• Friday, March 29, 2024
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BusinessDay

Our strange likeness for dictators in Nigeria

Buhari-APC

Prior to 2015, one of the major weaknesses Nigerians identified with Goodluck Jonathan, beyond his inability to tame grand corruption, is his supposed weakness or softness. The opposition was always quick to described him as ‘clueless,’ ‘soft,’ ‘weak,’ and a ‘coward’ with ‘weak biceps’ who was incapable of tackling the wide range of challenges faced by the country then. We may have forgotten now, but then, we often compared him with former president Olusegun Obasanjo who, during his rule, sent troops to kill and destroy entire communities in Odi (Rivers State) and Zaki-Biam (Benue State) after 19 security operatives were abducted and killed there.

 

Although the killings were condemned by the international community as clear cases of extrajudicial executions by the Nigerian military, which contravened the country’s obligations under international law, Obasanjo had defended the killings as ‘legitimate’ actions of ‘self defence’. During the Jonathan era, many Nigerians presented this incident to Jonathan as an example of how to deal with insurgencies at their roots before they got the opportunity to blossom. Not a few Nigerians saw Obasanjo’s actions as a show of decisive leadership compared to Jonathan’s indecisiveness and conciliatory approach to the Boko Haram threat.  So stringent were the attacks against Jonathan that even revealed on national television that he was under pressure from many Nigerians to govern like a dictator.

 

Nigerians clearly needed a strongman and have always pushed their leaders to become one. Despite an apparent preference for participatory, democratic governance, Nigerians harbour a deep and atavistic yearning for a ‘strong-man’ ruler or what Guillermo ODonnell refers to as delegative democracy. Being a vocal and assertive lot, Nigerians will criticize the authoritarian tendencies of their leaders, but they expect leaders to act swiftly or even brutally and bypass laws, if necessary, in pursuance of the common good. The tendency is to equate ‘effective’ or ‘good’ governance with dictatorship or authoritarianism.

 

That was the motivation for the election of Muhammadu Buhari as president in 2015. Although his antecedents were well known; that he was a brutal dictator who has no regard for rules or laws; who is ready to turn the demands of natural justice on its head and declare people guilty and then placed on them the burden of proving their innocence (which even when proven is not enough to free the suspect – a perfect example is Adekunle Ajasin); who is helplessly clannish and sectional in outlook.

 

However, to satisfy our artificial cravings for democracy, Buhari was packaged to appeal to our modern taste. He falsely told us he was a converted democrat and regaled us with the story of his Damascene conversion. But we did not really care. What we wanted was a strongman like Obasanjo or more appropriately, J.J Rawlings of Ghana who will be brutal with perceived enemies of the state regardless of what the law says.

 

And, of course, since coming to power in 2015, Buhari has acted true to character. He has perfected the art of disobeying court orders, refusing to release people he clamped to jail even when the courts ordered so in the name of fighting corruption. sadly, we clap for him!

He disobeys the constitution and laid down procedure by ordering a raid of the houses of top judges in a supposed fight against corruption and we clap for him. That encouraged him to take the fight a step higher by unilaterally suspending the Chief Justice of the federation even against the dictates of the law and the constitution. Still, some of us clapped. The army is ordered to massacre a religious minority and we clapped saying the group was a nuisance and needed to be dealt with. He also attempted to change the leadership of the national assembly by ordering a raid of complex. He nearly succeeded but for the smartness of the leadership of that arm of government.

He pleaded with lawyers to stop defending those accused of corruption and when they refused he famously informed them that “where national security and public interest are threatened the individual rights of those allegedly responsible must take second place in favour of the greater good of society.” Yet we still clapped.

Few days ago, he dropped all pretences to democratic norms by ordering the military and police to visit jungle justice on anyone seen attempting to snatch ballot box – and some people are still clapping.

Like I have argued in the past, Nigeria’s intelligentsia and thought leaders have been at the forefront of voices urging leaders towards authoritarianism.  At independence, the British bequeathed to Nigeria a federal state and a Westminster parliamentary system of government in which the Prime-Minister was only ‘primus inter pares’ and not an ‘all-powerful’ President. But the military incursion into politics in 1966 changed all that. The military boys, inexperienced in the art of governance, relied heavily on civil servants, academics, lawyers and politicians for policies and advice on governance. These civilians, however, only encouraged the military’s tendency to cultivate a centralized system of government with less devolution of power.

Towards the end of the first phase of military rule in 1978, Nigerians got another opportunity to fashion a new constitution.  The constitutional drafting committee, nicknamed ‘49 Wise Men’, was made up of the ‘crème de la crème’ of Nigerian academics, lawyers and politicians. Crucially, the 1979 constitution jettisoned the Westminster parliamentary system for an American-style presidential system of government, and vested of disproportionate powers with the federal government in a context of weak institutional restraints.

The reasons given for the shift were quite revealing of the push for democratisation and strongman politics. On the one hand, the committee highlighted the structural elegance and deeper democratic character of the presidential system. On the other, they also agreed with Leopold Senghor that sharing power between a President and a Prime Minister was not feasible in Africa. Presidentialism, the committee argued, was more compatible with African indigenous kingship/chieftaincy traditions. It also had the capacity to overcome the conflict of authority, personality and ethno-political interest between the ceremonial President and the Prime Minister, which citizens had witnessed in Nigeria’s First Republic. What was more, they reasoned that a developing country like Nigeria needed a strong president who could serve as a symbol of national unity and a custodian of the national interest.

Forty years on, some of the ‘49 Wise Men’ who drafted this constitution – which became a template for subsequent constitutions – have started to express regret for their decisions, describing them as naïve and misguided. However, the predisposition towards strongman leadership is not about to abate.

 

But what we have failed to learn is that all dictators – especially so-called repentant or converted dictators “eat out democracy from within.” I hope that by time we are done with Buhari or he is done with us, we will still have anything called democracy.

 

Christopher Akor