to the level of a soldier-statesman. Previous rulers such as General Yakubu Gowon and General Ibrahim Babangida must bear a great deal of the responsibility for the broken dreams that have come to characterize Nigerian nationhood. Between them, they had 17 years at the helm as the two longest serving heads of state respectively but could not make much of it. Their regimes were undone by corruption and their lack of an overarching vision of Nigerian nationhood. Both were forced out of power when they broke their pledges to return the nation to democracy and tried to prolong their tenures. I believe that all things considered, military dictators unfettered by the sandbagging, filibustering restraints that Nigerian democracy is capable of throwing up, could have turned this country around with decisive and visionary leadership. They didn’t; in fact they pushed the country further towards the precipice of extinction.
I suspect that both Gowon and Babangida realize this and have since their forced exits from power been haunted by the need for historical and political redemption. This need inspired Gowon’s failed bid for the presidency in the 90s coincidentally under Babangida’s convoluted transition program as well as his socio-ecclesiastical initiative ‘Nigeria Prays.’ Babangida’s current political maneuvers towards Aso Rock are motivated similarly by this need for redemption. Posterity’s judgment is necessarily harsher for leaders who had the greatest opportunity to change their nations but failed to do so.
Like Bola Ige said, Nigeria isn’t yet a democracy; she is on her way to becoming one. Democracy isn’t merely the conduct of elections as is it is often construed in denial of the rigours of democratization and nation-building. It is a culture of mass participation in governance; the diffusion of responsibility and power in accurate measure between the state and the society- something for which our nearly three decades of military rule have rendered us eminently ill-prepared. The ideological spinelessness of the mushroom political parties that emerge from hibernation every four years is evidence of the prematurity of most of our political operatives.
If we are not yet a democracy, what we have now is a quasi-democratic interregnum which within our unique historical and sociopolitical context is a necessary bridge between the military totalitarianism of the past and the liberal democracy of the future. A quasi-democratic interregnum of this sort will feature what, for want of a better nomenclature, I will term a ‘redemptive autocracy.’
It is my conviction that given the ideological aridity and mercantilism that characterize our political space, what we need now is a strong leadership, one that might at times be accused of dictatorial tendencies or constitutional and procedural inexactitude but which must lift this nation up by the bootstraps and hurl her into the future. Now we are at a point in our national evolution where an elite whose concept of politics is power without responsibility could easily translate democracy into a license for anarchy. A strong leadership of the kind portended by a redemptive autocracy that is impervious to political partisanship and focused only on what must be done is a necessary counter weight to the numerous political forces angling for power.
A redemptive autocracy is crucial in an immediate post-military interregnum to serve as a stabilizing force in the polity and is guided less by high morality than by expediency, urgency and the burden of historic necessity. It will often apply a tactful, if not Machiavellian blend of persuasion and force, the tempting carrot in a velvet gloved iron fist to address issues. The operation of such an autocracy is somewhat paradoxical. It could be said philosophically to employ destructive means to achieve constructive ends. It will often engineer in an authoritarian fashion the very process that will terminate the authoritarian structures of its existence. Recall how Mikhail Gorbachev as president of the defunct Soviet Union brought about the structural collapse of that entity (although some argue that Gorbachev merely sought to reform communism and in so doing unleashed forces of change that he was unable to control). De klerk’s regime which turned out to be the last apartheid government in South Africa also fits into this model. In short, a redemptive autocracy is a creature of a nation’s unique historical circumstances. It is, to borrow from Nigeria’s peerless political lexicon, “a child of necessity.” The noblest and the most critical attribute of this creature is its willingness to program itself into obsolescence by superintending the transition from totalitarianism to liberal democracy. Thus, from its inception, a redemptive autocracy runs on a self initiated self-destruct sequence; the very epitome of self sacrificial leadership.
It is all but impossible for a country that has spent three-quarters of its history of independent nationhood under military rule to effect a sudden transmutation to a western style liberal democracy. Certain habits and philosophies have to be unlearned even as democratic values are gradually imbibed. In other words, it is a process. Thus, analysis of our national progress must incorporate an understanding of the times, of where we are now in the course of our sociopolitical evolution.
