Democracy and development in Nigeria: the missing links

Main article text

Introduction

It is the responsibility of every comrade and patriot of this country to animate the memory of Chima Ubani, a Nigerian patriot who kept hope alive and died fighting for the course of the oppressed masses of our people six years ago on 21 September 2005. We have not been consistent in marking it due to the pervasive apathy in the broad progressive movement in Nigeria. Here, I don't intend to interrogate the underlying causes of the apathy. It suffices to say that our inability to project the noble exploits of the progressive forces in this country and the consequent dominant current of reactionary forces constitute one of the missing links in our quest for development in this country. I now turn to democracy and development, two popular post-war concepts that have captured the imagination of social scientists and the development set. I do so with a great sense of responsibility because Chima Ubani stood for the total transformation of Nigeria, in other words, the development of the country within a democratic setting.

Understanding democracy and development: a theoretical excursus

Why democracy? Karl Marx (1972) says it is the solution to the riddle of all constitutions. In our contradictory governance milieu we have also latched on to democracy as the solution to our crisis of governance. Our solace is understandable having been victims of rapid military dictatorships. I do not need to bother you with the history of the development of democracy in the Western quadrant, to borrow the phrase of Guillermo O'Donnell. But two important things need to be emphasised. One is that democracy was built on the development of certain positive and negative rights – I mean socio-economic and political rights. O'Donnell (2008, p. 21) referred to this when he observed that:

The early construction of subjective rights, especially in the law of property and of contract for the exchange of goods and services, is the legacy of capitalism and of state-making, not of liberalism or political democracy, both of which emerged after these constructions had become, in the Northwestern countries, widely diffused and highly elaborated legal doctrines.

The second is that the complexion of democracy in countries which fit into that governance mould is a function of practice, which of course explains why there are various markers for democracy, namely: liberal democracy, partial democracy, participatory democracy, and delegative democracy. Importantly, one endemic theoretical problem that political scientists have to deal with is the theoretical bifurcation of democracy, that is, the difference between a political definition of democracy and a socio-economic definition of democracy. In confronting this challenge in a recent work, O'Donnell (2008, p. 113) cast his lot with the former. He argued that contemporary literature has diverse definitions of democracy and if the options were limited to the two above he would opt for a political definition of democracy because ‘the definition that conflates democracy with a substantial degree of social justice or equality is not analytically useful. Furthermore, it is dangerous: it tends to depreciate whatever democracy exists; and thus plays into the hands of authoritarianism’. He, however, entered a caveat to the extent that such a definition is adequate but not sufficient. I will opt for a socio-economic definition for a different set of reasons. Firstly, historically, if we take democracy as ‘unfinished business’, there is no need to run away from its liberating content as well as its dialectical continuity. Secondly, it is only in the context of a socio-economic definition of democracy that the nexus between democracy and development can be intelligible. Finally, the dominant perception of democracy by the electorate in Nigeria today is focused on the presence or absence of ‘dividends of democracy.’ Indeed, the argument in the literature is whether development should precede democracy or whether democracy should come before development. In his Political man, the social basis of politics, the renowned American scholar, Seymour Martin Lipset (1983, p. 41) argued for urbanisation, industrialisation, wealth and education as essential precipitates of democratic development. Education, he wrote, ‘presumably broadens man's outlook. Enables him to understand the need for norms of tolerance, restrains him from adhering to extremist doctrines, and increases his capacity to make rational electoral choices’ (ibid., p. 39). On wealth he wrote,

The general income level of a nation also affects its receptivity to democratic norms. If there is enough wealth in the country so that it does not make too much difference whether some distribution takes place, it is easier to accept the idea that it does not matter greatly which side is in power. But if loss of office means serious losses for major power groups, they will seek to retain or secure office by any means available. (Lipset 1983, p. 51)

This is largely true with regard to the development of the West where economic development preceded development of democracy. This argument held sway for a long while and served as an ideological rationalisation of authoritarianism largely in the Third World. The question really is whether the contemporary international community will permit the developing world to engage in the plunder of alien resources and the consequent social violence which underlay the Industrial Revolution and economic growth in the West. I shall return to this in subsequent sections of this paper.

