Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T20:48:45.131Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Confronting Potential Breakdown: the Nigerian Redemocratisation Process in Critical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

P. Chudi Uwazurike
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

One of the more perplexing problems of democracy in developing countries has to do with their potential for breakdown. In retrospect, at least three dynamics appear relevant in any consideration of how most come to atrophy: first, flaws in the pattern of instauration, involving the design and setting up of the modalities of the régime; secondly, a political process that tends to exacerbate entrenched cleavages such as class, ethnicity, and religion, given their relationship to the distribution of scarce economic and political resources; and thirdly, the events, internal and external, that lead to the onset of an ‘unsolvable’ crisis.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , March 1990 , pp. 55 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Linz, Juan J., ‘The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes: crisis, breakdown and reequilibration’, in Linz, and Stepan, Alfred (eds.), The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore, 1978), pp. 3–124.Google Scholar

2 See Newswatch (Lagos), 18 December 1989, for a critical analysis of the National Electoral Commission's draft constitutions and manifestoes of the N.R.C. and the S.D.P.

3 For two African contributions to this debate, see Meddi Mugyenyi, ‘Development First, Democracy Second’, and Chege, Michael, ‘The African Economic Crisis and the Fate of Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa’, in Oyugi, Walter et al. (eds.), Democratic Theory and Practice in Africa (Portsmouth, N.H., 1988).Google Scholar

4 Marsh, Robert M., ‘Does Democracy Hinder Economic Development in Latecomer Developing Nations?’, in Comparative Social Research (Greenwich, Conn.), 2, 1979, pp. 215–48.Google Scholar

5 See, for example, Huntington, Samuel P., ‘Will More Countries Become Democratic?’, in Political Science Quarterly (New York), 99, 2, Summer 1984, pp. 193–218,CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Huntington, Samuel P. and Nelson, Joan D., No Easy Choice: political participation in developing countries (Cambridge, Mass., 1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Cf. Chilcote, Ronald H., Theories of Comparative Politics: the search for paradigms (Boulder, 1981),Google Scholar and Bollen, Kenneth, ‘World System Position, Dependency, and Democracy: the cross-national evidence’, in American Sociological Review (Washington, D.C.), 48, 08 1983, pp. 468–79.Google Scholar

7 The phrase cited in Bollen, loc. cit. belongs to Chirot, Daniel, Social Change in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1977), p. 22.Google Scholar

8 Tilly, Charles, ‘Reflections on the History of European State Formation’, in Tilly, (ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, 1975 edn.), p. 81.Google Scholar

9 Huntingdon, loc. cit. p. 218. This sort of pessimism was, until recently, fairly widespread among mainstream political analysts who failed to see a repetition of the European experience in the ceaseless and escalating demands for social and political democracy in the Third World.

10 Bollen, loc. cit. p. 471.

11 Larry, Diamond, Juan, J. Linz, and Seymour, Martin Lipset (eds.), Democracy in Developing Countries, Vol. II, Africa (Boulder and London, 1988), p. x, note in their preface that there has been ‘a growing efflorscence [sic] of academic literature on transitions to and from democracy, and the sources of democratic persistence and failure’.Google Scholar None of these efforts, however, comes close to compensating for the direst weakness of democracy — the absence of any meaningful doctrine of its modalities and procedures that stems, as noted in Thomas, Hugh, A History of the World (New York, 1980), p. 508, from an ‘inner pessimism and doubt within’. On the need for an international organisation of democratic states that might address questions of mutual security and of nurturing fragile new entrants to the club,Google Scholar see Diamond, Larry, ‘Beyond Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism: strategies for democratization’, in The Washington Quarterly, Winter 1989, p.156.Google Scholar

12 See Diamond, Larry, ‘Nigeria in Search of Democracy’, Hoover Institution Reprint Series (Stanford, 1985), No. 70; ‘Issues in the Constitutional Design of a Third Nigerian Republic’, in African Affairs (London), 86, 343, April 1987, pp. 209–26, and ‘Nigeria Between Dictatorship and Democracy’, in Current History (Philadelphia), May 1987, pp. 201–24.Google Scholar

