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I love scholars. When you listen to very brilliant ones you feed the soul and society is better for it. Given recent events in the country it is clear we have not sat down to define what we understand as democracy.
Prof Ali Mazrui of the “triple heritage fame” was clear on the point that we have not defined what we want from our embrace of democracy. Professor Claude Ake said as much. Renowned writer, Professor Chinua Achebe, put his observation in a book form. So many other scholars have done the same. It is not like we never heard the point these scholars made. It is so much about our mental state and the growing attitude or culture to always act on the spur of the moment.
The recourse has been costly. Lack of direction has turned out to be a terrible hindrance to progress. Our leaders just run the affairs of the state according to their individual whims and caprices, the outcomes have not been good at all. The country is on a downward slide. As would be expected, everyone is on the anxiety mode. Despite this, the leadership is running as if it doesn’t matter. Yet, by what we see it matters.
We begin with the very recent: just a few days ago, President Bola Tinubu returned from what the president’s spokesmen styled annual leave. Annual leave for a president of a poor country?
Purists would argue it is his right to take a vacation. This is true. The bigger truth is that not all rights can be taken if some considerations are taken into account. Expediency can make citizens give up portions of their rights for the good of the whole. A president of a crawling country, where citizens are killed in hundreds on a daily basis would do well to forgo leave or vacation.
It is his right but doing so would give more time to governance but more importantly within our context, act to inspire. In bad times such as we are going through, small gestures such as the one in question go a long way to build up the sagging psyche of the people and push them to remain steady, calm and very determined to confront the challenges facing the country. In this instance it didn’t happen and would not have happened anyway because of negative political culture as already entrenched in the country. There is no good example on faithfulness to duty and national cause. We are hooked on a rat race. This is most regrettable.
The worst would be the fact our president travelled to a foreign country to spend a holiday of about one month. The duration is above the constitutionally stipulated 21 days during which our president can be away without transmitting a letter to the National Assembly handing over power to the Vice President. Our president in this case in question didn’t write to the Assembly nor did he do a hand over in any form.
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He just eloped. Eloping in a democracy isn’t considered a fair deal because a country must be seen to be under firm leadership all the time. Vacuum can be dangerous. We do it so frequently, never concerned about predictable negative consequences. Sane societies don’t condone this. A president going into another country to relax is viewed very seriously.
In the first place, it leaves the world with a distasteful paradox, and creates a sovereignty within a sovereignty. The world of political scientists have since agreed this picture is very ugly. We here agree. Nothing reduces the prestige and placing like the development in question. It is worse for an unproductive country to see the leader enter developed countries in the garb of a play boy. Africans lament poor treatment often extended to citizens across the globe but unknown to many among the remote causes is the bad behavior of the apex leader and those of the ruling class as a whole.
When leaders of independent countries leave their countries to roam the streets of the developed ones, it does not only tell a sordid story, it conveys a statement of backwardness and of resignation. It carries a stigma.
There are so many examples to draw from but for issues of limited space we take few, and draw our conclusions. In times of national crisis, decisions should be collective. It is not so in our case. We have been told about reforms. Nobody told the citizens what form it would take and what the processes would be like. The President draws his plans, picks a few people to give the interpretation and that becomes the national policy. Before we know it, citizens begin to drop dead because of suffocation and hunger.
The crux of democracy is not participation though very important, it is the preservation of the people’s will or sovereignty as exemplified by the sanctity of the entire electoral process. Internal democracy is dead. The political parties are artificial or mimicry of what ought to be.
There is no predictability to our democracy pattern whereas certainty is of much value. Apart from helping political parties plan, economic growth is difficult when people would have to grapple with quick fixes. But this is what we have in the country. As we speak candidates who have set themselves up to run in the coming elections slated for January and February next year are not certain if they have met the qualifications or not.
I listened to former Singaporean President, the father of that modern country, Lee Kuen Yew and what he said of democracy and development. He said democracy is good, but countries who embrace it must first sit down and decide for themselves the nature of their democracy. He did so in Singapore and many of us believe this experience should apply to us in Nigeria.