A political definition of democracy emphasises mainly negative freedoms, namely: political liberty and civil rights – the right to association, freedom of expression, freedom to chose those to govern and the right to own private property. Robert Dahl (1998, p. 90) labelled regime types with these features as polyarchy, a short hand for representative government. Given these political attributes a country can qualify as democratic and in the context of post-Cold War diplomacy be open to external aids as well as direct foreign investment. If we take democracy as the highest expression of modernity as Samir Amin (2001) has argued, the question then is whether a bifurcation of the political and economic aspects of democracy is possible. In my opinion democracy is that form of governance which provides the material conditions for individual self-actualisation in the context of the community free from oppression and alienation in a given social formation. This connotes the prevalence of social justice, equality and freedom. My definition of democracy produces a convergence of the two schools. I do not think we should wait for economic development before we can govern ourselves according to the general will; I believe it should be both. The foundational ingredients of the general will should unleash development as well as democratic institutions of political management. This provides explanation for Nigerians' expectations that democracy must produce dividends in ways that reinforce our belief in the system. However, the Nigerian condition is that we have no development and have no democracy. Or let me charitably say our democracy is hemmed in Carothers's (2002) grey zone of unfreedom where elections are neither free nor fair; where vertical and horizontal accountability are absent; and the goal of governance is the aggrandisement of the base instincts of incumbent state actors. In the following section, I shall look at the reasons that, in my opinion, Nigeria is trapped in the deoxidised sphere of development and democracy.

The missing links

While Nigeria has been unable to reach the destination of democracy and development, a number of contributing factors can be identified. These include the absence of the general will, the citizenship question, the presence of two publics, the character of the post-colonial state, the global ‘jungle’, and leadership. I shall address these factors seriatim.

Absence of the general will

Thomas Hobbes (1998 [1651]) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are prominent contractarian theorists who engaged with the notion of social contract. Hobbes espoused the general will or the social contract and then invested authoritarian attributes in the Leviathan or the Sovereign, the political expression of that social pact. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's (1968 [1762]) treatment of the general will provides no room for its alienation. He says

How to find a form of association which will defend the person and goods of each member with the collective force of all, and under which each individual, while uniting him with others, obeys no one but himself, and remains as free as before. This is the fundamental problem to which the social contract holds the solution. (Rousseau 1968 [1762], pp. 60–61)

The social contract thus amounts to:

‘one of us puts into the community his person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will; and as a body, we incorporate every member as an indivisible part of the whole’. Immediately, in place of the individual person of each contracting party, this act of association creates an artificial and corporate body composed of as many members as there are voters in the assembly, and by this same act that body acquires its unity, its common ego, its life and its will. (ibid., p. 61)

And hence the republic or body politic is then born. In Nigeria I dare say there is no general will; what exists is the ‘British will’ for the protection of primordial interest, not solely British interest as originally intended in a neocolonial sense. This is why each section to the ‘Nigerian union’ tries to lord it over the other thereby upsetting the polity. Everyone is tired of the marriage and has yet to find a perfect solution to an ongoing marital squabble. Pro-democracy forces have over the past two decades prescribed a sovereign national conference (SNC), a conversation to arrive at some common articles of faith. Unfortunately, those benefiting from the prevalent unjust social order have severally subverted the path to national dialogue. The truth is that there may be no room for a talk before the Armageddon. Truly, the realities are clearly ominous.

The citizenship question

No event accentuates the citizenship question in Nigeria more than the current ethnic carnage in Nigeria's Plateau State, where the settler Hausa–Fulanis are ranged against indigenous Berom communities. Indeed, the citizenship problem in Nigeria is closely related to the absence of the general will or can be located within it. The thesis here is that if we as a people had a common agenda or universal minimum and we were truly a republic; whoever espoused that minimum would become part of the association or republic. The absence of the general will hinders our ability to create a transnational identity which is why Chief Obafemi Awolowo described Nigeria as mere ‘geographical expression’. Today, the dominant reference for Nigerians is their ethnic identities as Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, Ijaw, Edo and so on, in spite of constitutional provisions which create the formal modern criteria for citizenship. Chapter 3 (Citizenship) and Chapter 4 (Fundamental Rights) of the constitution contain essential provisions on citizenship and its consolidation. Citizenship is either by birth, registration or naturalisation. Under Chapter 4, Section 42(1) (2), the constitution states that:

• 1.

  A citizen of Nigeria of a particular community, ethnic group, place of origin, sex, religion or political opinion shall not, by reason only that he is such a person – (a) be subjected either expressly by, or in the practical application of any law in force in Nigeria or any executive or administrative action of the government, to disabilities or restrictions to which citizens of Nigeria of other communities, ethnic groups, places of origin, sex, religions or political opinions are not made subject; or (b) be accorded either expressly by, or in the practical application of any law in force in Nigeria or any such executive or administrative action, any privilege or advantage that is not accorded to citizens of Nigeria of other communities, ethnic groups, places of origin, sex, religions or political opinions.

• 2.

  No citizen of Nigeria shall be subjected to any disability or deprivation merely by reason of circumstances of his birth.