13 According to Alexander W. Wilde, ‘Conversations Among Gentlemen: oligarchical democracy in Colombia’, in Linz and Stepan (eds.), op. cit. p. 33, ‘Whether a democracy breaks down or survives in crisis depends not only on structural considerations but also on the experiential rules of infra-democracy – the expectations and perceptions that political actors have of one another.’ It should be noted, however, that there are serious limitations to this option – see, for instance, Powell, G. Bingham, Contemporary Democracies: participation, stability and violence (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 214.Google Scholar

14 Though Linz cautions in loc. cit. that his thesis is largely limited to institutionalised democracies that suffered a breakdown, his insights possess substantial utility for the Nigerian case, especially the Second Republic.

15 Cf. Lijpart, Arend, Democracy in Plural Societies: a comparative exploration (New Haven, 1977),Google Scholar and McRae, Kenneth D. (ed.), Consociational Democracy: political accommodation in segmented societies (Toronto, 1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Shepherd, George W. Jr, ‘Transition to Democracy in Nigeria: an editorial’, in Africa Today (Denver), 33, 4, 1986, p. 3, points to a certain reality when he observes that although ‘there is a general determination to end military rule and return to democracy, Nigerians are having great difficulty defining their objectives and finding the means of achieving them’.Google Scholar

17 Answering questions in New York after delivering the 5th David Abshire Lecture, entitled ‘Strategic Perspectives on Africa for the 1990s’, General Obasanjo, Olusegun, the former Head of State, was reported in West Africa (London), 28 12 1987–1984 01 1988, p. 2557, to have said, inter alia, ‘I wish that…my former colleagues in West Africa will leave politics to politicians. Military regimes have not done better than the administrations they purportedly set out to correct… Every time a new set of people come, they give plausible reasons for their coming in…but no sooner they settle down than they start doing other things and they want to perpetuate themselves in office…you can leave the military and leave political office and still live as an ordinary human being within the community.’Google Scholar

18 Mass Mobilisation for Social and Economic Renewal (MAMSER) has been Babangida's replacement of the more forceful and direct, albeit surprisingly popular, War Against Indiscipline (WAI).

20 See Africa Confidential (London), 16 December 1987, p. 3.

21 Allegations were made that well-placed individuals had managed to engage in acts of gerrymandering, as had been the case in Nigeria's six other elections since the 1950s. Charges of collusion in a few places between some candidates and local N.E.C. officials were reported in West Africa, 21 December 1987, and subsequent issues in January 1988 carried news of further allegations and reactions.

22 This eyebrow-raising figure of 72.5 million was an early indication that the ingrained habit of closely perceiving population largely in terms of power still haunts the Nigerian polity. This seems to be one of the by-products of an Anglo-American mindcast that affects racial relations because of the implication that a ‘minority’ connotes subordinate, irrelevant, limited rights, etcetera.

23 Diamond, Larry, ‘The Political Economy of Corruption in Nigeria’, 27th Annual Meeting of the African Studies Association, Los Angeles, October 1984, pp. 25–8.Google Scholar

24 It is widely accepted that probably all parties have tried to some degree or another to rig elections or engage in other forms of gerrymandering, including the National Council of Nigerian Citizens (N.C.N.C.), the Action Group (A.G.), and the N.P.C. in the First Republic, 1960–6, and their clones in the Second, 1979–83, the Nigerian People's Party (N.P.P.), the Unity Party of Nigeria (U.P.N.), and the ruling National Party of Nigeria (N.P.N.). But the governing party with a virtual monopoly on firepower and intelligence, money and communications, as well as a leash on the judiciary, has invariably mauled its often widespread opposition, albeit in the process compounding its legitimacy crisis. For incisive analyses of this enduring phenomenon, see Diamond, Larry, Class, Ethnicity and Democracy in Nigeria: the rise and fall of the Second Republic (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 171–90.Google Scholar

25 It was widely believed that the pliable Federal Electoral Commission helped to ensure that the Government led by Shehu Shagari would not be defeated, by preventing the registration of the Progressive People's Party (P.P.P.) as a result of last-minute technicalities, even although this united opposition front was widely supported by other major organisations.

