Change Nigeria Project

The Democratic Impasse in Nigeria:

     Prognosis and Prospects

                                Professor  Adebayo Williams

    Good morning ladies and gentlemen. I have been asked by the governor of Lagos State, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, to thank the organisers for deeming him worthy of being invited to a distinguished forum like this to deliberate on the issue of electoral reform in Nigeria. This is indeed a pressing and urgent affair. Unfortunately, the governor is unavoidably absent because he is attending another equally important forum at this very moment. He has therefore asked me in my capacity as the Chairman of the Lagos State Electoral Reform Committee to represent him at this august forum.

Let me note in passing that given the natural and human endowments of Nigeria, it is profoundly ironic, if not tragic, that we should be deliberating on the issue of the political empowerment of the Nigerian people in a foreign land on the very day that Nigeria is turning forty nine as an independent nation. It is a splendid rebuke to Nigeria’s post-independence elite and a grim index of retarded political growth. This should be an occasion for sober reflection, and for charting the way forward, and not for bitter recriminations.

     The issue of electoral reform has assumed an urgency bothering on a national emergency. Nigeria cannot continue along the current path which is a sure route to national perdition. Once again, Nigeria has arrived at a critical crossroads. The choice before the nation is stark. It is either we reform and overhaul our entire electoral system or we continue our speedy regression into the jungle of anomie and political anarchy. The anomie is already with us and it may be followed by a swift descent into complete ungovernability.

     It is a sad commentary on the state of the nation that ten years into civil rule, and nineteen years after a leading American scholar dismissed the Babangida Transition Programme as the most sustained exercise in political chicanery ever visited on a people, Nigeria is still groping in the dark tunnel of democratic disablement. Several other African countries that were transiting to full democratic rule at the same time have since left Nigeria at the starting block. Ten years into the current experiment with democratic governance in Nigeria, the greatest gains of democracy appears to be the absence of formal military dictatorship rather than the quality of civil rule itself or the strength of extant institutions.  Please permit me at this point to retrace the origins of the current democratic impasse in Nigeria.

Origins of the current democratic impasse.

    On May 29, 1999, Nigeria successfully transited to civil rule after almost two decades of prolonged and protracted military dictatorship. Retired General Olusegun Obasanjo was sworn in as Nigeria’s second Executive President in an austere but impressive ceremony at Eagle’s Square in Abuja, The grand occasion was not without its equally grand ironies. Almost twenty years after handing over the baton of authority to Alhaji Shehu Aliyu Shagari of the victorious NPN, (National Party of Nigeria) Obasanjo was himself receiving the same instrument of power from the man who was the parade ground commander at the earlier historic ceremony.

     The story has told itself, and given the looming presence and pervasiveness of the military in Nigeria’s post-independence political evolution, it was a truly remarkable achievement. At that point in time, it can be said that it was civil rule that had become an interregnum rather than military rule. Except for two brief periods of civilian intercessions, military rule has become the norm in Nigeria rather than the political aberration that it is.

    It is gratifying to note that ten years after, civil rule is still holding out, despite the storm and stress, the hiccups and upheavals. It has been a tense and turbulent ride, but Nigeria’s legendary luck has prevailed. The military have been kept at bay and restricted to their constitutional duty of preserving the territorial integrity of the nation and protecting it against external aggression. For the first time in its post-independence history, Nigeria has been able to achieve a civilian to civilian transfer of power, admittedly in very dubious and less than democratic circumstances. Given the context, this is no mean achievement.

    Yet if anybody had thought that this meaningful process of demilitarization would be followed by a corresponding deepening of the democratization process and an expansion of the space and frontiers of democracy, such a person would have been living in a fools’ paradise. Civil rule in Nigeria has been accompanied by a worsening contraction of the democratic space and a brazen negation of virtually all the rules and tenets of free and fair electoral procedure.

    The 2003 elections which were the first series of electoral contests to be held in Nigeria in twenty years were widely adjudged to have been marred by widespread irregularities and large scale rigging. The international observers were dismayed and scandalised by the open and brazen resort to manipulation and forgery. The late Chief Sunday Awoniyi, an estranged founding father of the PDP, observed that it would amount to a spiritual scandal if some good did not come out of the whole shameless process.

     In the Nigerian media the inglorious farce became known as the 419 elections in a savagely sarcastic gloss on the legal code against criminal forgery and fraud.  General Mohammadu Buhari, the rival presidential candidate, was to spend the next three years in court disputing the fairness and validity of the election that returned President Olusegun Obasanjo to office.

     But if the 2003 elections can be described as fraudulent and marred by irregularities, the 2007 elections scaled new heights in the annals of electoral banditry. It was a berserk travesty even by the standards of electoral manipulation in Nigeria. The vote-rigging machine simply switched to an overdrive gear. Ballot snatching at gun point, criminal manipulation of the voters’ list and brazen falsification of results became the order of the day.