Due to the absence of the general will, these provisions in the basic law, to paraphrase W.R. Brubaker (cited in Stewart 1995, p. 65), have not become shared rights and obligations, legally rationalised and ideologically accentuated, and, as Femi Taiwo (2000, p. 99) puts it, lack ‘moral ideological content’.

The two publics dilemma

Peter Ekeh (1975) interrogated the civic realm in Africa and identified the existence of two publics, namely the primordial public and the civil public. The former, a native sector of moral obligation, and the latter a Western amoral sector ‘from which one seeks to gain, if possible in order to benefit the moral primordial public’ (Ekeh 1975, p. 100). This departs greatly from the civic realm in the West where morality is bound up – citizenship and duty are coterminous. This phenomenon, traceable to colonial times and spawned by the ideologies of legitimation by the African bourgeois, produces an endemic tension that is the bane of development in Nigeria. The public realm lives with the problem in which thieving public officials, either jailed or indicted, are given a red carpet reception by their native communities for accessing the largesse of the public sector seen as no man's land. This is the rationale for neopatrimonialism which underlies politics in Africa. Next is the character of the post-colonial state.

The post-colonial state

The character of the Nigerian state is, in the main, neocolonial. Like all neocolonial states, it lives to fulfil the accumulation goals of the metropoles as well as the compradorial bourgeoisies. By its nature, it is incapable of unleashing the dynamics of development. This understanding must have also informed Claude Ake's (2001 [1996], p. 1) observation that to assume that there had been a failure of development was misleading, because development was never on the table as the political conditions render it nugatory.

A major and contemporary defining element of the Nigerian state is oil, and the diverse ways in which oil has shaped the political economy of the Nigerian state have been described by Terisa Turner in her 1978 article, ‘Commercial capitalism and the 1975 coup’ as one involving multinationals, compradors and state elites. The Nigerian state by virtue of its sole reliance on oil is a rentier state. According to Hazem Beblawi (1990, p. 86), the latter is characterised by ‘a windfall wealth of unprecedented magnitude’. And as I have observed elsewhere, this is the sole incentive for Nigeria's continued existence and simultaneously underlies its indefinable nature. The state collect rents from sales of oil and merely distributes these revenues through the bureaucratic system where they are appropriated, misappropriated and stolen outright. It is the struggle to access the oil wealth that has made politics akin to warfare, or, in the words of the former Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, ‘a do-or-die affair’. This type of state is roguish and is incapable of engendering development. The state acts largely to entrench the two public orders, thereby living up to its character captured by Ralph Miliband (1969, pp. 265–266) as ‘primarily and inevitably the guardian and protector of the economic interests which are dominant in society. Its “real” purpose is to ensure their continued predominance, not to prevent it.'

The global jungle

The global environment, aptly qualified by the former Peruvian diplomat Oswaldo de Rivero (2001) as a ‘global jungle’, is one that cannot be discounted in scholarly endeavours that intend to scrutinise the development problematic. I have always argued that a deep appreciation of our problems in the Third World, especially Africa and Nigeria, will always reveal the overarching nature of the external dimension. Mercantilism, slavery and colonialism created the primary uneven development and the resultant divergence inherent in the unequal relations of production in the global capitalist economy (Weeks 2001). In this context, Africa and other Third World regions play second fiddle. To sustain those unjust relations in post-colonial settings, the forceful removal of unfriendly regimes was undertaken and praetorianism was ideologically justified. The relationship was further sustained through global governance by powerful international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) whose policies create what I have qualified elsewhere as secondary uneven development – those policies which entrench and reinforce the primary uneven development. To buttress these claims, hear what John Perkins (2004, p. ix) said:

Economic hitmen (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the global out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), huge corporations and pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization. I should know; I was an EHM.

The age of globalisation has been one of anarchy of capital on a global scale; this is de Rivero's (2001, p. 82) global jungle where ‘the undeveloped countries that failed to modernise technologically are not only unfit species. The individuals and social groups that are less skilled in grasping and using new technologies are too’.

There was however, a paradigm shift in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, namely the instrumentalisation of democracy to tame recalcitrant countries into the orbit of finance capital underlined by the old Wilsonian idealism that democracies do not make war on each other. And in this era the states have become ‘surrogate powers’ acting only as sentinels for transnational capital. I dare say here that the goals of development cannot be fulfilled by transitional capital, whether through corporate social responsibility or otherwise. The truth is in the nature of capital. Capital has no soul and therefore it cannot be saved. In the global jungle where it operates, ‘it is very jittery. It is apt to flee from a given country in a flash. Besides, it represents an almost virtual value, which no government can control’ (de Rivero 2001, p. 86). Largely, they deconstruct efforts of developing social formations, but the big powers are privileged to infuse a dose of financial socialism into their depressed economies in the form of bailout packages. The question is how can the developing countries achieve the goals of development in such a hostile environment? I will attempt an answer in the concluding section of this paper.