26 Powell, op. cit. p. 136.

27 Lipset, Seymour Martin, Political Man: the social bases of politics (Baltimore, 1981), p. 227.Google Scholar

28 Cf. Duverger, Maurice, Political Parties: their organisation and activity in the modern state (London, 1954).Google Scholar

29 Extracts from General Babangida's justification were published by West Africa, 16–22 October 1989. Aside from the legal challenges mounted by Gani Fawehinmi, the locally well-known human-rights activist, Odia Ofeimum's ‘Democracy by Fiat’, in ibid. 18–24 December 1989, probably represents the typical critical reaction.

30 The classic study by Duverger, ibid. Provides pertinent insights to understanding the persistence of affiliation patterns in Nigeria over the past half century, running along ethnolinguistic, ideological, and, to a lesser extent, religious lines. As noted by Powell, op. cit. p. 74, some of ‘the most thoughtful and influential political theorists of our time have seen the system of parties in a society as the key to political performance’. Intra-party fractionalisation or cohesion, the strength of a party's pressure on its candidates in government, and the degree of ideological extremism of contending parties, all have serious implications for the survival of the given democratic system.

31 See Sklar, Richard L., Nigerian Political Parties (Princeton, 1963);Google ScholarFalola, Toyin and Ihonvbere, Julius, The Rise and Fall of Nigeria's Second Republic, 1979–84 (London, 1985); and Joseph, op. cit.Google Scholar

32 Jackson, Robert H. and Rosberg, Carl G., Personal Rule in Black Africa: prince, autocrat, prophet, tyrant (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1982). This theme runs through most of the contributions in Oyugi et al. (eds.), op. cit., notably Peter Wanyande, ‘Democracy and One-Party State: the African experience’, pp. 75–83.Google Scholar

33 The five Muslim and three Christian Heads of State, of whom four were from the far and two from the middle-belt North, with one from the East and one from the West, have generally shared a conservative, élitist view of the rôle of the state. In other words, they have invariably wished to manage, rather than to change the fundamental character of, the inherited neo-colonial state. By contrast, the opposition is characterised as ‘radical’, and either incorporated or marginalised.

34 Sklar, Richard L., ‘Democracy in Africa’, in African Studies Review (Los Angeles), 26, 3–4, 09–12 1983, pp. 14–24.Google Scholar

35 See Akinola, Anthony A., ‘A Critique of Nigeria's Proposed Two-Party System’, in The Journal of Modern African Studies (Cambridge), 27, 1, 03 1989, pp. 109–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

36 Ofeimun, loc. cit. p. 2093.

37 Stolper, Wolfgang, Planning Without Facts: lessons in resource allocation from Nigeria's development (Cambridge, Mass., 1966),CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Okigbo, Pius, ‘Economic Planning in Nigeria Since 1960’, in Kayode, M. O. and Usman, Y. B. (eds.), The Economic and Social Development in Nigeria (Zaria, 1985).Google Scholar

