Guardian

MAY 29 is here again! As the 2013 edition of what has become christened as Democracy Day in Nigeria is around the corner, it is only reasonable, yes, logically imperative, that an attempt is made to appraise the context and the circumstance of the fourteen-year journey so far, a telling peregrination comparable to a jig-saw puzzle, best qualified as grit-assaulted, bump-infested, fear-inducing and yet awe-inspiring or simply smarting with all the possibilities of hope. There is no doubt that this year’s celebration of the nation’s Democracy Day is one of a great milestone. It is unique in more ways than one.

First, for our fellow compatriots, whose sense of national pride, of implicit altruism is one beyond the reaches of a lip-service conviction, it is a clarion call for national integration. It is a caressing drumbeat for fanning and rekindling the fading embers of Nigeria’s Unity. Don’t forget, we are told in our national anthem, which was adopted in 1978, with the music composed by Mr. Ben Odiase, then Director of music, Nigeria Police Band, that, as Nigerians, we are “one nation bound in Freedom/Peace and Unity.”

Here, our sense of history takes us back to 1914 when Lord Lugard, a British administrator and adventurer, made the impossible to become possible in his midwifing of a marriage of convenience, not of love, the coming together of strange bedfellows, as it were, exemplified in his so-called amalgamation of the Northern and the Southern protectorates. Between 1914 and 2013, a period of ninety-nine years, a lot of water, as the popular parlance would put it, has passed under the bridge. The chroniclers of the cultural, social and political histories of our country’s evolutionary process(es) have done justice to this particular aspect of our nationhood, as evidenced in their documentations— be this in archival, electronic or print formats. As such, it is not the intention of this writer to rehash or simply begin afresh a long narrative of our national history couched in ideational or stylistic pyrotechnics in one full swing, given the need to save time and space and, more importantly, to avoid the oddity of this piece being smeared in the dirt of repetitiveness. Be that as it may, it suffices to say that the founding fathers of Nigeria’s nationhood, who, in their life times, had imbibed hook, line and sinker, Lord Lugard’s (un)redeeming gospel of national unity through unequal yoking of the disparate ethno-linguistic nationalities in the ‘Niger Area’ will definitely not be happy in the dead silence of their graves to hear or be told that their labour of love, quantified as national unity, is no more than a sheer paper work, after all! In other words, that is, flowing from the foregoing, it is obvious, without any iota of doubt, that the May 29 Democracy Day -– just a stone’s throw from now, has implications for Nigeria’s grandstanding preparation for what its political actors have tagged a Centenary Celebration billed for 2014.

Second, and that, with all its subterranean machinations and political implications, is the do-or-die struggle for the soul of 2015, an uncertain political goalpost, which, as we noted of its predecessor in figures, is more or less another stone’s throw from now.

It is instructive that, since May 29, 1999, when the bus of Nigeria’s nationhood once again beckoned to democracy and got kick-started, following, if we may be right, the final death song or nunc dimittis   of the country’s long and dreary season of festering aberration in military imperialistic arrogance, the services of a number of drivers to power the bus, together with their conductors or acolytes, have been engaged but the manner in which the vehicle had been and is still being driven, with the passengers largely gullible and unperturbed in the scheme of things, is a source of worry.

At the point in time, when the likes of a Buhari, an IBB, an Abacha and, indeed, other members of the ‘Soza’ Boys’ Club began to overreach themselves to high heavens, to daub themselves in stinking colours of repressiveness, expressed in the trampling on the fundamental rights of Nigerians, at will, the people, in their hues, rose in unison to say no to the soldier and the power of his gun. Yes, with a remarkable glee, power changed hand and has remained so in the hands of civilians ever since. Notable, too, was what has been perceived as a paradigm shift in political equations in the land. At the federal or national level, Chief OBJ and Alhaji Yar’Adua (of blessed memory) had called the shots. The acclaimed man of luck, our GEJ, has been saddled with calling the shots since two years now (2011-2013), that is, going by the prescriptive capacity of his tenure, outside what may be likened to the season of curacy in his political mentorship.

Any objective assessment of the current administration, under the helmsmanship   of Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, devoid of asinine politicking, satanic conjecture or mindless propaganda, for instance, ought to acknowledge the existence or otherwise of certain enabling democratic structures designed to either advance or undermine the inherent grace and sanctity long associated with democratic practices all over the world. Whether we are talking of the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC), or of the executive, the legislature, the judiciary, the electorate, or the opposition, name it, one thing stands out clear: are these sub-sets or functioning parts of the democratic practice living up to their billings? Are they making right choices in line with the demands of democratic tenets as spelled out in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria?  And so on and so forth.

To amplify or buttress the point being stressed, we shall comment briefly on one or two democratic structures, listed above. In the case of the executive arm of government, there has continued to exist, a yawning gap between electioneering promises and their fulfillment at the local government, the state and federal levels. Greater attention is paid to the exercise of executive powers by those wielding them, even for their own sake, than to the need to ensure that structures are put in place geared towards conferring dignity and value to the wide range of humanity, the less-privileged fellow Nigerians still wallowing in the threshold of poverty, deprivation and want. There is no doubt that the Jonathan administration has put in place a number of strategies designed to address the needs of the masses of this country. If surely, there is assuredness, transparency and probity in the execution of the SURE Programme of the Federal Government, the Transformation agenda of Mr. President, without the undermining effect of corruption and its sundry accomplices throwing spanner in the works, then of course, all will be well. It is one thing to have a good plan for a project; it is another entirely to have people imbued with the fear God, who can be trusted to deliver the expected democratic dividends in their subsisting capacities, anywhere, anytime. Majority of our Governors, Nigerian Governors, spend much time seeking for unnecessary political relevance under the auspices of the Nigeria Governor’ Forum.

A few of them, like Fashola, Oshiomhole, AKpabio, Obi, Suswam, etc are working and the indelible pieces of evidence, in supporting this assertion, in their respective States are there for people to ascertain or verify.

As we mark the Democracy Day, this year, on Wednesday, May 29, 2013, let the government refrain from paying lipservices to matters of urgent national concerns. The electoral umpire should be strengthened in all ramifications to make it “operationally independent”; the Judiciary should live up to its role as the last hope of the common man by ensuring that errant, corrupt judges are sanctioned in line with the relevant laws of the land. The opposition parties, on their own part, ought to see criticism as a mediation, not necessarily as a platform for engendering strife and heating up the polity in destructive, rather than constructive, engagements. In every situation that throws up itself as an opportunity for political debates, we must not lose sight of the fact that, in all cases, the winning wand is tilted in favour of superior arguments rooted in convincing ideational contents, not sloganeering or mere propaganda.