The leadership question

On 25 March 25 2010, reflecting on the new cycle of crisis which the ruling clique in Nigeria has caused the country, Dr Muazu Babangida Adamu, chairman of the Northern Governors' Forum, said Nigeria was a failed state. In his words:

Outside there, many people see Nigeria as a failed state. The argument that came up was that if in 2010, we are still killing one another, if in 2010, we cannot guarantee electricity, if in 2010, we cannot guarantee water, if our roads are still bad, our economy virtually comatose, many people talk of these variables as the elements of a failed state. We must not allow that to happen. (Daily Sun Online 2010)

Economically, Nigeria has been labelled a fragile state. Fragile states according to the World Bank are characterised by ‘weak policies, institutions and governance’. It is simply indicative of systemic failure which can only be denied by those who profit by the Nigerian chaos.

However, most high-profile analyses of the Nigerian condition see it as a problem of leadership. Chinua Achebe (1984 [1983], p. 1) leads in the pack of analysts in this regard with his seminal pamphlet, The trouble with Nigeria. He argued that the bane of the country was its harvest of bad leaderships.

The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with the Nigerian land or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which is the hallmarks of true leadership.

Jeff Haynes (2001) in his study of democratisation in the developing world referred to this as structural contingency. The strength of character of a leader could alter the course of a country's history in the most productive ways. Beyond the sheer force of personal example, I shall address the leadership question under a new category of vanguardism, which allows the appreciation of leadership as a socialised phenomenon rather than as an individualised phenomenon, which is often ephemeral and ceases to exist once the leader is no more. The word vanguard refers to the leading parts of a group. Vanguardism in concrete political terms refers to a core of advanced cadres in a movement, political in this regard, that shapes the philosophical content and form of the movement (Odion-Akhaine 2009, p. 431). The death of one person in the vanguard does not necessary lead to the derailment of the ideological principles that underlie the movement. This is why countries are able to preserve and energise a core of unimpeachable principles that continue to drive them through modernity. Today, rather than a leadership vanguard, Nigeria breeds ‘cliques’ or ‘cabals’ that have held the country hostage to their base and venal instincts fed by oil rents.

Conclusion: beyond the constraints

What are we to do to transform these counterproductive variables which I have talked about in the foregoing sections of this paper? Professor Kelechi Kalu (2005, p. 3) linked the absence of public leadership to the absence of the general will. To move beyond the colonial contraption he recommends a national dialogue which those of us in the pro-democracy movement call Sovereign National Conferences (SNC) and which we have agitated for since the Aka-Bashorun-led National Consultative Forum (NCF) in the late 1980s. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we cannot move the country forward without a new social contract. The other suggestions that I will add here in the form of solutions are contingent on the social contract.

A historical fact that needs recognition is that most of the ethnic nationalities in Nigeria are geographically contiguous; a fact which reinforces the materiality of the ethnic nationalities and provides a basis for its incessant politicisation in ways that are counterproductive to common citizenship. The absence of common citizenship drives the accumulation of national resources along ethnic lines. Therefore, the construction of a common citizenship as an empirical and juridical reality to deal with the indigene/non-indigene question can be resolved within the framework of a national dialogue. So also is the structural rearrangement of the economy. Once we have a country we can call our own, we can then square up to the task of navigating the international waters or through the global jungle where only the fittest survives. As Samir Amin (2001) has rightly noted, in that global jungle ‘the objectives of dominant capital are still the same – the control of the expansion of markets, the looting of earth's natural resources, the super-exploitation of the labour reserves in the periphery’. I have no doubt that given the abundant energy of Nigerians and the creative ingenuity of our people we can – as a people – stand tall in that jungle. To begin in earnest with the organisation of a transnational nation-building elite is desirable. The elite can construct a transnational consciousness on the basis of redemptive core values and enduring institutions. After all, the reification of nationalities as the basis for regional and individual relevance in Nigeria was first and foremost a result of the bourgeois elite's conscious search for legitimation (Ekeh 1975, pp. 103–105), not a natural creation. This is the challenge of our time. Surmounting it is the only vehicle, I believe, that will take us away from the nightmare scenarios that stare at us.

Note on contributor

Dr Akhaine, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Centre for Constitutionalism and Demilitarisation, currently lectures at the Department of Political Science, Lagos State University, Ojo, Lagos, Nigeria. His research interests cover human rights diplomacy, transition politics in Africa and global governance.

Acknowledgements

This briefing was first delivered as a lecture at the fifth anniversary of the death of Comrade Chima Ubani, 21 September 2010.

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