Reclaiming our undemocratic democracy

So it is already 15 years since we began this our longest experience with, well, democratic rule? Unlike all our previous attempts, this one has come a long way that we can fairly say it has come to stay. In a way we have been able to exorcise the “abiku” or “ogbanje” spirit out of our ‘democracy’ (read civilian rule). My children, who were all born, post military rule cannot fathom what it meant for us to live under the rule of despots who neither sought nor obtained our permission to be our leaders. That’s the shame and indignity of the past we lived with and now have to explain to our children how we ever lived with it.

So now, we are led by people who at least sought our permission and to a large extent got it to govern us. If they therefore pride themselves as ‘democratically-elected leaders’ they are right, somewhat. I don’t know about the nonsense of calling themselves right honourable, distinguished and excellencies though. But that is another discussion entirely.

What exactly do we mean by democracy, whose day Nigerians are celebrating this season? It is government by elected representatives. The defining word here is ‘elected’, not selected. So there cannot be democracy without elections. And elections properly so called, presupposes the right to choose freely. It means that the entire process of election, not just the voting, is free of under-the-table dealing that leaves voters with little or no choice. Otherwise we may be practising the joke we see in many countries, especially those who add the word, ‘democratic’ to their names but are too often the least democratic. See for example, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) or the Democratic Republic of Korea.

It seems Nigeria is gradually becoming another democratic republic, given how undemocratic the current players in politics are carrying on. Sadly the problem is not limited to the party in government at the centre but is linked to virtually all the existing (main) political parties in the land. Rather than operate democracy for what it is, a system that allows for the consideration of variety of views and opinions on every issue before putting the decision to vote, our present democratic culture accepts of no opposition, alternative view or dissention. Holders of contrary views are often derided as “disgruntled elements”, “detractors” and those who do not wish the state well.

At the national level and in discourses citizens are increasingly classed into two groups in virtually every issue. That explains why they brand us as northerners and southerners, as Christians and Muslims, as PDP or APC, as pro-Jonathan or anti-Jonathan elements etc. To this brand of ‘democrats’, there are no middle courses and no multiple choices.

It is no democracy if we keep hearing politicians and those in the elite class say things like ‘Jonathan must not contest again’ or ‘Jonathan must continue as president’ or ‘the next president/governor must come from a particular zone or area’. Some of these statements come with open or veiled threats. In making such silly and undemocratic statements, they suggest that this democracy is about what a few persons want, not what the electorate want. That simply put is elitocracy.

The undemocratic nature of our ‘democracy’ is often hatched within the political parties. By the way, who remembers the last time that any of the dominant political parties ever had an open contest for party positions and standard bearer selection? What we keep hearing these days are ‘consensus’ candidates who emerge through a process manipulated by a few bigwigs of the parties. The leadership of the political parties mount so much pressure on some candidates, even cajoling and bribing or buying them out of democratic contests just so that the anointed candidate would emerge unopposed or as consensus candidate. The so-called consensus candidates are usually the ones anointed by what I call the ‘sole spiritual leader’ or ‘general overseer’ of the political party or, at best, a cabal. For many smart politicians therefore, they spend all their efforts trying to curry the favour of the ‘general overseer’ or cabal of their party than be worried about wooing the voters. And so I ask, why do our political class so abhor election, even in a democracy?

If after 15 years of attempting to practice democracy this is all we have to show, then we need to re-strategise and create the building blocks of democracy, starting with children in schools. The National Orientation Agency and other like institutions should begin to design democratic studies curriculum for schools and if such already exists, we must ensure that this is being taught. Unfortunately, everyone, including children learn and practice more of what they see than what they are taught in class.

It’s certainly a long walk to democracy for us. But for now, ours is democracy sans democrats.

Published in http://www.punchng.com/opinion/reclaiming-our-undemocratic-democracy/

and http://www.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/161736-reclaiming-undemocratic-democracy-obo-effanga.html

On Children’s Day, just BBOG!

It is the season to celebrate children, and that is happening in many churches and out there in schools and homes, culminating in Children’s Day on May 27.

  

Oh how many of us remember this day with nostalgia; how we would hardly sleep deeply in the night of May 26 with our little minds set on May 27, our own day. We would have washed, starched and ironed out our school uniforms and readied our footwear, set for march past at the stadium. That is after a few weeks of practice in our schools.