38 E.g. World Development Report, 1988 (Washington, D.C., 1988), p. 222.Google Scholar

39 Ever Since 1959–60 the Muslim northern leaders have had a difficult time imagining others than themselves ever in power. Their alleged belief in such a ‘birthright’, fostered by comments dating from Abubakar and, especially the then Premier, Ahmadu Bello, help to explain the deep fears in the minds of many southerners that in part led to the Biafran war. See Dudley, B. J., Instabiliy and Political Order: politics and crisis in Nigeria (Ibadan, 1973),Google Scholar and also Paden's, John N. overly sympathetic biography, Ahmadu Bello, Sarduana of Sokoto: values and leadership (London, 1986). These fears were reawakened by Shehu Othman's alleged discovery of a Kaduna ‘mafia’/military conspiracy to keep the army under the control of northern Muslims, as explained in his ‘Classes, Crisis and Coup: the demise of Shagari's regime’, in African Affairs, 83, 333, October 1984, pp. 441–61. See Newswatch, 22 January 1990, pp. 10–16, for a number of sharp Christian complaints against the perceived preponderance of northern Muslims in Babangida's end-of-year reorganised Government.Google Scholar

40 See Ojiako's, James historical compilation, Nigeria Yesterday, Today And…? (Onitsha, 1981), pp. 150–7, and also Diamond, Class, Ethnicity and Democracy, pp. 151–60.Google Scholar

41 Rimmer, Douglas, ‘Development in Nigeria: an overview’, in Bienen, Henry and Diejomaoh, V. P. (eds.), The Political Economy of Income Distribution in Nigeria (New York and London, 1981), p. 46.Google Scholar

42 According to Kirk-Greene, Anthony and Rimmer, Douglas, Nigeria Since 1970: a political and economic outline (London and New York, 1981), p. 62, ‘In order to reconcile the 1980 estimate of 87·4 million with the rates of increase officially assumed in the past, the total in 1952–3 would have to be 45·67 million, or 50 per cent more than the number actually counted.’Google Scholar

43 Although Babangida's undoubted political virtuosity has earned him the sobriquet ‘Maradona’, after the popular Latin-American footballer noted for his ability to dribble and ‘confound’ his opponents, the President appears to be the target for increasingly sharp challenges to his régime's policies and authority.

44 According to Thomas, op. cit. p. 490, democracy originated, not with the electoral franchise as such, but with the rôle of the courts in the enhancement of individual liberties, a tendency reinforced by the freedoms and self-responsibility required in market-oriented economies. The Nigerian Supreme Court was widely praised when it granted Gani Fawehinmi locus standi in his dogged pursuit of the two Dodan Barracks intelligence officers accused of being behind the parcel-bomb murder of Dele Giwa, the outspoken editor. See Akinola, Richard, ‘Gani's Finest Hour’, in Sunday Vanguard (Lagos), 20 12 1987, p. 7,Google Scholar and Alibi, Idang, ‘Salute to the Judiciary’, in Daily Times (Lagos), 28 12 1987, p. 11.Google Scholar

45 See Joseph, op. cit. pp. 175–80.

46 Thomas, op. cit. p. 485.

47 Some of these measures, to be sure, are already on the administrative books, but it is not clear that the Judicial Services Commission has any influence beyond restating legal ethics. See ‘Judiciary on Trial’, in Newswatch, 26 May 1986.

48 This point needs to be made, even though the sheer number of detainees and cost to the state in terms oi judicial time and finance must have been enormous. But nothing less than the future of the polity was at stake: appropriate sanctions against corrupt officials could have laid a sound precedent. For details of the political-legal determination of the fate of so many members of the Second Republic's ‘establishment’, see West Africa, 1986 passim, for reports of many hundreds being dismissed from their government posts, hundreds being arrested, hundreds being released without being charged, while still others fias their tribunal-imposed sentences selectively reduced. The specific measures taken against the final 61 offenders were published in ibid. 4 August 1986.

49 Although this was eventually done in subsequent correctives by the state, the impression of a ‘blanket’-type of partial justice could not be easily erased.

