The long and short of this intervention is that there is democratic apologia in Nigeria, by which is meant that the notion of democracy in the country is not something that the majority can relate to. To the extent that Baba Obasanjo is the leading voice on the strangeness and utter irrelevance of the reigning idea of democracy, and given his status as an individual republic within the Republic, as well as the advantage of ample resources, he can lead the process of a junctural interrogation of the concept of democracy.
The gap between democracy and the dividends associated with it between 1999 and today has called the concept of democracy into question. So much money is spent on conducting elections whose outcomes nobody believes, including the winners. The more elevated ones among the winners, such as the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, put the system on the couch for critical re-examination. Unfortunately, the Justice Uwais Committee took a structuralist-cum-institutionalist approach to the assignment, making recommendations that took the problem back to its very promoters or beneficiaries to resolve. It was predictably dead on arrival. That fate would not have been the case if they experimented on a conceptual tussle with democracy itself.
Today, the problem has grown wings. It is not only that elections and their outcomes are suspect, it is also that the winners have no sensitivity to any values hitherto considered sustainable of the social. Above all, once in office, ‘they’ have successfully redefined development strictly in terms of giant roundabouts or similar physical projects from which they can make enough money with which to rig the next set of elections. Concentration on disjointed infrastructure provisioning from calculated motives, has meant that the project of wielding together diverse cultural groups into a ‘collective will’ called the nation is ousted from the agenda of democratic politics. Similarly, state building is knocked off the agenda too.
So, the citizens of a basically pre-industrial society as Nigeria are simply on their own, with no one dominant value framework acting as the glue. It is what accounts for the chaos and anarchy that define Nigeria. Some people somewhere could decide to take the laws into their own hands against whoever they consider to have infringed on some loosely defined norms and the Nigerian State will have nothing to say or do about it. For instance, Nigeria must be one of the very few places in the world where profiling others does not constitute a crime. When a more comprehensive list of these features is drawn up, it speaks to a national power elite that has forgotten about its most primary responsibilities: nation building and state building. Evidence of the abandonment of nation and state building automatically implies a state of democratic apologia. That is: democracy has become a show, a false event, a situation which raises the question of whether it can remake Nigeria. The remaking of Nigeria being the essence of the democratic idea in the first case.
But that is still a tough question to answer. Like every other concept in social analysis, democracy is contested too. In other words, those who might be tempted to argue that democracy is not remaking or cannot remake Nigeria would have to clarify what meaning of democracy they are working with.
If they should choose to refer to the Greek city states, they would quickly meet a conceptual roadblock. In the absence of a standing army, ancient city states relied on able-bodied male citizens to defend each of them. To induct the average citizen into the idea of soldier-citizen, a concession was awarded that made all such citizen-combatants members of what we would call the legislative structure today. In the Greek city state, this did not include slaves, visitors or strangers and women. This is what the remarkable African scholar, the late Archie Mafeje, saw as the problem with this model of democracy. In his 1995 book chapter sub-titled “breaking bread with my fellow travellers”, he made the point that, in the history of democracy, there have always been people and non-people. His was a post-French Revolution assessment but, empirically, he was also referring to the ‘direct democracy’ model in ancient civilisation, in which women, slaves and strangers were excluded.
Even those who would start with the trite notion of democracy as government of the people by the people for the people would have to situate that definition. When they do that, it would be found that it is an impossible definition. In the United States of America where the definition was advanced, the concept of the people was not settled. Blacks, slaves and women were not part of the people then and this is very much so till this day. Otherwise, we the world would not have had to contend with the #BlackLivesMatter inspired global insurgency over racist policing practice in 2020. In many parts of the world, this question hangs as a sword of Damocles on humanity.
In any case, the view of democracy, which eventually prevailed in the debate on it in America was never about the government as provider but as a suspected but necessary evil. It is for that reason that the American State was assigned governing minimally in relation to relatively prosperous citizen whose only need for anything called the state was and is to block the redistributive impulse about democracy. This is very clear in the massive literature on the emergence of democracy in America. It was as if the Americans were already anticipating the communist phenomenon that early, pragmatically using the territorial expansiveness of the emergent American State to restrict democracy to a representative version. This version is what conceptual consumers in much of Africa, for example, have absolutised as a universal framework. It is not. It is democracy with American characteristics, just as the Chinese took a hard look at socialism only to conclude that ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ is what is acceptable.
In Africa, colonial subjugation took away mental and practical skills, and the culture of problematisation among scholars and activists. So, we endlessly consume concepts without insisting on their domestication. People like Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, who argue that democracy is alien to Africa, have a point except that, as with most things with him, he gets stuck in fragmentary analysis.
Otherwise, he would have pursued the argument to its logical conclusion. That would have been to say that there’s no such thing as democracy, which has a timeless meaning universally. That democracy is what we make of it and that what we make of it is what our civil society says it is. The civil society is the segment of the society assigned the role of the construction of meaning through intellectual and moral leadership.
