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Song of Jonathan: “Our Enemy Democracy” By Ogaga Ifowodo

August 29, 2011

Since President Goodluck Jonathan revealed his great idea for saving our democracy by way of a single six-year tenure for the president and state governors, a lot has been written ridiculing him for his astonishing misplacement of priorities.

Since President Goodluck Jonathan revealed his great idea for saving our democracy by way of a single six-year tenure for the president and state governors, a lot has been written ridiculing him for his astonishing misplacement of priorities.

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There have also been a few voices in his support, pointing out, however, that it is not Jonathan’s original idea. The compelling logic of the proposal is, to put it mildly, dubious. Because of the crippling cost of elections, from primaries to the polling booth, and because of the selfish desire to remain in office at all cost, governors and the president are unable to govern. To cure these two ills with one pill, Jonathan revived an idea that, we are told, all the political parties save the Action Congress had divined, and which was only waiting for the doctor-president courageous enough to administer the bitter medicine.

On reading about Jonathan’s prescription I could only exclaim, The mountain heaved and quaked but gave birth to a mouse! I simply could not stop recalling that tale of great expectations and commensurate disappointment inimitably told by Aesop over three thousand years ago. The mountain, abode of the gods, the master fabulist narrated, went into labour, and the earth trembled and the air howled with frightening sounds. Then suddenly all became calm and the mountain peak split open.  Only to expel “a tiny little mouse.” But while the awful spectacle went on, the people, terrified, all “got down on their knees and began to pray.” Some even “fainted from fear” and others “couldn't take their eyes off the mountain” as they wondered how the spectacle would end.

True, I had no expectations of Jonathan high enough to form a mountain. Neither as deputy governor and then governor, nor as vice president and then president by default. If you do not consider the debacle surrounding the constitutional succession of the dead or nearly dead Yar’Adua by Jonathan equal to the mountain’s cataclysmic birth pangs, how about the clang and clamour over his running for the office on his own steam? Or the last minute scramble by INEC chairman, Attahiru Jega, to save the April presidential election after an abortive beginning? What about the bomb blasts and the burning streets that bracketed the election? Allegorically, the mountain heaved and huffed for Jonathan to be president. All in the hope of change, any change. Given the crude majority-takes-all credo of the political class, it became a test whether or not a minority could ascend to the leadership of the country. And because this minority candidate happens to come from the Niger Delta, from whence the oil and gas flows to fund the banditry called the government of Nigeria, the expectations were high, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that he might rouse himself to steer a new and enabling course.

And after months of post-inauguration lethargy, out came his first path-breaking idea. What worries me most about it, and which has not received as much attention as the charge of misplacement of priorities, is the assumption about democracy that informs it. Democracy, Jonathan asserts by his solution, is inherently expensive. And so he joins the odious chorus of senators and representatives who have been singing that song to justify their looting of the treasury in the guise of salaries and emoluments. Consequently, they no longer speak of “the dividends of democracy.” That, you might recall, was the deafening refrain soon after the military reluctantly withdrew to the barracks in 1999. Now we hear only of “the cost of democracy.”And when Jonathan brings the weight of his office, the symbolism of the first policy change he desires as his own man, to bear on this malevolent idea, he says in essence that our enemy is democracy.

To Jonathan, as the plundering “politicians” who breathlessly intone this cost of democracy song, it is not the philosophy (or absence of it) and practices of the bankrupt parties, not the dearth of democrats and statesmen that people them, but democracy itself that is to blame. But how would Jonathan’s single-tenure magic rate in a parliamentary system, the sort practised in Britain? Under that system, there is, strictly speaking, no limit to tenure, that being subject to the will of the people as expressed in scheduled and called elections. So Margaret Thatcher was prime minister for eleven years, and Tony Blair for eight years. But they both had to have their mandates reaffirmed by the electorate, in the case of Blair three times in just eight years. Are we to assume that democracy suffered as a result? That either prime minister lost the sense of statecraft and governing priorities due solely to the distractions wrought by the process of renewing their mandate?

On the contrary, periodic elections, especially in a parliamentary system, are a cost-efficient way of holding those in power accountable and maximising any good of which they are capable. To take a local example, it ought to be possible for a Governor Raji Fashola to be returned to office for as long as his electorate retains confidence in him. For the most urgent tasks confronting a state governor or the president in a stone-age country like ours are long-term in nature. Certainly, not tasks to be reasonably completed in four or six-year cycles. Think here of such heavy infrastructural needs as an integrated public transport system involving rail, road and water. Think as well of such other  massive projects as electricity and an industrial blueprint; standard schools for pre-school, primary and tertiary education; urban renewal; canalisation, central sewage collection and treatment; pipe-borne water to every home, whether in the village or on the fortieth floor of a city high-rise; greening and humanising our towns and cities through the proper paving of streets (complete with sidewalks), parks and gardens, to name just a few. How long must any of these take from planning to actualisation? Why should any governor or president dedicated to one or more of these crucial needs not be given enough time to achieve his or her goals subject to approval in periodic elections?

If democracy has become a high-stakes casino game played by Nigeria’s so-called politicians, whose fault is it — the people (democracy) or the politicians (the anti-democrats)? Why does Jonathan not seek other ways of curing the evils of our casino democracy? He could, for instance, start by implementing to the letter the findings and recommendations of the Uwais panel on electoral reforms set up by up by his former boss, the late Yar’Adua.  Or by setting the nation to the task of restructuring a warped and predatory post-colonial entity, which has far better prospects of instilling the requisite sense of governance as nation-building, as service and not an avenue for graft.

The question of how Nigeria has come to symbolise the notion of democracy as prohibitively expensive is not hard to answer. It is a fairly recent phenomenon, the ills of the first republic aside. It is the outcome of a total rejection of the “demo” in democracy, that part which speaks of civic duty and responsibility.  The roots of this rejection lie deep in a dysfunctional political structure inherited wholesale from a colonial past whose goals were conquest, repression and blind exploitation. Under such a system, Jonathan’s single-tenure solution proves diversionary and a disservice to democracy properly called. Since a single tenure can neither imbue vision nor selfless service, nor manufacture democrats, where shall it all end? A one-party system (even cheaper)? A consensus candidate (the primaries bazaar avoided)?  Or, damn it, a benevolent dictatorship (away with costly democracy once and for all)?

By withdrawing faith in the people, a process that inculcates the genuine spirit of democracy, Jonathan’s solution reminds me of another for the then divided Germany famously lampooned by Bertolt Brecht in a poem entitled “The Solution.” I have taken the liberty of rewriting its concluding rhetorical question (and urge the reader to consult the original): “Would it not be easier/For Jonathan/To abolish democracy/And install its opposite/which is cheaper?”

 

· Ifowodo teaches poetry and literature at Texas State University in the United States.

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