  

Sometimes, there were also cultural dance and sports competitions. And yes, we often had free meals or at least cabin biscuits and soft drinks back in the school a few days afterwards. For whatever it was worth, our governments remembered us and that was some fun for us. Those sure were the glorious years of childhood, in an equally glorious era in our country.

  

 Pan to 2014 and you find us in an entirely different kind of country where even being in school is precarious. Killing, kidnap, terror. No thanks to the heinous group that calls itself Boko Haram, and the shame for its continued success so far is collectively ours as a nation and people.

  

For this reason, on this year’s Children’s Day, there cannot be many things to wish for than just one thing – Bring Back Our Girls! Yes, the campaign for this has gone on for too long, reaching a crescendo two weeks ago when many world leaders and influential persons signed up to the trending hash tag of #BringBackOurGirls or #BBOG.  

But so far, little has come out of it. And this is where frustration begins to set in. Soon, many will go back to their life routines. But where are the girls? What is happening to them? What is going through their minds? What about their parents and siblings? Oh, what about other children in schools, especially boarding schools across the land? If we listen well enough, there is a feeling of fear among many of our children about going to and staying in school, if others like them could be harvested from their academic environments for one month and life is going on ‘normal’ in the rest of the country.

  

Or isn’t life back to full throttle? Even with the bombs going off in Kano and Jos in the last one week, the two major political parties were planning and staging major campaign events few days after, as they seek to win the Ekiti gubernatorial election. Every day, especially in the electronic media, we are assaulted with direct and indirect political campaigns. Even the reactions of politicians to the fate of the children have been laced with partisanship, at a time one expected to see a pan-Nigerian attempt to resolve the matter. That is despite the earlier promise by them to stop all campaigns until the children are brought back. Now we know better that they did not mean what they said and did not say what they meant.  

With the teachers’ union threatening to shut down all schools in sympathy with the abducted and yet to be brought back school girls, and more than 173 teachers lost in all the attacks so far, life could never be more gloomy for our children. And if such shutdown ever happens, we would have unwittingly played into the hands of the evil group whose aim anyway is to stop education, as they claim.

  

What society owes children is safety, and this must be provided wherever these young ones are, especially where they are legitimately. For their level of development, they need to be provided quality education as guarantee for a future out of poverty, and nothing must stop society from doing so. The state must do everything to provide that safe environment for learning. For residential schools, particularly, security agencies need to exercise extra surveillance around their locations as preventive measures, rather than wait to react after an attack.

As we mark Children’s Day this week, all we ask is for them to Bring Back Our Girls and save our children and their schools from future attacks.

http://www.thenicheng.com/on-childrens-day-just-bbog/#sthash.VtzpnOYj.GjLQVQDM.dpbs

TRANSACTIONAL REPUBLIC

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Who else notices that many contacts with state agencies and their officials in Nigeria are always defined by transactions? These transactions cover the formal and informal engagements and sometimes borders on extortion. It is not about service, but discomfort to the citizens for the purpose of fleecing them, to the advantage of the state and its corrupt agents, or even private businesses whose owners are cronies to those in government.

Let us take a few examples. If you are a victim of a crime and you report to the police, some police personnel may require you to pay some indirect cost of documenting the case such as providing money for stationery or the cost of investigations.

The battered image of the police is notorious enough and society almost often expects them to act in transactional manners anyway, so also are their brothers in transaction, the Customs service. Customs transaction is mega. ‘Settle’ them and you get away with just anything.

This image of an extortionist or transactional agency cuts across virtually every law enforcement agency by whatever name called. Until the recent suspension of the park-and-pay policy in Abuja business districts, the agents involved in the ticketing were a pain in the neck. Drivers have had their tyres clamped for staying five minutes beyond the duration they paid for, with the agents refusing to accept payment for the extra minutes of N50 per 30 minutes, insisting that the driver goes to pay the penalty of N5,000. The truth remains that those who conceptualised the policy had transactional interest behind it; hence the implementation was outsourced to private businesses for the purpose of profiteering them, while also generating revenue for the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA). So, as long as government received its agreed revenue from their agents, it couldn’t be bothered about the transactions used by those agents against the society.

