Abimbola Agboluaje
Nigerians not their much maligned leadership have been complicit, if not instrumental, to the impunity with which the political elite rig elections and hang on to power. Our well known docility fosters the rise of bad leadership, the type that is slowly but surely killing our democracy.
While most recent analyses (including this column) have rightly lampooned our leaders for the retrogression of our democracy, we have not paid much attention to the manner in which ordinary people have been culpable for our political malaise. The appeal of democracy is universal. Many African traditional societies have been democratic from the get-go.
Right here at home, every one of our ethnic groups “including those that had feudal characteristics” is replete with elements of that universal psychological regularity, the desire for free choice and autonomy. Histories of our ethnic nationalities show that while these desires were often subordinated to the needs for subsistence and order when survival proved precarious, they consistently took high priority as survival became more secure.
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The shame today is that in contrast to this history and culture of freedom, it appears that we have chosen to socialize our citizens to celebrate indifference, to show contempt and disdain for the social requisites of democracy. While most new democracies strive to remedy serious deficiencies in adopting the rule of law and related governance practices that make democracy truly effective, our political culture appears to be permanently nailed to the cross of the android and follow “follow citizenship of the military era. And this is not for lack of opportunity to learn and apply civic responsibility. Every election “from campaigns to actual voting and declaration of winners” is the greatest education moment for the citizenry. People in other climes would ideally feel shame and quickly adopt unambiguous measures to check the abuse and corruption of citizens’ democratic rights., the right to choose their political leaders, for example. But our citizens from the best educated to the non-educated tend to quickly get cozy with abnormalities like our current regime of democracy without elections. Here villages, religious congregation and myriad socio-cultural groups’ “humour those who deliberately seek to kill our historical desire for choice and autonomy by awarding them multiple chieftaincy, religious titles, and even honorary degrees(!) with our abused mothers, wives and unemployed youth dancing themselves lame at such grand occasions. Meanwhile, millions of our citizens steadily give up on this beautiful land by renouncing their responsibility to sacrifice for it, to make it a proud place to live. In effect, the country has become a mere cash cow of sorts with a mercenary citizenship that is unreservedly focused on milking it dry. There appears to be no love for the country by its citizens because our relationship to it is defined only by chaotic pursuit of personal gain. This is why OBJ’s do or die adjective is in a sick way, an apt description of our electoral politics.
Civic responsibility, the moral obligations of conscientious citizens to preserve and improve the well-being of our democracy is dead and buried in this country. In its place is a lazy and cost-free blame-the-leadership tirade, our new opium of the people. But in a democracy all citizens’ “not just the leadership” have civic obligations to fight for their rights, including the right to make their votes count. In fact, the citizens not the leadership should be the ultimate agents of accountability in a democratic system. But our docility will never allow this to happen in Nigeria . The one billion naira question is this: given their swagger and rambunctiousness, why are Nigerians so submissive to political abuse? Some say it is due to the pivotal place of corruption in our everyday life, leading to the trading of our civil and political rights for crumbs. But there may be a more profound cause of our docility, and the key to unveiling it may lie in the dangerous class discrimination that go unchallenged in this country. Our popular ethos in general excludes the common man from making his views count in shaping public life in Nigeria (consider the active membership of our political parties, civil societies and even women groups.) When we add this to our well-known thin skin for political criticism and opposition, to the rapidity and impunity with which our leaders loot our wealth, to the sheer size of the loots that extends the gap between haves and have-nots, to our shameless culture of money worship and conspicuous consumption, we can begin to understand why many of citizens have given up on the country. Why they have chosen to be casual about their country, to look the other way as our nascent democracy dies. Our docility in this case may be simply, good old pragmatism. We believe that citizen pressure on political leaders to respect democratic rights in Nigeria will remain weak because of this. We have all gotten to a point where we are no longer capable and willing to practice democratic freedoms ourselves. In every country where it thrives, democracy has never been a gift freely granted by those in power. Political leaders everywhere almost always prefer to retain as much power as possible. What has stopped every elite desire to retain power by all means has been citizens’ resistance. Our citizens have bucked this trend. Still, we do love our democracy.
Poles after poles show that Nigerians prefer democracy. But whether we still have the supporting values for it is in our view, the most important question.
