Date Published: 05/29/09
TEN YEARS OF DEMOCRACY IN NIGERIA.
By Joe Igbokwe
When Nigerians were enthusiastically celebrating the routing of the military and the dawn of what came to become a democratic anti-climax in 1999, there was nothing to suggest that ten light years after, Nigerians would be so disillusioned, so perplexed and so alienated as to wish for just anything but a continuation of a system that has been perverted to serve as a pestilence on them and a meal ticket to those that never even believe in democracy and its noble concepts. As Nigerians watch in awe and wonder as those who forced their ways to the various supposed democratic offices employ same to inflict mass torture and legitimize all forms of crime and corruption, they are wondering if this indeed is democracy.
Between May 29, 1999 and May 29, 2009, Nigerians have been made to travel to hell and back while all forms of perverted acts have been stolen into the system to ensure that the people remain far from the very corpus of democracy. Nothing mocks our supposed democratic experience more than the fact that the people have been violently removed from the process. Both in selection and in application of the democratic tenets, the people have been ostracized and made to feel less important. Is it not curious that ten years into democracy, Nigeria is being made to live with the most macabre, absurd, vicious and fraudulent electoral exercises known to mankind? Is it not strange that ten years into democracy, the only business that thrives in Nigeria remains the mindless pillaging of the country’s resources by a thieving political class that have invented newer ways of reaping off the entire country.
Ten years of democratic practice has seen life in Nigeria plummet to an all time low while official corruption, nepotism, greed, avarice impunity, and all other vices that militate against the interests of Nigerians flower. An acute leadership atrophy had ensured that those occupying leadership positions in the country remain blighted in their approaches to governance. The narrow and selfish interests of the few that accessed political offices, mostly through fraudulent, violent and culled means, have successfully replaced the interests of the people for which they yearned and longed for democracy. In this wise, democracy has come to lose its flavour and meaning amongst Nigerians in the past ten years. While the sybaritic interests of those in government have grown to unmanageable proportion, the basic needs of the people have been neglected and treated with total disdain. This is even as the government in the last ten years has made such bounteous harvest in terms of revenue accruals from an oil boom that had been clearly misappropriated through the most obscene acts of corruption that has hit Nigeria since its independence.
Nowhere is the failure of the democracy project more anchored than in the conduct of elections. The three general elections held under the present democracy were acts that shame and mock democracy. What is more, the preceding elections always turn out better than the ones held thereafter, thus while the 1999 arranged elections were deemed better than the 2003 vote allocation, the 2007 farcical charade that drew worldwide opprobrium remains the topping to deliberate electoral frauds that were committed to preserve the most audacious and corrupt wing of what passes as the country’s political class in power. The recent macabre charade in Ekiti still points the way to what will clearly be another great electoral disaster in 2011, when the next general election is scheduled. The lack of will to reform the country’s electoral process is all too obvious in the actions of the principal beneficiaries of electoral fraud in the country who would always not mind another bazaar where they would be favoured and thus democracy continues to lose its most important trait and Nigeria continues to recede into the sheol of neglect and infamy in the comity of nations. This is why Nigerian leadership in the last ten years are mostly people that accessed their ways to power through the most and dubious means and why things continue worsening in Nigeria. It is heart breaking that while countries such as the South Africa, Ghana continue to gain in international recognition in Africa, Nigeria continues to draw derisive asides. Two clear demonstrations of the derisive low Nigeria has sunk were the invitation to the recent G-20 Summit in London where Nigeria was not even allowed an observer status and the decision of the new American President to visit neighboring Ghana while ignoring Nigeria that is increasingly becoming an international pariah for its lack of reformatory desires.
Corruption grows and thrives like never before in the past ten years. The members and officials of the PDP have been variously named in high-profile corruption cases and very often, they are treated with kids gloves, which serves an impetus to commit more atrocious acts of official corruption. Members of the two chambers of the national assembly and state assemblies now pre-occupy themselves with developing new fronts of reaping off the people as they pocket huge chunks of the yearly budgets to the chagrin of the greatly suffering Nigerians. Most states have become theaters of mind-bogging bazaars and the orgy goes on among those who have invested in the complete subjugation of the Nigerian electoral process to gain political offices in the federal, state and local councils through the foulest and crudest means.
