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Our politicians are dictators, says Ayoade
By Sola Shittu,
Reporter, Ibadan
A one-time director of the Centre
for of Democratic Studies (CDS), Professor John Ayoade over the weekend
described Nigerian democrats as dictators “who take pleasure in providing
an icing of democracy for their cake of dictatorship”.
Delivering the annual lecture
entitled: Democracy Deficit or Democracy Dividend at the Kareem Babatunde Adewusi
Foundation (KABAF), in Eruwa, Oyo State, Ayoade regretted that what Nigeria has
been witnessing since 44 years of independence “has been motion without
movement” as the people refused to tell the politicians what they should
know and do.
“Evil persists when good
people keep quiet. People must confront the wrong doings of our politicians if
not, we will live under it forever. Politicians are human beings. We must be
bold enough to tell them when they are wrong. They should be made to sign
agreements before election. They are tenants and we are the landlords,”
he said.
The political scientist also
lamented that in Nigeria today, it is becoming more difficult to see the
dividends of democracy as everything that looks like democratic dividends have
been affected by negative policies of government.
According to him, the political
reality on ground in Nigeria today, is that anybody who calls himself or
herself a democrat can enter the kingdom of democracy, saying that many of the nation’s
politicians are dictators going about dressed in democrats’ garb.
“We must not make the mistake
to think that even those who win a democratic election are democrats. The
Christian Baptism is the beginning of the long journey of Christian life. So
also, the democratic election is the beginning of and pledge to be a democrat.
In fact, it is easier to be a democrat at election time than to run a
democratic government. More often than not, beneficiaries of democratic
elections deny democratic governance to their benefactors. Such betrayals are
common in our system,” the university don added.
To him, the happiness of the people
under a democracy lies in the ceaseless flow of democratic practice by a
government that is ever seeking to attain democratic heights.
He stated further that democratic
governments should be satisfied only when their performance elicit the
happiness and well being of the people.
The bad news about Nigerian
politicians, according to him, was that they live in the world of make belief
and “behave like magicians under a strange spell of mental
hallucination”.
“They enumerate the dividends
of democracy and score themselves high. The people are often confused because
they cannot see what the politician sees and enumerates. It is important to
remind politicians that they are appointed rather than anointed and therefore
remains the tenants of the electorates”, he said.
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