The call by President Bola Tinubu for West Africans to shun coups d’etat and anti-democratic tendencies led to this attempt to trace the cause of the failure of democratic governance in Nigeria and possibly suggest how to get this floundering Fourth Republic right.
The nostalgia for the days of military rule, that kindled the return of the military in some African countries like Guinea, Burkina Faso, Mali, Gabon, Sudan and Niger Republic, must be addressed and discouraged.
Those who want a return to the days of military dictatorship do not realise that they are asking for a return to the days when military rulers oppressed “bloody civilians” and took from their commonwealth with impunity.
Those who think that a military government is an alternative to the current imperfect democracy, or mere civilian government, do not quite know the danger they are herding Nigeria into.
Even if this democracy is not quite working as expected, a return to military rule is certainly not an option for consideration. It is a no-no. “It is unthinkable,” to borrow a phrase from former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
Apart from the intolerance to opposition or alternative views, the bigger problem is that the military governments contributed to the collapse of political ethics and economic wherewithal of the country.
They have a general lack of respect for due diligence, breach of conventional norms and insistence that actions must be taken “with immediate effect,” when the doer and the recipient may not have had enough time to think the action through.
That development is probably responsible for what appears to be a lack of due process and the absence of professionalism in practically every aspect of human endeavour in Nigeria. Nigerians just do not care to do things right anymore.
Anyone who insists on doing anything right these days is ridiculed. A driver once told his boss not to worry that he was driving against traffic on a one-way road because no one, including traffic officers, obeys the highway code anymore.
The boss, a no-nonsense man, fired him as soon as they returned from the trip. The interesting part is that the bum didn’t seem to think he had done anything wrong. He still holds grudges against his boss more than 10 years after his dangerous act.
A friend argued that civilian successors of military governments never had the opportunity to learn the art of politics and governance from the first class of civilian politicians, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Ladoke Akintola and Dr Michael Okpara.
Government technocrats, like Simeon Adebo, Jerome Udoji, Ahmed Joda, Peter Odumosu, Joseph Dina, Allison Ayida, Philip Asiodu, and Abdul Atta, hardly had an opportunity to pour their expertise into their successors. The military truncated that.
The academics that the military worked with as federal ministers and state commissioners as replacement for First Republic politicians are intelligent but they never had the opportunity to learn enough from the masters. All they worked with was their theories.
The inability of the First Republic politicians and their technocrats to tutor their successors, who therefore lacked requisite institutional memory, contributed to the current failure of the Fourth Republic that started in 1999.
Between four decades, from 1960 to 1999, the military ruled Nigeria for about three decades. This prevented First Republic politicians from tutoring their protégés. That became the loss and damage that has not been remedied.
As a result every Nigerian, including the military, is suffering the devastating effect. The military never sat under the feet of any political leader or mentor before gatecrashing into Nigeria’s political space.
You can only understand the failure of the process with what has happened in Tanzania, an African country that successfully transferred power from civilians to civilians without a military interregnum since Independence in 1961.
The military disrupted the progression of the democratic rule of the First Republic and began to run the affairs of the country, whereas they were not exactly trained in statecraft. It is not always that you have a General Ike Eisenhower (of America) or General Charles de Gaulle (of France) successfully transmuting into a civilian president.
The majors and the colonels who took over the reins of the government of Nigeria in 1966 demonstrated an absolute lack of understanding of administrative niceties and ultimately plunged Nigeria into a civil war that affected the politics and the economy of Nigeria, as well as the military institution itself.
Unfortunately, the “wobbling and fumbling” politicians of the Fourth Republic cannot do better because they do not have adequate tutelage in the art of governance. All they are doing is “winging it,” with the hope that they’ll somehow get it right.
No one can swear that any of the politicians in the South-West region of Nigeria has ever read any of the books of Obafemi Awolowo. You couldn’t say that the Azikiwes, Awolowos and the Bellos successfully transferred their institutional knowledge.
That is why you see politicians, bereft of governance ideas, holding lavish birthday celebrations in large stadiums, sharing useless items as poverty alleviation tokens and travelling abroad looking for mirages of Foreign Direct Investors, instead of coming up with policies that will reboot the economy.
The prolonged constitutional crisis that trailed the illness of Governor Rotimi Akeredolu and the needless show of strength between Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, and Sim Fubara, his protege and successor as Governor of Rivers State, are near tragic cases in point.
It became practically impossible for Akeredolu, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria and former President of the Nigerian Bar Association, to acknowledge the poor state of his health and accordingly inform the Ondo State House of Assembly of the same and yield power to Deputy Governor Lucky Ayedatiwa.
You may recall that, as the NBA President in 2009, Akeredolu had said, “All we are asking is that the vice president be sworn in as acting President.” This asking by Akeredolu was made when President Umaru Yar’Adua was terminally ill and the Northern Nigerian political establishment was doing its best to prevent Vice President Goodluck Jonathan from taking over even as acting President.
Also, the Ondo State Executive Council couldn’t bring itself to invoke Section 189 of the 1999 Constitution to require the Ondo State House of Assembly to set up a medical panel to determine if Governor Akeredolu could continue to be in office.
Fubara and Wike, his predecessor, reduced the governance of Rivers State to an infantile level. Fubara reportedly got a musician to sing “Dey your dey, make I dey my dey, nobody worry nobody,” a counsel for each to stay in his lane.
The message is for Wike, who started the childish trend, by getting a musician to sing, “As he dey sweet us, omo he dey pain them,” a pidgin English version of musician, Osita Osadebe’s song, “Osondi Owendi.”
Fubara chose to ignore Section 96 of the 1999 Constitution which provides that, “The quorum of a House of Assembly shall be one-third of all members of the House,” and presented his 2024 budget proposal to only four, instead of at least 11 members of Rivers State House of Assembly.
Nigeria’s politics has remained at this pedestrian level because the military intruded into the political scene.