Take also the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC), an agency set up to ensure safety on the roads. It has since expanded its mandate to include revenue generation as central to its operation.

The political class is equally involved in the transaction. It is a notorious fact how government officials, including parliamentarians, use their supervisory and approval powers to transact personal advantages. They pressure the agencies they are meant to have oversight on to sponsor their frivolous foreign trips; request slots in job opportunities and contracts for their nominees and footing of bills for their committee assignments, including oversight visits to the agencies.

How did we get into this bind? One reason this is happening is because citizens have left governance to all-comers who have little clue about what public office and duty are meant for.

The political space is one that citizens need to claim back to put its ‘best eleven’ on the field. We need to hold our governments to account on the basis of the constitution which makes the welfare of citizens the primary purpose of government.

Citizens need to be well-informed about their rights and insist on them, sometimes under difficult situations and not budge to pressures to compromise. We need to strengthen the mechanisms of oversight of regulatory and law enforcement agencies. Very importantly, we need robust, effective and properly staffed citizens’ re-orientation programmes.

The elite class needs to get out of its comfort zone by not seeing every obstacle foisted on it by the state as only requiring transactions to overcome or avoid. It needs, instead, to stand up to the state to do what is right in the interest of all.

WHERE ARE THE CANDIDATES?

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In less than one year from now, Nigeria would have conducted elections into the offices of president, governors as well as all the seats in the National Assembly and Houses of Assembly. By this time next year, we would have officers-elect, waiting to be sworn into offices, ceteris paribus, on May 29, 2015. Next year is thus very important in our life as a country, being election year. So where are the candidates?

By Obo Effanga

There is something terribly unacceptable with our system, if the voters, who are supposedly the ones to decide who gets into office, are yet to be presented with the names of those they should start watching and considering their suitability to lead. Or does it not worry us that less than one year to the elections, very few persons have come forward to openly say they are interested in any office? Make no mistakes; this is not happening because there is a dearth of interested persons; it is rather because everyone is treading cautiously. And why is that so? Here are some reasons.

Though public offices, especially the elective ones, are meant to be platforms for service to the general good, that only exists in theory, and we have increasingly come to accept it that way. In truth, public office is a platform for quick, easy and almost risk-free illicit wealth. It is a gold mine of some sorts. That being the case, we are faced with many incumbents who have so much illicit wealth and also power and instruments of coercion. With these, they turn themselves to demigods who must decide who gets into which political office after them.

The result is that even some governors serving their second (final) term of office have gone out of the remit of their offices to manipulate the system and determine who succeeds them. Especially in states where a single political party is dominant, the out-going governors have made themselves the determinants of who succeeds them. They declare which senatorial district should fill the position of the next governor. This doesn’t sound democratic in any way. Yes, their political parties may decide where they want to ‘zone’ the position to, but the governors do not constitute the party. Even if they have the sole prerogative to decide for their party, do they have such rights to decide for the entire state?

However, the blame also goes to many of the politicians who suck up to the governors in an embarrassingly sycophantic manner. Isn’t it shocking to see federal legislators and even former deputy governors suck up to their governors and openly declare that they are ready to support whoever the governor handpicks and anoints as his successor? So, until the governor decides to ‘anoint’ his successor, it has become taboo for anyone to aspire or openly indicate such aspiration. What all the aspirants are doing now is to pray that they should find favour with the governor, whom they have turned to an emperor. Truth is, these governors have so amassed illicit wealth that they can manipulate so many political structures to suit their purposes. Not done, many of them want to be further compensated with seats in the Senate as retirement benefit.

Closely related to the above is the fact that our political parties are about the most undemocratic of any institution in the land today. If there is one thing the political party and the political class loathe most, it is election. That is why they have developed a silly practice called ‘consensus’. To the extent that consensus candidates are supposed to emerge outside of an open competition, so much under the table, underhand and under whatever else, go on to present a candidate. With so much compromise going on, it would be a tall dream to expect the next set of public office-holders to be accountable to the electorate and citizens.

The way out now is to support the electoral body to ensure that the votes in the general elections, at least, count. That way, we can only hope, the voters can determine who gets into what position, despite the shenanigans of the political class. To do this, citizens need a new orientation to not only realise the power they hold as citizens, but to exercise same in an effective manner during the elections. It is when we begin to do so that good, independent-minded candidates would emerge, not those hoping for the crumbs from the table of their corrupt masters. And such independent-minded candidates would be bold enough to come out early to tell us what they want, build and mobilise grassroots support and structures.

