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When democracy loses its
meaning
By Dan Amor
After several years of trying
to paper over serious cracks on the nation�s body politic which had
painfully degenerated into a pariah status, the regime of General
Abdulsalami Abukarkar which came on board following the death of General
Sani Abacha in June 1998 suddenly recognized the need for the emergence of
democracy in Nigeria. This dream became a reality on Saturday May 29,
1999, when the military handed over the reigns of governance to a
democratically elected civilian government thus putting an end to almost
16 years of military gangsterism, rapacity and greed. So we thought.
Unfortunately, however, this was not be, as the so-called civilians turned
out to be like (if not worse than) their predecessors in all
ramifications.
General Olusegun Obasanjo �
the chief priest of the new dispensation � rambunctious, stubborn and
summarily unpretentious, has suddenly turned the Nigerian political
landscape into an inherited kingdom. Rather than address the structural
imbalance in the federation which the military deliberately created upon
their incursion into the center-stage of the nation�s political
leadership, Obasanjo, a former military head of state, has continued with
business as usual. More than five years into his eight year two-tenure
presidency, Nigerians see him more as an emperor than as a democratically
elected civilian president. Obasanjo�s carriage and idiosyncrasies are
practically unassuming. Every time the President and his regime�s
representatives speak of their resolve �to move the country forward�, they
are unwittingly admitting that, since the past five years, Nigeria has
moved everywhere except forward.
Every time the President and
his yes-men speak of their resolve �to put in place a home-grown and an
enduring democracy�, they are unwittingly admitting that since the past
five years, Nigeria has put in place everything except a home-grown and an
enduring democracy. And since he has barely three years to go, Obasanjo
has only succeeded in building an imported democracy of falsehood and
propaganda, of want, insecurity, hate political jingoism and vendetta; of
economic strangulation, and poverty, as dictated by the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund, IMF. If they are not deluded beyond
redemption, the protagonists of our present woes must be dismayed that,
beyond the vast fortunes which have accrued to them, they have little to
show for all the frenzied manipulations, the willful distortions and
obfuscation, the blackmail, the harassment and the repression that have
been systematically employed to consecrate their hold on power.
This government has been preaching to itself
and its foreign sponsors again and again that it believes in dialogue and
that they do not lay claim to monopoly of wisdom. And yet, its presiding
deity and ageing warlord goes ahead to implement its World Bank and IMF �
sponsored conditionalities without consultation with the Nigerian people
who bear the brunt of this executive lawlessness. One had thought that
upon assumption of office on May 29, 1999, the first thing the regime
would have done would be to set up an independent Truth and Reconciliation
Commission to take a critical look at where the nation had gone wrong and
the multitude of sin committed against the people by the shameless and
sadistic governing elite. But national reconciliation does not appear to
be one of its priorities. Instead, the talk is about a �unity� that is not
negotiable no matter how violated, even though its contents and purpose
are never mentioned; about Nigeria remaining at all cost, a single,
indissoluble entity in spite of persistent excesses and injustices of some
against others.
In the bid to consolidate
their phantom victory at the polls and to attract international
solidarity, the government set up the Justice Chukwudifu Oputa Panel
ostensibly to inquire into perceived injustices of the past and abuses of
power. No sooner did the commission invite former dictators to testify
before it, than the panel was compelled to close shop for daring to step
on powerful toes. All is now history. Since then the government has been
employing a military tactic known as regimentation to pit ethnic group
against ethnic group, region against region, religion against religion and
even politician against politician thereby turning what ought to be one of
Nigeria�s finest moments into a waking nightmare where the spectre of
civil war, ancient prejudices and fears are invoked as national pastime.
With intimidation, balkanization, repression and blackmail as its telling
tools, the government is pandering to the coarsest instincts in the
Nigerian society.
Here, democracy has lost its
meaning. It has meaning only for the ruling class-the executive and the
legislature, that is. Individually, our law makers at the National
Assembly have not had it so good at the expense of the suffering masses.
But the seriousness of democratic construction must be divorced from all
false prosperity. Its strength is thus not in the happiness of a select
few, no matter how ideologically the term is understood. What we are
witnessing is a rhetorical concept of unfulfilled promises, and
opportunism. By bribing a foreign magazine to report that Nigerians are
the happiest species on the face of the earth, the regime has forgotten
that happiness is the effect and not the cause of development, and causes
must not be confused with consequences. To place in the forefront of
national glory, a people�s false happiness when in actual fact they are
dying of hunger, is an ideological perversion that empties democracy of
all meaning, reducing it to a mere word. Nevertheless, because democracy
is not just a word, in order to establish it, reasoning on the absurd is
not sufficient: to set its precise content requires an explanation of
social structures and conceptual elaboration. This is what our counterfeit
democrats fail to understand.
Encapsulated in the grandeur
of megalomania, our leaders are yet to realize that money-making per se,
is but one element in the complex processes of growth and development, the
other crucial elements being discipline, hard work and rational resource
management and allocation. And in spite of official ranting of government
functionaries, there are still many glaring distortions in the economy
while the planning experience of the past five years poses challenges to
conventional economic wisdom in several ways than one. The most troubling
bathos of the Nigerian drama is the glaring insensitivity of our rulers to
the galloping plight of the common man. The story of virtually every
social responsibility of the state to the people; of every area where the
state remains relevant to her subjects, under the unwritten social
contract principle, has been re-written on its head: the public school
system is in a shambles; roads, including hitherto smooth expressways, are
now death traps, and almost a century after electricity supply debuted in
Nigeria, her citizens still live more in darkness than light.
A democracy in which brutal
assassination of citizens has assumed the toga of a national anthem is not
only a democracy gone mad but one which has lost its meaning. Under this
kind of democracy inflation has become the order of the day while natural
blessing like oil has suddenly turned into a national curse leaving
poverty to walk in its true nakedness like a monster in the land. And when
the National Assembly which is supposed to be the safety valve or sole
arbiter for the common man has abandoned the people for juicy lucre from
the all-conquering executive, what will the people do?
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