by Alade Fawole
YES, the July 14 Edo State governorship polls truly emblematized
the critical relevance of the electorate in our democratic process. For a
fact, the electorate has not been vaporized; they still exist and can
be active in the democratic process. I am not among those who would
gloat that this has brought an end to god-fatherism in politics, for it
has not. It may seem so for now in Edo state but it won’t be for long,
and it is definitely not going to be so in the rest of the country. In
any case, god-fatherism in the real sense is not what it has come to
symbolize in the Nigerian context. A little on that below. Now that the
voting is over and the winner has finally emerged then real governance
must begin and the peoples’ votes must begin to count. The voters must
now begin to make their government work to provide the real dividends of
democracy. If they fail to exercise the requisite vigilance, then they
risk their democracy being reduced to nothing more than the mere ritual
of queuing up to vote and then going back to sleep until the next
election cycle four years from now. Since they have not allowed the
legendary godfathers of Edo politics to vaporize them this time around,
they have sent strong signals to all politicians that they want to
control their own political destiny. It is now up to them to make the
government responsible and accountable to them. That is an edge they
must not allow to slip from their grip again. All governments generally
are capable of and do relish behaving lawlessly but democratic
governments tend to perform better not because of any genetic
predisposition on the part of democrats but only because the electorate
holds them accountable to their electoral promises and wouldn’t hesitate
to vote them out next election cycle. What this implies is that
democracy thrives, deepens, yields dividends only to the extent to which
the people are willing to make it. Democracy is too important to be
left to the whims of so-called democrats alone. Active involvement of
the people in the process of governance is a critical factor. America’s
democracy is mature and envied today not because of its operators as
much as because of the vigilance of the people and their readiness to
defend their own interests. Nigerians can only hope to enjoy the fruits
of democracy when they are prepared to regard their welfare and
wellbeing as the most important reasons why government exist in the
first place. If democracy fails in Edo state henceforth, then the people
themselves must be to blame.
But I need to stress that while the good performance of Governor
Adams Oshiomhole in his first term in office was responsible for the
overwhelming endorsement he has received from the people for a second
term, performance alone is not all that democracy is made of. Provision
of good social and physical infrastructure, education, healthcare and
other goodies for the vast majority of the people is a bounden duty of
every government and not that of democratic governments alone. Good
performance in the area of physical development as witnessed in Edo, as
necessary and desirable as it is, must never be the yardstick for
determining overall democratic performance. Let me hasten to remind us
that Nigerians protested, struggled valiantly and many even died, and
generally made near super-human sacrifices to rid our polity of
authoritarian military rule, not because military regimes failed to
perform or provide good social and physical infrastructure, but because
military rule is antithetical to democracy. To be honest with ourselves
and fair to the military, it was during the three decades of military
dictatorship that Nigeria witnessed some of the most impressive
infrastructural development that we still enjoy today. Soldiers paid
salaries, established schools and universities; built hospitals,
stadiums, good roads and flyovers, bridges, electricity generating dams
and other wonderful structures. Yet, Nigerians overwhelmingly rejected
them and successfully forced them back to their barracks in 1999. It
then implies that, at bottom, democracy must surely mean more than mere
performance and provision of physical development.
In reality, some of the basic elements which are unique to democracy,
and which no other form of government is able to guarantee include the
notions that: sovereignty ultimately belongs to the people; governments
exist at the instance and for the welfare of the people; it is the
right of the people to freely choose their own leaders through free and
fair elections in which all adults are allowed to participate without
restrictions except as stipulated by law; the rule of law as opposed to
force must prevail, which implies that all are equal before and subject
to the law, and that government operates according to law and not
outside it; rulers are accountable to the people they govern and that
the people have the right to change any government they no longer want,
among others. These, in a nutshell, are the integral and irreducible
minimum dividends which people are entitled to in every democracy,
regardless whether democratic governments actually performs well or not
in the area of physical development. And these are the standards that
Edo people and, by extension, all Nigerians, must insist their
governments adhere to. Any government that fails to meet these minimum
standards is at best a caricature of democracy and not a real one. With
regard to performance, democratic governments strive to meet the
yearnings and expectations of the people for development if they ever
hope to be returned to power next time. However, adherence to the
democratic tenets mentioned above, rather than mere provision of good
infrastructure and evident physical development, which even dictatorial
governments often excel at, must be the yardstick for assessing
democracy.
Many Nigerians are today totally dissatisfied with our democratic
experiment because it has failed to satisfy the minimum standards listed
above. We are saddled with an executive arm of government that is
overbearing and anti-democratic in temperament and action; a National
Assembly that shamelessly appropriates a quarter of the national budget
for fewer than five hundred members against the welfare of 160 million
Nigerians, and one that is unrepresentative of the people, if not
anti-people in its conduct; and a judiciary which should ordinarily be
the last hope of the people for justice to prevail but is,
unfortunately, the bastion of injustice, delayed and twisted justice.
Today twelve years later, impunity reigns supreme in the conduct of
government, corruption and insecurity have combined to make life a
nightmare for majority of Nigerians, and the democracy they struggled so
hard to enthrone is almost going totally berserk before their very
eyes. Only popular will, and not any government, can make this democracy
work. The ball is therefore in our court!
Permit a little digression into godfatherism and its impact on
politics and governance which I alluded to above. Beyond the opprobrium
it has attracted in Nigerian politics, godfatherism has positive role in
democratic politics.
Unfortunately, most of those whom our local media erroneously refer
to as godfathers are little more that political entrepreneurs or
contractors whose main interests are selfish and at variance with what
real godfathers are known for. I reserve a fuller discussion on
godfatherism and democratic politics for another day.
Four years from now, Adams Oshiomhole will himself start acting out
the role of a godfather in Edo politics once he completes his second
term as governor. It is common knowledge that every elected leader is
always interested in who succeeds him/her. General Ibrahim Babangida,
even though unelected, during his interminable transition to civil rule
programme, reportedly asserted that while he did not know who would
succeed him, he certainly knew those who would not be allowed to succeed
him. End of story! Comrade Adams Oshiomhole as leader of the Action
Congress of Nigeria in his state would definitely not sit idly by and
allow anyone who would rubbish his accomplishments to take over from
him. That would be against commonsense. Since he would also not want his
party to lose to the opposition in the next elections, he would
invariably find himself playing the role of gate-keeper and godfather.
Governor Bola Tinubu did that by carefully overseeing the emergence of a
credible successor before leaving office as governor of Lagos State in
2007. That is godfatherism of sorts. All good political leaders are
supposed to be godfathers to mentor others, oversee their adherence to
party manifestoes, rules and regulations, and whip them into line when
need be. So, godfatherism is not such a bad thing after all.
This is the positive role that Governor Oshiomhole and, indeed, all
political leaders and elder statesmen, would be expected to play once
out of office so that our democracy can be run by real democrats and it
can begin to deliver to us the much anticipated dividends.