The Foreign Football Madness (FFM) Syndrome

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What is it about sports, football in particular, in Nigeria? Why does it engage our citizens so much? The passion from citizens is so much that it competes with religion, the well-known “opium of the people”, according to Karl Marx. This new-found opium creeps into many things we do. It is worrisome enough that many Nigerians get crazy about football, but it is even more nauseating that the passion is hinged on teams that have little or no nexus with these Nigerians.

By Obo Effanga

Why, for instance, would the artisan or jobless youth, who goes hungry all day, be struggling to pay for and watch the telecast of a UEFA Champions League match in the evening at a local viewing centre? What is more, he might have spent most of the productive hours of the day debating with his fellow poor or jobless friends about how ‘his’ team plays better football than his friend’s team? Sometimes the argument is so intense that it leads to violence before, during or after the game. There are reported cases of brawls occasioning deaths as a result of (foreign) football fans’ rivalry. I call it ‘Foreign Football Madness (FFM) syndrome’.

Make no mistakes; most of these supporters of foreign football teams cannot locate, on the map, the cities where those teams are based. That is even assuming they know that some of the names are not of cities.

The FFM gets sillier, even among the enlightened and comfortable elite class. Here are a few manifestations. In Abuja, federal capital, there are major hotels with names like Chelsea, Bolton and Valencia. A reverend father friend in Ondo State once told me how, during a church harvest, some of his church members came for thanksgiving in groups of foreign football fans. So there were Manchester United fans club, Chelsea fans club and Arsenal fans club etc, decked in the colours of those clubs, of course, and competing to out-dance and out-donate the others.

Some of these FFM sufferers are so deep in it that they cannot draw the line between their individual idiosyncrasies and their official duties. A few weeks ago, someone who posts official materials on the facebook page of a major Nigerian bank got carried away and on a Monday morning used the page to express sentiments about the outcome of an English premiership match involving two rival teams. The reactions from followers of the page were predictable. Not a few persons threatened to close their accounts with the bank if the said bank was openly celebrating the success of one team over theirs.

Or what do we make of the audacity of the sponsors of the UEFA Champions League recently sending the trophy to Nigeria as part of the ‘world tour’ to popularise the competition. It looked more like colonialism, to me, especially when the Lagos State governor, himself a proud fan of an English team, was on hand to receive the trophy and the promoters, thus turning it to a state event!

The media also deserves some knocks. Last Monday, I found it very unacceptable and embarrassing to see a photo of a football game played the previous day in the English Premiership splashed on the front page of a major Nigerian general interest newspaper. Pray, what were the editors thinking? Were they suggesting that none of all the newsworthy happenings in Nigeria was good enough to have its photograph on the cover of that newspaper?

As I write this, a major issue of discussion by many Nigerians is the result of the UEFA Champions League semi-final game involving Chelsea and Atletico Madrid. I posted a status on the social media on this madness and this is one of the responses I got: “My young son nearly strangled his younger sister for merely laughing when a Chelsea player missed a shot. We had to call a family meeting and I threatened not to pay for the satellite television subscription again.”

While at breakfast in the hotel, one of the guests complained about his team’s loss the previous night. He admitted though that he had feared they would be defeated but was only trying to be ‘patriotic’ all the same in wishing his team the best. Did he just say ‘patriotism’? And I thought patriotism was about devotion to one’s country. I quickly challenged him to show a whiff of such ‘patriotism’ to his/our country, Nigeria!

Now, this is exactly what I wish we could do. Let our passionate football fans bring in that passion to how they see Nigeria and what they do to it? We argue over who manages our (foreign) football teams and who plays for them. We invest money and time talking about it, and even when those teams perform poorly, we still believe in them and support them, not just for now but on the hope that ‘e go better’. If Arsenal, as unsuccessful as it has been for close to 10 years, still has supporters among Nigerians, why can’t those Nigerians love their country as passionately? Let us bring this passion to our work as government officials and as citizens engaging the officials. And if we have the opportunity to make the change, let us do so.