On June 1963, President J F Kennedy in one of his most famed speeches, told the Germans in the city of Berlin: “Two thousand years ago, the proudest boast was civis romanus sum (I am a Roman citizen). Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is: Ich bin ein Berliner…. All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words Ich bin Berliner!” This speech was made in some of the darkest hours of German history especially in the context of the Berlin Wall. This reflection on Nigeria’s democracy is inspired by Kennedy’s speech. Like Germany in 1963, Nigeria is on a crossroad and question on every lip is QUO VADIS NIGERIA?
The proposal in this write up is that the gloom of this time should not make us give up hope on Nigeria. A “dazzling vision of a new ‘Nigeria’ which will succeed where the present one has failed” is possible. We have a dream, our dream is of a future world, where the proudest boast will be: I AM A NIGERIAN, when people all over the world will queue to apply for Nigerian visas. As Nigeria celebrates its democracy today, I have assembled the choicest teachings of the grandmasters of democracy, hoping that their recommendations will help Nigeria navigate its wobbling leadership.
Nature as the Guide for the Best Type of Government
Thinkers beginning from the Greeks have always assumed that there is an ideal state which should serve as the model for all states. Nevertheless, these thinkers have almost always disagreed on what this ideal state would look like. Surprisingly, one of the few things they seem to agree about is that human nature should be the guide in determining which state is ideal. Usually, the disagreement is on whether the realization of the ideal state would either require the circumscription or promotion of man’s innate desire for freedom. Plato, for instance, prescribes that the ideal state would proscribe the quest for freedom which according to him is not only inherent in human nature but also the bane of every society. For Plato, the ideal state is a restrictive society. Hobbes, Bodin, Machiavelli and a whole host of latter theorists pitched their tent with Plato in seeing enforcement of consent as the measure of statehood.
Hegel, unlike Plato claims that the ideal state should allow the full expression of man’s natural desire for freedom. For Hegel, the arrival of the ideal state would coincides with the realization of freedom. In fact, Hegel went as far as arguing that history is linear and culminates with the realization of freedom.
Now, a careful study of the evolution of human history seems to favor Hegel’s interpretation of history over Plato’s, for if according to Hegel, the ideal state is made good in freedom manifested in the quest for the observance of human rights and equality then it is perfectly Hegelian to say that the ideal state is upon us.
Open Society and the Best System of Government
Two thinkers who did a lot to increase modern understanding of the basic structure of the best system of government are J.J. Rousseau and Karl Popper. An ideal state, Rousseau lectures his contemporaries, is a society organized around popular sovereignty. It is a state where the people rather than rulers are sovereign. Popper agreed and listed three features a state must attain to be considered ideal: freedom, equality and periodic election. He further reduced them to equality insisting that both periodic election and freedom are practical ways of expressing human equality. Popper in this light defines open society as a society ruled by laws emanating from the will of the people. Not a society based on the whims and caprices of some self-styled wise rulers. In order words, the more open a society is or the more of freedom and equality its members enjoy, the closer it is to the ideal state.
Democracy as the Best Type of Government
Marx and Hegel are the two scholars that contributed immensely to modern idea on the origin of the state. For Marx, the state originates from man’s desire to maximize his economic interest. Hegel contrary to Marx, opines that the most basic longing in man –i.e. the desire which gives rise to human consciousness−is not economic interest but the desire for equal recognition. In Hegel’s documentation, the state began with a bloody battle between first men who engaged in a mortal struggle for recognition. The outcome of that battle was a master-slave relationship as one of the contestants for fear of death submitted to life of slavery. Hegel explained that this is why the history of the world’s most primitive societies is a history of master-slave relationships.
In any case, master-slave state was an unstable society because it was unsatisfactory both to the master and the slave. The slave, because he is not recognized as equal by the master, and the master because he is not recognized by a person he considers his equal. This struggle for recognition was what led to the many wars and revolutions that have ravaged human history as both slaves and masters battle for recognition. The outcome is the invention of one ideology after another−Christianity, Communism, Socialism, Nazism, Islam, democracy, etc.−as he searched for the ideology that will satisfy his quest recognition. Hegel concludes that of all these ideologies only democracy satisfies man’s innate desire for freedom and equality. It follows therefore, that man in his long quest for a system of government most suitable to his nature arrived at democracy exhausted. Hegel was insistent that the idea of equal recognition by the state which is the hallmark of democracy is the apex of human ideological evolution and therefore, the best system of government for man.
Why Democracy is not working in Nigeria and What to do
Anyone who has given moderate attention to the evolution of human society in recent years will agree with Hegel that the desire for freedom or struggle for recognition is the major driver of history. The person will equally concede that democracy provides the most befitting satisfaction for mankind’s quest for liberty. However, one needs to make a distinction between democracy as an ideology and democracy as practiced by democratic governments. As an ideology democracy has no rival in the arena of political ideology but the same cannot be said when the difficulties involved in implementing the principles are taken into consideration. Key among these difficulties derives from the fact that democracy is a representative government. Now, nothing stops a representative, the president for instance, from becoming a tyrant when he knows he can get away with it. Hence, the fact that elected officials can flout the rules of democracy makes it the weakest form of government.
However, the only bulwark against such abuses is an enlightened citizens. Citizens who will be ready to stand by the principles of democracy and say no to bad leadership no matter where their ethnic, religious and political affiliations lie. That is, citizens who will go all out to oppose the abuse of power even at a cost to their own personal safety. For instance, these citizens will oppose a Buhari’s or Jonathan’s bad leadership irrespective of whether Buhari or Jonathan is coming from the North or the South. If this citizenship were to arise in Nigeria, then ethnicity, religion and state of origin will cease to count as they do today in Nigeria. This national citizenship was almost forged during the END SARS PROTEST but was scuttled by the lack of enlightenment among Northern youths who were used to highjack the protest because they felt Buhari’s presidency was under attack.
Thus as Nigeria celebrates its 22 years of uninterrupted democracy, all hands must be on deck to forged this national citizenship. The citizenship will help to checkmate the kind of abuse of power, political bigotry and ethnic jingoism that have become so rampant in Buhari’s government. Most, importantly, it will help to pull Nigeria back from the brink of failure because if Nigeria’s democracy fails, the consequence will be unimaginable. To say the least, with the technological advancement attained by post-modern man, the failure of Nigerian democracy will unleash the power of evil in the magnitude never seen before. The case of what bandits –though lightly armed – have done in Northern Nigeria and the havocs unknown gunmen are causing in the South are just a tip of the iceberg of the kind of chaos the failure of democracy engenders for Nigeria. Since our elites have failed, the onus is on ordinary Nigerians to take back this country. It is either now or never.