Is it possible that Baba Obasanjo stopped short of pursuing the argument in that direction because his past is weighing heavily on him? This is very possible. In 1978 when Obasanjo was a military dictator, he said Nigerian students would be mistaken if they thought that they could bring down the government of the day like their counterparts in Europe. A whole set of policies after the ‘Ali Must Go’ protests inaugurated the State’s decapitation of universities as centres for the production of the critical mass that we call the civil society. Back in power between 1999 and 2007, he devasted the university system even further. Apart from neoliberalism, he went to the extent of declaring how he would flood Nigeria with private universities as a strategy of undermining the capacity of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to ‘hold the public universities system to ransom’. Nigeria today is awash with private universities, most of which are, however, surviving on academics from the public universities. And Baba Obasanjo did all these in spite of Professor Akin Mabogunje’s stark warning in 1997 that there’s nothing like the civil society in Nigeria, because Nigerians are not citizens but property of one local notable or the other. Mabogunje was simply saying that devastating the universities meant undoing the idea of civil society and, by implication, democracy. It was and still is the sort of profundity one gets from only people in Mabogunje’s generation, whether they are in Economics, Geography, History, Literature or wherever.
Mabogunje who, as everyone knows, is late now, delivered the paper in question in 1997 at the Inaugural Session of the Institute of Civil Society, which was the deceptive platform the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) assumed, so as to divert Abacha’s attention from it. Many of us thought that being Obasanjo’s friend meant that Mabogunje’s paper would form a core of Obasanjo’s second coming in 1999. It has been a case of waiting for Godot.
The relational implication of Mabogunje’s insight is Obasanjo’s complicity in the lack of a ‘democracy with Nigerian characteristics’ once he (Obasanjo) had a hand in killing the kind of universities that could have turned Nigerians from the property of local notables to free thinking citizens, who could have defined democracy contingently from a Nigerian sensibility. Without that critical mass, everyone, including the professors and experts who are supposed to update and guide the rest of us, talk of democracy as if it is jollof rice – something to be eaten without any further questions.
This is a tragedy for any country, because what the examples from the ancient and modern models of democracy above show is that democracy is always a product of contingent definition, and never a universal definition. In the post-Cold War, intellectual promoters of the now badly wounded liberal internationalism, such as Francis Fukuyama, advanced a very specific reading of the end of the Cold War as the end of history. By that, he meant ‘the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’. This 1989 essay was a bold claim which, unsurprisingly, generated its own debate, until Professor Samuel Huntington struck with the ‘Clash of Civilisation’ arrows. In the end, Fukuyama’s must be the attempt at theorising the Post-Cold War order with the shortest lifespan. It died almost instantly, hardly breathing much after the fatal stabbing by Huntington, who charged him with ‘the errors of endism’. Huntington’s charge against Fukuyama is part of the unending battle between liberals like Fukuyama and reformed Realists (or emergency constructivists such as Huntington?), which we cannot go into here.
In the context of the foregoing, we are confronting a twist. This how, all said and done, Obasanjo is still far ahead of the rest of us, especially if he has realised how he undermined the construction of democracy in Nigeria previously by messing up the universities which produces the critical mass with which a hegemonic meaning of democracy is possible. And if he would now invest on that agendum as a statesman that he prefers to be known today.
Obasanjo would have many followers if he should choose to move in that direction. A set of very established Nigerian political/social scientists have, since Professor Eme Awa, been working in NEC/INEC, carrying out conceptual experiments on elections and electoral practices. The Attahiru Jega tenure beefed up this team. Reassembling all those who participated in those efforts at innovation in the case of elections might be the starting point for Obasanjo or whoever the current crisis of democracy in Nigeria has thrown up, who finds purchase in this strategy. That ‘team’ has to be the starting point because they are no longer strangers to situated nature of meaning. They are already more in tune with the idea that accepting fixed, universal, timeless meaning is a return to the Cartesian subjectivism that produced empire and colonialism. And, furthermore, that any polity in which a concept such as democracy begins to have a fixed meaning is dangerously manifesting a sign that someone somewhere has successfully imposed his, her or their definition of the concept by helping to create an ineffectual civil society cum ‘historic bloc’ capable of fine-tuning crucial concepts.
But, as long as a concept such as democracy has no cultural coordinates by which the average African can pinpoint where there has been an infraction or not, the government of the day will always go scot free with murder. Yesterday, the cry was against Buhari. Today, it is against Tinubu. Tomorrow, it could be worse. So, the question of whether democracy is remaking Nigeria or can remake Nigeria would have to first answer the question of what sense of democracy. Otherwise, we would be wasting billions conducting elections that fulfil all righteousness but have nothing to do with democracy.
The long and short of this intervention is that there is democratic apologia in Nigeria, by which is meant that the notion of democracy in the country is not something that the majority can relate to. To the extent that Baba Obasanjo is the leading voice on the strangeness and utter irrelevance of the reigning idea of democracy, and given his status as an individual republic within the Republic, as well as the advantage of ample resources, he can lead the process of a junctural interrogation of the concept of democracy. He has a constituency from which he can reassemble some social scientists who are not totally new to interrogating received ideas. This way, he (Obasanjo) can write his name into History because a new formatting of democracy will so easily catch popular acceptance in a manner irresistible by any force on earth. That is how this achieves writing his name into history which he craves a lot but which his present approaches to politics cannot achieve for him.
Adagbo Onoja is a critical geopolitics researcher at Wits.
