Teaching Comparative Government and Politics

Thursday, May 05, 2011

Why democracy in Nigeria?

In this analysis, Paul Beckett asks why people seem so determined to have a democracy, in spite of the dangers of democracy in a country like Nigeria. This is a good review of some of the basics about Nigerian political culture.

Beckett was a political scientist who taught at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, from 1969 to 1976.

Slouching Towards Democracy

Nigeria is among the world's most dangerous countries. Nigeria has the seventh largest population in the world (nearly 160 million), and that population is a potentially explosive mixture of peoples, regions, and religions - a mixture of almost infinite complexity…

As Nigeria celebrated the 50th anniversary of its independence from Britain last year, the country had had elected governments for only about 20 years…

Nigeria has spent enormous sums of money trying to create fair and transparent electoral systems. Yet rare is the election that has not been condemned as false by the loser (often, by everyone except the winner!)…

As we recommend democracy for all countries, we should be conscious that democracy can be dangerous in a country like Nigeria: very dangerous. Democracy has been a significant factor in Nigeria's horrific communal clashes (stretching from the pogroms against the Igbos in the middle 1960s to the bloody clashes in the Jos area that are on-going now). Scores and sometimes hundreds have been killed in violence in each national election…

If the presidential election of Goodluck Jonathon [sic] of the People's Democratic Party was generally peaceful and fair, as observers tell us, the results may still prove dangerous for the future…

Viewed in national political terms, the far north finds itself (temporarily, at least) in unprecedented isolation. Over most of the previous half century, the Muslim (in ethnic terms,mainly Hausa-Fulani and Kanuri) far north… has generally provided the core political leadership for the rest of the huge area of the original Northern Region. During the first political decade, their dominance was absolute.

And throughout the independence period the influence of the far north has been disproportionate at the national level, too…

Thus, the landslide election of Jonathon maymark a watershed event in the evolution of Nigerian politics. The historic pattern of at least mild hegemony exerted from the far north may have largely run its course. Which in turn returns us to the question:Why does Nigeria work so hard and so persistently to create a functioning, stable, permanent democracy?The costs and dangers, after all, are great…

With the country's complex ethnic makeup,and the now bitter relations between many Christian and Muslim communities, Nigerians know that they live over a political sea of magma that could, at almost any time, erupt.

Yet Nigeria persists in the effort, and, I believe, will continue to persist. At the time that Nigerians were emerging from more than a decade of military rule in the latter 1970s, intellectuals advanced many ideas for a constitutional system that would work for Nigeria, not as one might want Nigeria to be, but as it is. A number advocated indirect, or "guided democracy," or a benign single-party system. Ultimately, such compromises were rejected in favor of straight, unadulterated winner-take-all electoral democracy with competitive parties.

The preponderance of opinion was that Nigeria was too complex a country to function as a single party system, and their experience with military rule had convinced them that benign dictatorship never remains benign. One could say that Nigeria needs to be a democracy not in spite of its staggering complexity, but because of it.