|
With Us, Democracy and Paralysis are Synonymous By Abdullah Musa
We have just completed some major segments of Presidential and National Assembly elections. We say major because the media has reported that certain elections for the Senate have been postponed in some Senatorial Districts. Of interest to us is not the result of who wins and who loses. What is of utmost importance to us is the process of elections and the motives behind it.
Democracy to my understanding is an imported concept. To put it more crudely, in the area I come from, Northern Nigeria, democracy was an imposition. Colonial rule gave birth to British Parliamentary form of Government, which is believed to be a form of democracy. It must have been thought that because we had our own monarchs, it would have been natural for us to accept and integrate the Parliamentary system. That was not to be, for in 1966, it was gunned down, to be replaced thirteen years later by an American type of Presidential System of democracy, which we are trying to consolidate now.
Since I am not a student of history, I do not know how we came to have monarchical system of governance prior to the invasion and our consequent enslavement by the Europeans. You may even venture to say that it is irrelevant to the present state of affairs since nobody would want to go back to monarchy. I do not intend to make any prescriptions here, for that would pre-suppose that I do know what others do not know when it comes to the question of governance. What drives me is a saying from the Prophet of Islam that a Muslim is not bitten from the same hole twice.
Prior to the commencement of the current elections, many of the candidates believed that there could not be free and fair elections. Many believed that INEC was not impartial and that it was doing the bidding of the current federal government. Elections have shown that while adults may decide to be irresponsible, the youths decided to be responsible by physically thwarting all efforts to rig them. The cases of Kano and Bauchi are what I have in mind. In a nutshell, we may believe we are on a long learning curve, in so far as democracy is concerned, or we are perpetually in a vicious cycle, from which we cannot extricate ourselves. In this particular election, many have lost their lives, houses of opponents torched, INEC headquarters at local level burnt, while even its national headquarters was not left unscathed. We are unable to distinguish between the chaff and the grain. Resort to taking laws into our hands may either be read as barbarism, or lack of trust in the due process.
If I am contesting elections, how do I know whether I lost or I won, since I doubt the credibility of the very agency that is saddled with the responsibility of conducting the elections and certifying those who succeeded? To my mind, once a candidate decided that the umpire is partial, he or she should not have been in the contest in the first instance. To come and say that you entered the election in order to challenge the results, shows that one acknowledges his un acceptability, and he would do all he could to throw spanner in the works.
It may be foolishness on our part to ask the question: why do people rig elections; whether by falsifying results, creating bottlenecks to stop opponents from voting and so on? To state the obvious is to say that people rig because the instruments of rigging abound. But the most important reason being that people do accept bad governance; for what is the use of rigging, if I am not to govern the way I want?
The sad fact glares us in the face: we do not have the capacity to ensure that those that come to power are answerable to us. The Local Government Councils, the State Houses of Assemblies, The National Assemblies, do not act in the capacity they are to act because in more than 90% of cases, they tow the line of the executive because their Party dictates that they should not challenge their own man. In the end, what obtains is collusion between various office holders, with the rest of the society thrown out either into the scorching sun or the arid desert.
Rigging and our response to it is dependent upon the type of people that we are. In the North, the greatest number of people does not fully understand the intricacies or even the basic structures of democratic systems. With the psychology of subservience to the monarchs still firmly entrenched within us, we carry it forward in our relations with elected officials. Without in the least being mischievous, I look at Bukar Abba Ibrahim as emperor-like. He may not have intended so, but the people he lords it over, have facilitated his becoming one. One would wonder how on the other extreme, the people of Oyo State facilitated the emergence of Adedibu.
I am sure mass communicators know the types of institutions that are necessary for the enthronement of democratic norms and their sustenance. Unfortunately, the Press is one such component necessary for the running of democratic system. The Press may feel that as a group, they have discharged or are discharging their obligations to the society they find themselves in. But have they? There are three foreign radio stations that do run Hausa service. One of them, belonging to our erstwhile Colonial power was broadcasting its election coverage from Abuja. Are we being honored or disgraced? It has become the norm that we have to tune in to one or all of these stations for us to know how we fare as a people each morning, afternoon and evening. For most part, these stations broadcast to us our failure as a people, the failure of our leaders, (which in fact is our failure) and the unending world conflicts which they ignite, and which they present to us to be seen as their eternal struggle to promote democracy. Who is free? Who knows where he or she is going?
Before the advent of Colonialism, our demands from those in authority were quite minimal. At that period, there was neither organized health delivery service, nor organized educational delivery service; in real fact, we were so to speak on our own. Of greatest significance however was the fact that our then rulers had nothing to do with the delivery of fertilizers to our farms. But today, we go cap in hand begging those in authority to give us subsidized modern fertilizer without which our modern seeds would not grow and we would remain hungry. In passing, we may draw our attention to an assertion by a Niger Deltan, that they have no time to plant anything in the name of agriculture, for they would die before the crops grow! What is their focus? Theirs is to dip their hands into oil money, a life without sweat.
This is the paralysis we are referring to in our own democracy. Rigging, thuggery, Corruption and all other forms of malpractice abound due to this acceptance of economic and social paralysis as away of life. We affirm by our own action that the public treasury is really not public in any form whatsoever. It belongs to those who are the pillars of the system: they range from the civil servants, the politicians, the Press, the cream of the business class, and surprisingly to a significant extent to prostitutes- male and female.
One undertakes to write all these in order to show people the tortuous way to be followed in order to enthrone democracy with minimal hiccups possible.
But who really needs democracy in its true form? I mean in the form that ensures equity, and fair allocative mechanism for resources? I believe very few. For one, in the decades when the military ventured into governance, top civil servants thrived better. Top military brass also became business moguls once outside the uniform; and the Press suffered numerous incarcerations. The average businessman, suffering from his own share of national paralysis, would like a democracy where he takes without giving; in short where he does not pay taxes. The farmer takes subsidized fertilizers but does not pay taxes. In our own type of democracy, we all are takers, there are no givers. And some people are out there working, buying crude oil from us and selling to us even the sanitary pads our wives and grown up daughters are to use, amongst the millions of other products from their endeavors. And they don’t relent in their aggressive media assault to make us hate ourselves, and to make us more dependent on government and thus indirectly on them.
Our media of today would not want to borrow a leaf from their Western counterparts. When the marauders from Europe and America decided to destabilize the Middle East for reasons best known to them, the main channels refused to criticize the move. Even where the disasters unleashed could not be whitewashed, they stood behind the savagery, painting the perpetrators as Statesmen in the mould of Churchill and Roosevelt.
Is the just concluded election imperfect? Is it full of rigging and intimidation? Not free and fair? Designed to perpetuate PDP in power? If the answer to all of the above is ‘yes’, I would counsel us to accept it. The fault is not with INEC, neither with the politicians. The fault is with us. We have been unable and unwilling to enthrone the democratic culture. The democratic culture may be helped by the strategy of a kasa, a tsare, a raka. But we would only have real democracy the day we agree to give more than we are willing to take. Well, no society makes giant strides without the right caliber of leaders. The gentlemen of the Press had consistently sold to the populace the wrong types of leaders because they (the Press) are driven by their bellies rather than by their conscience. Do not tell us to riot because elections have been rigged. We are along way from taming the riggers, but progress is being made: it was Kano only, now conservative Bauchi has tasted the honey. More will follow in future. What we need from you is to show us how to put elected leaders on the frying pan. For now, let Nigeria be. Yar’Adua, barka da sirdi.
Abdullah Musa Special Assistant to Kano State Governor On Societal Reorientation (kigongabas@yahoo.com)
|