   The international observers were shocked and benumbed by the scale of the daring and audacity and by the sheer impudence and defiance of all known norms of electoral contest. It was indeed a do or die affair and some commentators have described what took place as the abolition of the Nigerian electorate. According to Professor Ben Nwabueze speaking on behalf of the Patriots, a respected group of statesmen, it would amount to a desecration of language to describe what has happened as an election It was a rape of the electoral process on an industrial scale.

    The 2007 elections have been adjudged as the worst in the history of the nation and arguably mankind since the advent of liberal democracy. Never in the history of the nation has an election brought so much pains and misery to the people. The elections have been disputed and legally contested at all levels. The president himself was left off the hook by a split decision of the Supreme Court, but the burden of legitimacy remains. Even as at this moment, almost two and a half years after, litigations are still going on. One can imagine the cost to governance and to a clearly overburdened judiciary which is also overexposed and vulnerable to temptation.

    No one ever thought that democracy in Nigeria was going to be a tea party. Given its shattered institutions, its diverse, mutually incompatible ethnic composition, its fractious and historically remiss political class fractured along ethnic, religious and regional lines, it would have amounted to a great miracle to expect Nigeria to transit overnight to a full-blown democracy after nearly two decades of a military blitz which completely devastated the land.

      It is very important to contextualise the process of democratisation, particularly in the light of African countries emerging from the throes of colonisation. In many of these countries, the problems of ethnicity and religion coupled with the absence of popular nationalist movements as the vehicle of the resistance and struggle against colonisation often combine to thwart democratic aspirations.

   With the dawn of independence, many African countries were little more than armed camps with a mainly illiterate population tottering at the edge of despair and disorientation. Their pre-colonial system and indigenous institutions completely ravaged, these new nations were no better than armistice territories with the colonial army as the only durable and viable national institution in place. This development was to have dire consequences for the political evolution and democratic growth of sub-Saharan Africa.

    For example, at the start of the American Revolution, there were more intellectuals in the whole country than men under arms. The rate of popular literacy and enlightenment which constituted the strength of civil society ensured that while the armed struggle against Imperial Britain was going on, majority of Americans were also actively involved in the intellectual contestation to lay the foundation of a strong, virile, economically prosperous and democratic nation.

     But all these notwithstanding, we cannot continue to make excuses for democratically underachieving countries like Nigeria. Even after it has been saddled with the western paradigm of political evolution, a nation must be seen to be seriously grappling with the objectification and realisation of its destiny as a modern nation-state or it will regress into an anomic fiefdom of medieval tyranny, a despotic cave of biblical misery and millennial horror. This is the stark choice facing Nigeria.

     Political adversities also have their uses. The silver lining in the farcical elections of 2007 is that they have pushed Nigeria willy-nilly into a confrontation with its destiny. Except for those who are deluded or deranged, the country cannot continue along its present path of electoral chicanery without a rendezvous with a major catastrophe. This is not some fancy foot works of theoretical postulations. As we have witnessed in many parts of the developing world, particularly in post-colonial Africa, the crisis of the democratic process has a way of spinning and snowballing uncontrollably into a crisis of the nation-state itself.

     In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Algeria, Cote d’Ivoire, it has led to civil wars. In Burundi and Rwanda, it has led to outright ethnocide. With a civil war already directly emanating from a bungled electoral process, if Nigeria were to follow the same path, the humanitarian catastrophe would be of unimaginable proportions for Africa and the rest of the world. Nigeria has become an equal opportunity electoral time-bomb waiting to explode. This is why it is important and urgent to find and proffer solutions to the democratic debacle facing the nation.

   Prospects and possibilities.

     With the conclusion of the 2007 elections, Nigeria returned to the status of a pariah in the comity of democratic nations. The elections were so scandalously and sensationally botched that the odium has completely overwhelmed whatever strides the country has taken in other spheres of human endeavours in the last decade, particularly on the economic front. The international norm is that there cannot be any meaningful economic development in the absence of genuine democratic rule. Shunned and avoided by the global community, Nigeria once again reverted to the role of the poster boy for all that is dark and disreputable about Africa.

     Hobbled and bogged down by a critical lack of legitimacy and popular acceptance after his controversial victory, President Umaru Yar’Adua was one of the first to admit that the election that brought him to power was deeply flawed. In a swift move to return the country to the path of electoral sanity, he had set up the Justice Mohammed Uwais-led Committee for Electoral Reform filled with distinguished and respected Nigerians from all walks of life.

   Nigerians being eternal and incorrigible optimists, the hope and possibility of electoral reform gave the struggling Yar’Adua administration a fresh impetus and a critical life line. More importantly, it helped to persuade those who were seething with dark rage and resentment at what they perceived to be a state-inspired disenfranchisement to sheath their swords. There was an atmosphere of infectious optimism as the Uwais panel settled down to deliberations, as it engaged in deep rumination over the electoral disablement of the nation, and as it crisscrossed the entire length and breadth of the nation soliciting for memoranda, ideas, opinions and suggestions about the way forward.