50 Shepherd, loc. cit. p. 4.

51 Ojo, Olatunde and Koehn, Peter, ‘Nigeria's Foreign Exchange Controls: an alternative to IMF conditions and dependency?’, in Africa Today (Denver), 33, 4, 1986, pp. 7–32. Also, ‘Excerpts from an Address by Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo (Rtd.) at the Launching of the Book, “Diplomatic Soldiering” by Major-General Garba on November 26, 1987’, in This Week (Lagos), 7 December 1987.Google Scholar

52 See World Bank, Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: an agenda for action (Washington, D.C.), 1981.Google Scholar Also Lal, Deepak, ‘The Misconceptions of Development Economies’, in Finance and Development (Washington, D.C.), 06 1985, pp. 10–13,Google Scholar and Paul Streeten, ‘A Problem to Every Solution’, in ibid. pp. 14–17. Babangida duly acknowledged the existence of ‘some negative side effects’ of the S.A.P. in his 31 December 1988 budget speech, and 12 months later defended his programme as a needed ‘change of our perceptions and attitudes’, based on ‘bold economic reforms involving a complete restructuring of the economy with all its adjustment pains and dramatic changes in the economic and social status of different groups’.

53 At the Organisation of African Unity's ministerial conference in Addis Ababa in May 1989, Nigeria strongly criticised the U.N.E.C.A.'s Alternative Framework to Structural Adjustment for Socio-Economic Recovery and Transformation (New York and Addis Ababa, 1989), which inter alia claimed that ‘the conventional SAP's are inadequate in addressing the real causes of economic, financial and social problems facing African countries’.

54 See First Bank of Nigeria, Monthly Business and Economic Report (Lagos), 05 1988.Google Scholar

55 See Mansbridge, Jane J., Beyond Adversary Democracy (Chicago, 1983), pp. 10–23, for a discussion of the move from the original concensual or unitary democratic heritage of most human societies, to the adversary patterns that prevailed in the embryonic western democratic nationstates from the seventeenth century. She also details the emergence of an ‘anti-adversary reaction’ to the competitive selfishness of the dominant model that resembles the consociational thesis advanced by Lijpart.Google Scholar

56 See Otite, Onigu, ‘Introduction: the study of social thought in Africa’, in Otite, (ed.), Themes in African Social and Political Thought (Enugu, 1978).Google Scholar Various corporatist possibilities have been addressed by Higgott, Richard A., ‘The State in Africa: some thoughts on the future drawn from the past’, in Timothy, M. Shaw and Olajide, Aluko (eds.), Africa Projected: from recession to renaissance by the year 2000? (London and Basingstoke, 1985), pp. 23–32.Google Scholar

57 See Othman, loc. cit. pp. 441–61, re the manoeuvres of the alleged Kaduna ‘mafia’.

58 The romantic notion of zero-sum elections is a figment of the past still found only in college textbooks. Post-Machiavelli realpolitik calls for victors to accommodate losers, and for the latter to have a credible enough hope that they might some day take their turn at the helm of affairs.

59 See Report of the Political Bureau (Lagos, 1987) for details of, and reactions to, the various constitutional proposals that were examined, including diarchy and a rotational Presidency. The Nigerian press publicised my own suggestion for a 20-year ‘freeze-rotate’ scheme, whereby the proposed two national parties would ‘hold’ the Presidency for, say, three years each, while open competition continued at the state and local-government levels. Each party would elect half the members of the National Assembly during this moratorium, and thereafter ought to have learnt how to govern by consensus rather than by confrontation, especially since a new generation of voters would by then have become accustomed to the ‘normalness’ of experiencing shifts in power. Under past constitutional arrangements, the extreme tensions in Nigerian politics have been perhaps the dominant factor in the less-than-successful process of development.

60 As Powell, op. cit. p. 212, notes, consociationalism is based on a rejection of ‘The majoritarian ideas that view democracy as the expression of majority elections and coalitions in favor of an emphasis on consultation and accommodation of all major groups’. But as with much else, there are extremes and dangers: ‘In its pure form, consociationalism would give each group a veto over all decisions affecting its interests.’ In the case of Africa, Joseph raises in Democracy and Prebendal Politics, pp. 25–9, as many as six major reservations about consociationalism, with its stress on élite-cartel consensus and the assumption of a containment of class and ideological dynamics.