Nigeriocracy

So, I was witness to yet another conversation between people with varying opinions on the Fourth Republic.

One person said "democracy" as practiced in Nigeria was too expensive (not just in terms of what is taken or wasted when a person is in government, but also the expense in money, lives and injuries from their fight to get into office and stay there) and delivered to little value for all the expense. He was of the opinion that the Federal Republic should be a one-party dictatorship. And yes, he trotted out China as his example of an economically successful one-party state.

The other person said "democracy" is a process and not an event. He argued the Fourth Republic was "young", that we were still "learning" and that we would get better at it with time.

They are both wrong.

We are neither practicing "democracy", nor are we in the process of it. And our history, dare I say "civilization" is as old as anywhere else in the world; we have had enough time to make enough mistakes over millennia -- if we refuse to learn from our mistakes, it does not mean we are too "young" to know right from wrong.

But if we are not practicing "democracy", then what should we call the operating system of Nigerian governance?

I do not think Political Science has a word for it. Despite the similarities, it is not an oligarchy or plutocracy nor is it a feudal or corporatist state. Despite "federal character", our is neither a consociational nor confessional state. We have never really had an "autocracy" or "dictatorship" per se (on a couple of occasions we did come close), and while we have never been exactly "federal", we have never been anything remotely approaching "unitary" either.

All that talk about "Westminster" and "Presidential" is window-dressing. Our First Republic had much in common with the rest of post-Independence Africa, but was also rather unique on our continent, for any number of reasons, the consequences of regional federalism being just one driving force of the disparity. Actually, all of our experiments with civilian-rule have been unique in Africa; federalism again drove some, but by no means all (or even most) of the differences. There are peculiarities about Nigeria's politics (too lengthy to discuss here) that allowed us to be the only country in Africa to defeat an attempt to amend the constitution for a Third Term without resort to extra-constitutional means (on the extremely rare instances that tenure-extension were defeated in Africa, it was done by means of military coup or more recently citizen "revolutions").

The same could be said for our years of military rule, each more accurately described as military-led "diarchies" of soldiers and civilians. It would take too long to discuss, but know that there is a reason Nigeria have never had the 20-year, 30-year and 40-year presidencies that occur elsewhere in Africa (and the world), in spite of supposedly being ruled by "dictators".

So what is the operating system of Nigerian political governance? I am not a Political Scientist, but as near as I can tell, Political Science does not have a word to describe our political system.

It is time for our professors to write a scholarly papers and books outlining the Nigeriocracy paradigm. They should be sure to academically break down the different strains of Nigeriocracy. It could be sub-divided into military-led and civilian-led Nigeriocracy, or maybe divided by time-period, as each Era practiced Nigeriocracy differently.

Why not?

Our academics, who learned everything they know from educational systems set up by European imperial powers during the Colonial Era. Like kindergarten kids trying to jam a shapes or blocks into the wrong slot, rather than give up and put it in the right slot, the academics tend to try too hard to fit Nigeria/African political paradigms into neat, predefined European slots.

European feudal history drives it's present-day political paradigms. Conservatives are ideological heirs to the supporters of the monarchy, aristocracy and Church. Socialist rhetoric about peasants and the proletariat gives you a clue as to their historical origins. When the British yab their Liberal-Democrats as being "too posh to be Labour, and too nice to be Tories", the bespeak a centuries-long line of city-based merchants, skilled workers, artisans, scribes, clerics, army officers and others who were neither serfs/peasants nor aristocrats/royals. Even the relatively "new" Greens are an echo of what used to be agrarian political parties dedicated to Farmers' interests.

Other parts of the world have modern political paradigms that are just as rooted in their own particular histories. The easiest example is Taiwan, where the two major political coalitions are pro-business, pro-trade and "conservative", but differ on the singular, Taiwan-specific issue of the island's relationship with the Peoples Republic of China. And that issue is itself only one the latest manifestations of a political metamorphosis in Greater China that began with the decay and decline of the Imperial Era and the intervention of European, North American and Japanese power.

Anyway, before I end up writing a book ....

... we Nigerians need to recognize the existence of something I am now calling "Nigeriocracy".

We need to study it and understand it.

Then we need to get rid of it and replace it with something that actually works and that better reflects an undistorted expressions of our real, underlying web of potential choices, potential options and potential futures.

But while I am on the subject ....

.... people who think dictatorship is good and democracy bad because China is currently doing well are engaged in intellectual dishonesty. They look only at the last 30 years and insist it proves dictatorship produces wealth. They pretend not to notice the decades when tens of millions died because the dictators didn't know what they were doing, and the people had no way of making the dictators stop enforcing policies that were creating famine. And they have completely forgotten the centuries of decline under dictatorial Emperors who were equally clueless.

When a system cannot regenerate itself politically, or change its government to match its changing reality, it will wither away. Even in officially democratic countries in Europe, men who come to office (and to politics) full of energy and ideas, usually leave office a decade later (and politics decades later) as washed-up, worn-out failures whose careers had long outlived their political usefulness.

If you are governed by a royal dynasty, a permanent one-party state, or a strongman dictator, you have no ability to influence whether you get a "good" one or a "bad" one. But, and this is important, even if you do get a "good" one, it will eventually lose steam, decay and decline, and you will be in no position to swap it out for something better.

I am just saying.