Whether by accident or design, the 1999 Nigerian constitution envisaged the present post military interregnum and accordingly created a near totalitarian executive presidency which within the context of the present times has its necessary uses. In my opinion, the two greatest threats to Nigerian democracy are the manipulation of ethnic and sectarian differences by the political class as well as the unconstitutional ambitions of sections of a highly politicized military institution. It required and has taken a totalitarian presidency occupied by a strong personality to leash those threats to a reasonable extent. It is in this sense that the Obasanjo presidency has served as a stabilizing factor in the polity.
Presently Nigeria is in the middle of far reaching socioeconomic reforms and while reforms on the political front have been slower, there is a growing impetus for change on that level. Taken together and properly executed, these two political and economic reforms will coalesce into the structural changes that will alter the face of this nation forever.
A few historians have pointed out that Gorbachev’s error was in allowing the pace of political liberalization to exceed that of economic reform. They contend that political openness should always be pursued in tandem with economic liberalization. They cite as a consequence of Gorbachev’s miscalculation the economic hardship and instability of the post soviet years. This argument is rooted in the logic of K.O. Mbadiwe’s assertion that “the first democracy is the democracy of the stomach.” Instituting political freedom without addressing the economy only creates room for the hungry masses to vent their anger much to the detriment of the existing sociopolitical structures. In apparent agreement with this thesis, China has strategically paced its economic liberalization ahead of political reforms. The result is a sprawling geopolitical mutation that has subjected what is for all intents and purposes a wheeling and dealing capitalist economy under the governance of a communist state.
In Nigeria, we run a risk diametrically different from that suffered by the Soviet Union. Economic liberalization has been pursued at a pace far greater than that of political reform. This too has its own dangers. Where economic liberalization is implemented without a concomitant opening up of the political space, economic progress will eventually be subverted by an elite who have preserved their strangle hold on the instruments of state power. Their inept governance will surely paralyze and retard economic growth.
The uncertainties that frighten foreign investors and trouble much of the organized private sector reside in the political sphere where competition for over centralized political power often threatens to reach a lethal intensity. These fears have motivated calls in some quarters both domestically and internationally, for a constitutional amendment to allow President Obasanjo contest elections for an unprecedented third term in office. These fears should be understood as being distinct from the propaganda of political mercenaries who pop up periodically in our national history to sell self-succession to people in power.
The real issue however is political deregulation which in our context entails a greater devolution of power from the centre to other levels of governance, the implementation of electoral reforms designed to secure the integrity of the electoral process and the institution of judicial autonomy in deed.
The overarching purpose of all these would be to engender a new politics of mass participation by bringing governance to the grassroots level from where true nation-building must begin. Politics would then become people oriented rather than power driven.
The real power shift isn’t from one group of oligarchs to another but from a group of oligarchs to the people. This season concurrently requires on our part as civil society, a new sociopolitical mobilization that will be driven by ideology and community consciousness – the sort of ferment that will redefine the political party in Nigeria as a vehicle of ideas rather than of elite interests. This is the true meaning of power to the people.
I believe that President Obasanjo’s final place in Nigerian history is as guarantor of just such a power shift. His administration which some critics have dubbed an “imperial presidency” fits the mode of government demanded by a post-military interregnum. Successfully moderating the transition from totalitarianism to democracy would undoubtedly cement his place in our decidedly sparsely populated pantheon of statesmen. In uprooting and destroying the authoritarian structure of governance as we have known it for decades dating back to colonial times, Obasanjo must entomb his generation in their ruins and close a chapter of our history. It is on this point above all else that he will be judged by posterity- on how far and how well he steers the Nigerian state away from the past.
A memorable line from ‘Ovonramwen Nogbaisi,’ Ola Rotimi’s masterful play chronicling the fall of the Benin Empire sums up the imperative of leadership in these times. Faced with the obliteration of the realm by the superior British forces, the Iyase (vizier) counsels the recalcitrant Oba to bow to the new British overlord. “Forget self! Forget status! Let power die so that Benin may live!”
Likewise the current power elite that have shaped Nigerian history for decades must forget self and status and pass into oblivion, so that the Nigerian nation may live. They must bow now to the superiority of historic inevitability or be broken by it.
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Posted by Robot| 26.04.2008 07:59