Over and above the polarising quarrels and the name-calling distemper of the current electioneering cycle is a shadow that haunts our body politic – the crisis of legitimacy. The Swiss eighteenth century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously declared that, until force is transformed into authority and obedience into duty, politics will remain a farcical preoccupation supervened by gangsters – a war of all against all. When force becomes legitimate authority, rulers can exercise power in the interest of the people and citizens will obey the laws, knowing that they serve the interest of all. It was indeed for this reason that the German jurist and sociologist Max Weber defined the state as that organisation that monopolises the deployment of legitimate violence.
For the ancient Greeks, the world was divided into two: the polis, or political community, and the realm of barbarism. Within the polis, citizens flourish on the basis of equality. The legitimacy of government derives from the will of the majority and power is exercised on their behalf for the common good. Outside the political community, you have the barbarian hordes that are subject to no law; where, according to the historian Thucydides, the strong take what they can and the weak grant what they must. This is echoed in the teachings of the great Arab-Islamic political thinkers who saw the world in terms of two separate and eternally warring kingdoms, the dar-al-Islam, which is the legitimate kingdom of light; and the dar-al-harb, the illegitimate kingdom of darkness. Whereas in the first, men will dwell together as brothers, in the other, they live and operate according to their baser instincts. Between the two kingdoms there can only be war.
In democracies old and new, legitimacy is a critical ingredient for the success and effectiveness of civil government. Where it is eroded, there you will find political decay and eventual rebellion. Legitimacy is eroded when government loses its capacity to govern and where the institutions and rulers become corrupted while injustice prevails. And as the English political philosopher John Locke would insist, where unjust government prevails, it is the incumbent duty of the people to take up arms in defence of their own liberties.
Nigeria today faces a major crisis of legitimacy. One of the greatest theorists of democracy, Sir Ernest Barker, taught that before a nation can become a flourishing democracy, the people must have a deep spiritual bond and sense of common purpose and destiny.
At the best of times, we Nigerians are a divided people. Today, the divisions have grown frighteningly deeper than ever before, as people are fleeing to their religious and ethnic tents, waiting for Armageddon. Trust – that glue that binds communities together in the form of social capital – is being precipitately eroded. Our elders are succumbing to disillusionment while the youths, wandering the streets without jobs, have given up on the future. A big question mark surrounds the very idea of Nigeria as a political community.
This crisis of legitimacy has its roots deeply embedded in our history and in the political economy of our oil-based rentier state. At independence in 1960, the British left us with a wobbly constitutional structure which Dame Margery Perham, a leading authority on colonial administration, described as a “tripod”. Any child who understands geometry will tell you that a tripod is an unstable structure. It was a structure which reinforced the syndrome of competitive ethnicity. It is an open secret that the British wanted to ensure that power would perpetually rest with the conservative feudal North to the detriment of the others. The Sultanate, on their part, developed this perverted illusion that Nigeria is their patrimony and estate to do with as they please.
The ensuing crisis of legitimacy led to instability and civil war. The long military interregnum saw the creation of more states and the consolidation of our federal system. But we also ended up with a system where the 36 states meet every month to share an ever-dwindling revenue base from oil. It has been a system rife with corruption where the governors feel they have no need to be accountable for how finances are spent. The same applies to the 774 local government areas.
The civil service, which was once considered the best in the Commonwealth – ahead of India and Singapore – is today a cesspool of graft and crippling ineptitude. Standards have plummeted beyond what any of us would have imagined two decades ago.
The higher judicature used to be one of the most respected institutions during even the worst days of military dictatorship. Alas, gone are the days of legal giants such as Teslim Elias, Adetokunbo Ademola and Mohammed Bello. As for the lower courts, nothing need be said.
While we have seen some improvements within the legislature, we are still far from where we ought to be. And as for the Fourth Estate, virtue has deserted virtually all of them. We are back to the days of yellow journalism, where truth is a commodity for the highest bidder.
At the heart of our current crisis of legitimacy is the fact that we inherited a 1999 constitution that was crafted by unknown persons. For all you know, the devil himself may have crafted it. In spite of all the good work that was done at the recent political confab, I fear that the most important constitutional issues were not addressed. The 1999 constitution, as far as I am concerned, is highly defective both in letter and spirit. Until we have a real constitutional settlement that truly reflects the will of all the nationalities of this country on an equal basis, we are simply deluding ourselves.
To all intents and purposes, we are all federalists now. But we in Nigeria have ignored one of the fundamental principles of federalism as espoused by theorists such as Kenneth Wheare, to the effect that federating units ought to be relatively equal in terms of economic development. A situation where the South enjoys enormous federal largesse and considerable industrial development while the North is largely impoverished accords neither with the imperatives of fairness nor the requirements of justice. It is certainly alien to the spirit of federalism as practised in the USA, Canada, Australia and India.
The North used to hold power as compensation and insurance for their low economic status. In a situation where, today, they enjoy neither economic status nor political power, you have the recipe for serious trouble. This is one sense in which we can understand the current insurgency in the North East. It is not, of course, a justification for it.
Far-reaching economic and political reforms are therefore needed if we are to overcome our deepening crisis of legitimacy. What is in question is no less than the Nigerian system as we have always operated it; a system that shows no compassion for the weak; that allows the powerful to act with impunity and that provides no redress for those who suffer injustice. Tackling these issues is a national challenge that transcends partisan politics or sectarian loyalties. The destiny of our country may well depend on it.
Obadiah Mailafia
