What do the great Nigerian people want and what do they expect of their government from federal to state and local levels? I was intrigued by the results of a poll opinion survey that was released last week by NOI Polls, an Abuja-based opinion research organisation. I do understand that NOI Polls is closely linked to the US-based Gallup Polls that is so well known in the opinion research industry.
Opinion polls are often used by different people to achieve different purposes. Anyone who has done elementary statistics knows that the devil often lies in the sampling procedure. If the interviewers concentrate on a given population cohort that have a predictable orientation, the outcomes are quite likely to be skewed. It goes without saying that if opinions surveys are to be trusted the population sampling must be representative enough to reflect geography, ethnicity, religion, gender, age and all the other sociological attributes that reflect our rich diversity as a country. And as far as these things go, the more the size of the sample, the more accurate and the more reliable the outcomes are likely to be.
I’m in no position to vouch for the reliability and scientific bona fides of NOI Polls and their methodology. But the outcome of their survey is something I found quite fascinating.
The latest poll exercise posed three questions to the interviewees: (1) In your opinion, what is the most pressing challenge facing democracy in Nigeria? (2) In which sector do you think the outgoing government has mainly performed well? (3) What three key sectors would you like the incoming government to focus its efforts in the next four years?
With regard to the first question, in terms of the pressing challenges facing our fledgling democracy, 32 percent singled out corruption as the most critical challenge. Next in line is “bad governance” which scored 22 percent. Some 11 percent identified insecurity as a major challenge, while 6 percent identified unemployment as the most important problem.
It was the great British wartime leader Winston Churchill who famously described democracy as the worst system of government – “except for the others”. There is no perfect democracy anywhere in the world. Even its pristine Athenian version in classical Greece did not include slaves and women. A huge chunk of the population in the land that considers itself “the mother of democracy” was largely disenfranchised.
Democracies the world over face all sorts of challenges. In America, if you cannot assemble a war chest of at least $1 billion you might as well forget about your ambition of running for president. Big money and vested interests have hijacked American democracy. If Alexis de Tocqueville, the brilliant nineteenth century French aristocrat who visited that great country and wrote the eponymousDemocracy in America, were to return to America today, he is unlikely to recognise the land he once wrote about with such elegance and civility.
The same would apply to Europe, the Old Commonwealth (Canada, Australia and New Zealand), Japan and other prosperous democracies. The media, increasingly controlled by a few shadowy creatures with narrow-minded selfish interests, call the shots in terms of swaying public opinion. People like Rupert Murdoch literally have the power to decide who and who can and cannot become President or Prime Minister. For this and other reasons, large sections of the citizenry, particularly young people, are disengaging from voting and other forms of civic participation. Voter apathy is becoming a threat to democracy itself.
Even in Nigeria, as we saw during the last presidential elections, only 27 million citizens actually voted, out of an electoral roll of at least 80 million. In our own case, it was as much about voter apathy as it was about the untested electronic gadgetry that was introduced by INEC which literally disenfranchised the majority of the voter population. We had an electoral outcome that amounted in essence to the election of a minority government. A government that comes to power on such a narrow base would have to do much to be accorded the minimum of legitimacy necessary to win the trust of the majority of the Nigerian people.
The outcome of the opinion polls relating to the problems affecting our democracy means that Nigerians worry more about corruption than anything else as the greatest threat to their democratic freedoms. Linked to it is the problem of “bad governance”. Although the latter was not properly defined, we take the line that we know it when we see it. I agree with many of those who are saying that Nigerians did not vote for the APC, which, in some respects is indistinguishable from the ugly and monstrous PDP.
The simple truth is that Nigerians voted for the person of Muhammadu Buhari. The question of his party was only of secondary importance. The King Makers who crowned the Oba are not the same as the Oba himself. In fact, as one garrulous Owu High Chief once quipped, those who crown the Oba must be ready to take to their heels. This is because, according to a well-known element in Yoruba political tradition, masquerades have a tendency to turn upon those who conferred the anointing of kingship upon them!
We voted for Buhari because we believed he is the knight in shiny armour who will wrestle down the monster of corruption and give us the good governance we yearn for.
The second question that was posed was for respondents to identify the three main areas which they believed the outgoing Goodluck Jonathan had made some positive impact. The results were equally interesting. The responses in this sector were generally the bleakest. The only saving grace for that disgraceful government was agriculture, education and aviation.
Some 19 percent identified agriculture as the sector in which the administration recorded its greatest success. This was followed by 19 percent for education and 10 percent for aviation. There is a general consensus that former Agriculture Minister Akinwumi Adesina was one of the shiny lights of the previous administration. There is no doubt that some important successes were registered in agriculture. Significant credit must also go to outgoing Water Resources Minister Sarah Reng Ochekpe who did so much to resuscitate many of our dams and water irrigation installations. Without water, agricultural productivity cannot make any headway.
Obadiah Mailafia