The so-called fight against corruption in the past ten years has been one huge ruse that accommodates the gargantuan corrupt deeds of those in government and their cronies, family members and friends while going for the jugular of small fries and petty criminals. The former Obasanjo regime so mutilated the fight that it became a weapon for its dastardly manipulation of the 2007 general election that set dubious standards in electoral fraud all over the world. This says so much about the genre of corruption that has been promoted with so much energy and verve since May 1999. It interlocks the electoral process and tends to reward and arm the most corrupt and fraudulent against those that do honest enterprise in Nigeria. Ten years after the dawn of democracy, Nigerians are buffeted in all sides by gargantuan stories of how their so-called democratic leaders steal them blind and there is this general feeling that nothing could be done about the worsening corruption sweepstake. The incoming Yar’Adua government was to go steps further by appointing several failed former governors and corrupt deadwoods, with large questions of corruption trailing them into his cabinet. This is comparable to the dubious sustenance of the man that conducted the worst and most manipulated election in known history, Maurice Iwu in office when Nigerians feel he should be jailed to serve as deterrence to another in-coming electoral umpire that may aim to surpass his dubiety in future.
In ten years of democracy, Nigerians have been made to live with a permanent energy crisis, initiated and sustained by a twin-policy of official ineptitude and sectoral corruption. Non-availability of finished petroleum products and general insecurity, chaos and crisis are hallmarks of a man-made circle of fraud, inefficiency and extortion that has characterized the conduct of business in Nigeria’s oil sector in the ten years of the malfunctioning democracy Nigeria has been burdened since 1999. As the oil sector greases the Nigerian huge corruption complex, it is understandable why the industry has been afflicted by such unending encumbrances. Ironically, the last ten years of democracy has been a period Nigeria made more money from the sale of crude but most of these have been stolen by unconscionable officers of the state who hide under the banner of democracy to steal and impoverish the people.
The country’s infrastructure base has been greatly depleted. Nigerians roads have come to become death traps as the governments that have been in place in the past ten years have found it difficult to maintain the roads they met on ground. Power generation has plummeted to an all time low and still threatens to degenerate after ten years of witless groping in the dark. The health and education sectors have been overgrown with weeds just because what passes as government in the past ten years lack the willpower and the initiative to deal with the problems of these two critical sectors. Unemployment has assumed an endemic proportion, acute inflation, job insecurity and rising cost of living have combined to battle Nigerians to a state of stupor in ten memorable years of untamed suffering. Widespread insecurity, alarming spread of the vicious circle of poverty, an increasing state of fear and anxiety have all added to deal a vicious blow on hapless Nigerians who with mouth agape, wonder if this is really a democracy they longed for with all their breath! While an alarming 80 per cent of Nigeria’s over 140million citizens live under the poverty belt, life expectancy has dimmed to 39 years! A widening ethnic and religious mistrust has bred a continuous tinderbox while the worsening Niger Delta crisis points to an impending national crisis, which the so-called democratic leaders have clearly mismanaged these past ten years.
While there have been one or two faint spots of cheer like in the telecommunications sector and the show of courage by a section of the judiciary in recent times, it has been resounding failures in nearly every sector. While there have been one or two states, like Lagos, that have shown bright lights of success in these past ten years, most centers of power, from the federal to the local government, have been theaters of philandering, unbridled sodomy, endless orgy and looting centers, which have worsened Nigeria’s developmental problems in the past ten years. Nigerians are today torn between continuing on this charred road that leads to unending pains and suffering and starting a new quest for a future they can control and put to serve them. It has been ten years of mass poverty, hunger, privation, massive insecurity, political killings, treasury looting, horrible roads, general darkness, fuel crisis, official extortion, vote stealing, impunity, armed robbery, prostitution, kidnapping, educational crisis, deteriorating health, etc. These are surely not symptoms of democracy, in its original form, anywhere in the world but man-made charades that Nigerian politicians have imported to besmear and mutilate democracy in the past ten years.
Joe Igbokwe.
