Nigeria is catching the world’s attention again; sadly, for the wrong reason! The #EndSARS protests that started two weeks ago attracted global reactions. The government’s heavy-handed response, particularly last week’s military attacks on protesters in Lekki, Lagos state, which left some dead, provoked condemnation from political leaders across the world.
The proximate cause of the protests, led by Nigerian youths, was a viral video allegedly showing an officer of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) killing a man in Delta state. Thus, the #EndSARS protests mirrored the #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations, which also started when a viral video showed a police officer brutally killing George Floyd in Minneapolis in the US. The two events led to a global focus on police brutality in both countries.
But there is a fundamental difference between police brutality in America and police brutality in Nigeria. In the US, police brutality usually stems from the behaviour of rogue officers, who are either racist or deranged. But there is no state collusion, and the law is always there to take its full course.
However, in Nigeria, police brutality is an integral part of an oppressive state structure; it is an offshoot of a tyrannical system in which the government perpetrates, condones and covers up appalling human rights abuses. In its 2019 report, Human Rights Watch listed “torture, forced disappearances, assassinations and extrajudicial summary executions” among human rights violations in Nigeria and added: “These abuses typically occur within the context of the Nigerian government’s security operations.”
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Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd US President, famously said: “The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only object of good government.” But, sadly, not in Nigeria! This country subjects its citizens to the triple whammy of abject poverty, organised non-state violence, such as terrorism, and state-led violence, such military massacres and police brutality.
Truth is, there is systemic inhumanity at the heart of the governance of Nigeria; the care of human life and happiness is not the priority of the government; rather, the destruction of people’s lives and happiness seems to be enabled, tolerated and condoned by the state.
Let’s face it, the Nigerian state is too powerful, too dominant and too domineering to produce the kind of “good government” described by President Jefferson. I mean, where are the checks on presidential power in Nigeria?
But why is this so? Well, as I have long argued in this column and elsewhere, there are fundamental structural problems with the governance of Nigeria. These problems can be viewed through the prism of the principal-agent theory. Under this theory, the people are the principal, the government is the agent. Thus, the government must act as the agent of the people and govern in their best interests. But the theory also tells us that the agent may pursue its own interests at the expense of those of the principal; in fact, the agent can act in ways wholly detrimental to the wellbeing and interests of the principal.
So, there is always the possibility of a principal-agent problem. To avoid the problem, the principal must create an incentive structure that would constrain the behaviour of the agent and ensure he acts in the principal’s best interests or pays a heavy price for not doing so.
It’s all about the incentives. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner said in their fascinating book titled “Freakonomics”: “Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life – and understanding them is the key to solving just about any riddle”. Putting it more vividly, they said: “An incentive is a bullet, a lever, a key: an often-tiny object with astonishing power to change a situation.”
Now, institutional and governance structures are the best incentives. As Professor Douglas North, the institutional economist and Nobel laureate, pointed out, institutions and structures can constrain the behaviour of actors, political or economic, and condition them to act in the right way. So, in politics, the principal-agent problem can be tackled by creating a politico-governance structure that forces elected politicians to see themselves as the servants, and not the masters, of the people, and ensures that governmental agencies derive their legitimacy from serving the citizens and ensuring their wellbeing and happiness.
But what do we have in Nigeria? Well, we have a governance structure that incentivises elected officials to act in arrogant, unresponsive and unaccountable ways. The structure allows Nigeria to have a president who, like President Muhammadu Buhari, can behave like an absolute monarch, controlling all key levers of power and yet hole up in Abuja, completely removed from the people. Furthermore, the structure allows state institutions and officials, including security operatives, to abuse their powers with utter impunity.
Let’s face it, the Nigerian state is too powerful, too dominant and too domineering to produce the kind of “good government” described by President Jefferson. I mean, where are the checks on presidential power in Nigeria? President Buhari can do whatever he likes; he can ignore court orders, side-line the legislature or direct any state institution, however supposedly independent, to do his will. He can ignore public opinion as he did in his speech last week when he failed to acknowledge and take responsibility for soldiers shooting and killing peaceful protesters in Lekki.
So, the Nigerian state is a Leviathan, except that, unlike Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, the Nigerian Leviathan cannot protect the lives and property of its citizens.
But does Nigeria need a Leviathan state? Of course not! As the Enlightenment philosopher David Hume pointed out, the more powerful and overbearing a state is, the less prosperous and happy its citizens will be. This is why, as several studies have shown, decentralised states, in which significant power is devolved to sub-national units, generate more prosperity and happiness than centralised states, where power is concentrated overwhelmingly in central government, in the hands of an all-powerful president.
Which is why scholars argue that political power should be diffused in society. But power is overcentralised in Nigeria. For instance, all the state security operatives take their orders from the president through the service chiefs, the cabal in Aso Rock wield enormous power without accountability, and federal agencies and officials treat the public with utter disdain. Have you ever seen how Nigerian civil servants treat citizens who encounter them? Instead of “we are here to serve you”, it’s more like “we don’t care how you feel”!
But there is another problem with overcentralisation of power: it always leads to oppressive governments. This is because those at the centre – president, institutions and officials – always have idiosyncratic views of patriotism – they think they are more patriotic than the rest of us – and will justify the repression of ‘enemies of the state’.
Think of it, even after President Buhari acknowledged there is police brutality in Nigeria, even after SARS was disbanded and replaced with SWAT – Special Weapons and Tactics – nothing has changed, as the “Lekki massacre” shows!
Which is why those calling for police reform miss the point. Nigeria’s problems are deeply systemic and structural, and police brutality is just a symptom of the underlying malfunction. Therefore, police reform without a radical overhaul of how Nigeria is run is like putting a band-aid on a bullet wound; it won’t work!
In 2019, the UN Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Agnes Callamard, said that the absence of “accountability functionality” in Nigeria drives human rights violations in the country. Ridiculously, every state governor is setting up a judicial enquiry to probe SARS’ abuses. Yet, as Human Rights Watch points out, “neither the report of the Presidential Judicial Panel set up in 2017 to investigate the military’s alleged war crimes nor that of the Presidential Panel of Inquiry set up in 2018 to investigate SARS abuses has been made public.” Truth is, the state enables the abuses.
So, yes, #EndSARS and #EndSWAT, but without a systemic, root-and-branch transformation, without restructuring, Nigeria’s over-centralised, over-powerful state will never produce the Jeffersonian “good government”, but, rather, a tyrannical one!