    Not to be left out, and in keeping with the tradition of visionary governance for which the state has become emblematic, the governor of Lagos State, Babatunde Raji Fashola, constituted and inaugurated a fifteen-people panel on Monday, 3^rd of December, 2007 to serve as the Lagos State Electoral Reform Committee. Comprised of many notable figures from all walks of life, the committee is chaired by this writer.  As the governor clearly stated at the inauguration, the committee was not set up in antagonistic competition or adversarial cohabitation with the federal panel. Rather, it was to complement the federal efforts at electoral reforms by making critical inputs that reflect the aggregate opinion of the people of Lagos State.

      The arrangement worked beautifully with Lagos state once again serving as a visionary guide in responsive and responsible governance for the rest of the country.  Indeed when the Uwais panel visited Lagos as part of its nation-wide consultations, many of the members expressed their heartfelt gratitude to the Lagos State Electoral Reform Committee for making their task much easier and more straightforward. In the event, many of their subsequent recommendations turned out to have been anticipated by the recommendations of the Lagos state committee.

     After the Federal Electoral Commission submitted its much awaited report, the state electoral reform panel was recalled, this time in an expanded and refocused capacity, to deliberate exhaustively on various issues arising from the report. The marching brief of the recomposed committee is as follows:

1. To present a general overview of both the Federal report and the state submission.
2. To deliberate on the highlights of the Federal Report.
3. To deliberate on the major areas of convergence and divergence between the two reports.

1. 4   To make recommendations on how to harmonise the areas of conflicts.
2. 5   To deliberate further on necessary political reforms in the light of developments since the advent of the current civilian administration and the nation-wide clamour for electoral reform.

It is however with immense sadness and a sense of a monumental tragedy in the making that one notes that the subsequent attitude of the Federal authorities to the reform process has been less than helpful. After stalling and stonewalling by subjecting the report of its own self-appointed committee to tedious emendations and further panel-beating, the government’s published White Paper on the Uwais committee has attracted so much national anger and general hostility that the nation seems to be back to square one. All the goodwill and political capital gained in the process have evaporated to thin air.

     While the Nigerian populace are appreciative of the government’s stated commitment to political and electoral reforms, they are nevertheless disturbed by what seems to be the interference of special interests in determining which reform to carry out. Most contentious has been the issue of the appointment of chief empire for the electoral commission. In the light of repeated failures at critical moment, the overwhelming majority of the Nigerian people seem to favour executive non-interference in the appointment of the chairman of the commission.

      It would seem that President Yar’Adua wilted and his appetite for electoral reform waned when he was confronted by the possibility of underwriting the political funeral of the hegemonic forces that threw him up in the first instance. The logical inference to be drawn from this sudden recoil from the path of electoral rectitude is that the hegemony is based on fraud and electoral chicanery and not on the manifest will of the Nigerian electorate. At the very moment when the president ought to allow national interest to prevail over party interest, when he had the chance to write his name in gold, the typical politician in him has overwhelmed the statesman.

    Many astute observers have ascribed this sudden failure of nerves to the Acquired Integrity Deficiency Syndrome that has afflicted governance at all levels in Nigeria, and which has undermined trust and confidence between the populace and the rulers. It is surely an act of utmost cruelty and political sadism to subject the biggest conglomeration of black souls on earth to such political merry go round only to thwart their legitimate democratic aspirations at the tail end of the process. It is very difficult to see how this insensitive manipulation of the political process is different from the farcical transition programmes of the military or their outright annulment of popular verdicts.

      Having allowed the historic tide and the political momentum for electoral reform to pass him by, Malam Yar’Adua now appears to be part of the problem. This is quite unfortunate for a man who garnered much admiration and respect for attempting to stand up to the interest group that produced him in the higher national interest. But this matter is beyond President Yar’Adua and the political clique surrounding him. Electoral reform is not a question of personal wish but a national necessity.  Reforms will have to be carried out, and urgently and expeditiously too, if we are to stave off a looming collapse of the current democratic experiment. Subsequent electoral re-runs in many parts of the nation have merely revalidated this position. They are a classic manifestation of what happens when a party entrenches itself in power for the sake of primitive accumulation.

      In the light of the foregoing, the prognosis and prospects of electoral reforms in Nigeria are very dire indeed. There are just too many entrenched reactionary groups and forces of the status quo combining and conspiring to frustrate the democratic will of the nation. Yet as middlemen of rationality stranded and squashed between two competing forces of irrationality, the forces of the irrational status quo and the force of irrational violence, democratic reformers in Nigeria must never give up.

    They must continue to shout and scream from the roof top until the current citadel of electoral corruption caves in. To form the necessary critical mass for change, they must link up with concerned Nigerians in the Diaspora, endangered reformers in the National Assembly and even forces of change in the ruling party who are propelled by enlightened self-interest to see beyond temporary political advantage. To give up is to commit political suicide. To give up is to surrender the nation to the forces of darkness. To give up is to allow Nigeria to implode with drastic consequences. Let President Yar’Adua be informed that the bitter alternative to the present status quo is not electoral reform and democratic transition but violence and national disintegration. Thank you all.

    Adebayo Williams, a former Amy Freeman Lee Distinguished Chair of Cultural Studies, University of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio, Texas, is the Chairman, Lagos State Electoral Reform Committee.