Looming Democracy Day: Just another vulnerable time? -By Ayo Olukotun

“To repeat Chinua Achebe, there was a country. Only God knows what we have now, when major roads connecting our most important cities such as Abuja-Kaduna, Lagos-Ibadan, Ibadan-Ife, Enugu-Port Harcourt, and so on are under siege of kidnappers and terrorists, and the Northeast and Northwest of our country are besieged by bandits”

 – Akinjide Osuntokun, Emeritus Professor of History, The Nation, May 16, 2019.

The Greeks of old had two different words expressing the concept of time, the first, ‘Chronos’, refers to sequence, the normal passing of time denoted in a calendar; the second, ‘Kairos’, speaks to a significant passage of time, in which landmark events take place. The looming low-key celebration of Democracy Day resourcefully forked by the President Muhammadu Buhari administration to include May 29 and to recognise the much downplayed June 12, is happening, not as a significant milestone for the nation, but as a political ritual, a vulnerable transition.

 Emeritus Professor Akinjide Osuntokun, quoted in the opening paragraph, provides insight into the depth of the growing insecurity across the nation, contrasting the current frightening disorder with more placid times in the past. No doubt, we have passed through turbulent times under the Fourth Republic, there was an interval under the President Goodluck Jonathan administration when, after a bombing escapade the previous year, a national anniversary was held in the protective ambience of the State House, Abuja. The point of departure is that this particular one has been a more widespread challenge, with more deaths and far more uncertainty.  Confounding is the variable that the top political echelons are still busy congratulating one another, giving out awards, strategising about the next elections, when Nigerians have their lives in such trepidation and peril! Are our leaders so uncaring, or they are merely sidestepping the spreading scourge, to engage in backslapping and merrymaking? Instead of lamenting or berating, let us rummage for the fundamental issues, with the hope of turning things around, not just about insecurity, but about soaring poverty, the return of high inflation, especially of food prices, the puzzle of unstable electricity, congested expressways, second rate education among others.

 Let me begin with a simple maxim: Order without consensus and civility is a House of Cards that will soon come tumbling down. The skyrocketing insecurity and banditry can be related to the fracture in almost every governmental institution in the country. Take a look at the political parties and see how dishevelled they all are. The recent fusillade of hard words launched against the All Progressives Congress leader, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, by Governor Nasir el-Rafai, openly narrating tactics that could be used to end Tinubu’s hegemony in Lagos, is only the tip of the iceberg of a ramshackled party, broken into several parts. The story of confusion and division at the high levels is replicated in other parties, and other institutions, giving the impression of a polity at war against itself. Needless to say, that very little governance can go on in such a phenomenally divided realm.

 When at the inception of the current Republic, the independent (London) journalist, Karl Maier, wrote his ‘This House has Fallen’, he was referring to the urgent need to reconfigure and recompact a badly divided nation, traumatised by years of military misrule. Nineteen years after, that important political dialogue between the federating units has yet to be held, though inchoate attempts were made at holding one. Whether the divisions that we see all around us stem from the bigger ones discussed by Maier, or whether they emanate from the failure of consensus among the governing elite, the point is that they hinder every serious attempt to make genuine progress. For example, at Zamfara, and other states affected by banditry, there is so much dialogue of the deaf with the security hierarchy accusing traditional rulers of treason, and traditional rulers talking back at security, accusing them of incompetence. Whatever the merits of this tense and heated conversation, it is far cry from the kind of governance consensus that is required to ward off the bandits. In other words, somewhere along the line, we may lose what the Americans like to call, The Art of Overture, featuring trade-offs, hard bargaining, and adroit negotiations.

Distinguished Political Science Professor, Richard Joseph, it was, who narrated, how in the course of conversation with a Northern politician of scholarly extraction, referred to a statement by the politician to the effect that some of the people in power these days simply do not know how Nigeria works. My understanding of the statement is that the delicate balancing acts and skills, needed to collate a public realm with centrifugal drives, are missing, or in short supply.

The other point that needs to be made concerns the lack of diligent planning and deliberate rehearsals that must be staged in search of credible governance outputs. Unsurprisingly, there are many plans in the archives that are not known to current office holders, which makes governing look like walking in a blind alley. Who was not surprised, to cite an example, when the Governor of Zamfara State, Abdulaziz Yari, revealed that the bandits in his state are far better equipped than our soldiers? If this is a fact, at what point did this become known to the authorities, and how does it fit into their prior planning and counter-insurgency mapping? Furthermore, was there any anticipation among our strategic thinkers and policymakers of the level of challenge that the country is currently witnessing? If there is none, who is responsible for the omission? Are there any questions being asked apart from pious lamentations and calls for prayer bazaar, about the significant lapses in our security architecture?

The same thing applies to other aspects of our national life, such as education, where, instead of spending money to raise the quality of our humanistic and scientific infrastructure, we are multiplying institutions all over the place, without thought for how a shoe-string educational budget can warehouse the dizzying expansion. As I had occasion to point out in a previous write-up, South Africa has only 26 public universities, and a clutch of private ones, yet, nine of its universities are world-class, in the sense that they appear in advantageous positions on global league tables, with one of them, the University of Cape Town, listed as No. 20 in the Times’ Higher Education survey in 2017. Why for God’s sake can’t we copy the good examples, and best practices, instead of leaving our youths, going around the world scavenging for, what if we were a better governed clime, we can easily come up with at home?

A final point concerns the need for Nigerians, as a people, to move from lamentations, to public-spirited actions. There are too few people, and they are getting fewer still, who can be called active citizens. We would rather lament, and regale our neighbours with how golden things are outside Nigeria. As we mark, in a fortnight or so, two decades of a democracy without coups, we should now all take responsibility, and stop to shift them to our leaders. The lessons of our history, the heroism of June 12, the Bring Back Our Girls campaign, the benevolent upmanship of our heroes past should inform us that without enlightened and sustained civil action, things will continue to drift. It is time to stand up and own this democracy.