Revolution in Nigeria?

The Federal Executive Council says an Egyptian-style revolution is impossible in Nigeria. Laughably, a spokesman said this is because Nigeria is "being run on constitutional order where the tenure of office of leaders is fixed". As though the people rebelled simply because of the length of tenure of the North African autocrats. The young Tunisian who set himself on fire, sparking the chain of events, did not do so merely because Ben Ali had been in office for decades.
as reason for his optimism.

The Speaker of the House, Dimeji Bankole (who becomes a mirror-world parody of himself more and more with each passing day) added his voice to the noise, telling a delegation of German parliamentarians a revolution was impossible in Nigeria because the "acceptance of democracy by the citizens" meant "North Africa’s experience was, therefore, not applicable to Nigeria".

Oh come on Dimeji. You know more than most that our democracy is all form and no substance.

But, while the FEC and the Speaker are definitely self-serving with their comments, they may have a point.

No revolution is imminent in Nigeria.

In our Federal Republic, nearly everyone is "marginalized" in one way or another; for example, we are all marginalized politically, because we still can't use our votes to decide who should hold political/government office. Unfortunately, we the people are divided against ourselves, each of us believing himself and his group to be the victims of "Nigeria" (where "Nigeria" is defined as every other individual and sociocultural group not ourselves).

But there is one other, possibly more influential issue.

I look at the transition in Egypt and Tunisia, and it seems to me the pre-existing political elite are still in charge, save for the musical-chairs removal of respective unpopular figureheads.

I suspect Nigerian citizens are reluctant to put their lives on the line and die for "change", because we all believe that the political beneficiaries of any such action on our part will not be much different from the people we would have died to remove from office. I suspect the average Nigerian citizens believes the consequent and subsequent economic structure following their sacrifice would not be much different from the economic structure they died to change.

No one actually says this out loud ... but nobody ever bothers to protest or fight when there is a rigged election, a military coup or an annulled election. Deep down in our hearts, Nigerians believe the victims and beneficiaries of such plots and shenanigans are more like each other than they are like we the average citizens.

We would not be fighting to free ourselves, but fighting to decide which of several political barons will oppress us for the next few year. Our lives won't change either way, so we don't even waste our time thinking about it, much less doing something about it.

But let me tell you something.

You know what will happen after the 2011 (rigged) elections?

The same things that happened before it. Jos will erupt in violence. Random killings will continue in the Northeast. There is quite a long list of things that will just continue as usual ... and even though these things happen with the frequency of the sunrise and the sunset, the federal, state and local governments will continue to react as though they were surprised and thus unprepared.

But there is one man with cautious optimism. A man who provided a ray of intelligent commentary on the comparison between Nigeria and the status quo ante in North Africa before the citizen revolts. Unsurprisingly it comes from Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the current Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria. Speaking after receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka he affirmed that our Federal Republic had everything it needed to succeed and warned that unless we harnessed our strengths to achieve our true potential we would be running the risk of a North-African-style popular revolt in Nigeria.