Since President Goodluck Jonathan revealed the idea of a single term six-year tenure for the president and state governors, a lot has been written, ridiculing him for his astonishing misplacement of priorities. There have also been a few voices in his support.
The compelling logic of the proposal is, to put it mi mildly, dubious. Because of the crippling cost of elections, from primaries to the polling booth, and because of the selfish desire to remain in office at all cost, governors and the president are unable to govern. To cure these two ills with one pill, Jonathan revived an idea, which we are told all the political parties save the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) had endorsed.
On reading about Jonathan’s prescription, I could only exclaim: The mountain heaved and quaked but gave birth to a mouse! I simply could not stop recalling that tale of great expectations and commensurate disappointment inimitably told by Aesop over 3,000 years ago. The mountain, abode of the gods, the master fabulist narrated, went into labour, and the earth trembled and the air howled with frightening sounds. Then suddenly, all became calm and the mountain peak split open. Only to expel ‘a tiny little mouse.’ But while the awful spectacle went on, the people, terrified, all ‘got down on their knees and began to pray.’ Some even ‘fainted from fear’ and others ‘couldn’t take their eyes off the mountain’ as they wondered how the spectacle would end.
True, I had no expectations of Jonathan high enough to form a mountain. Not as deputy governor and then governor, and definitely, not as vice president and then president by default. If you do not consider the debacle surrounding the constitutional succession of the dead or nearly dead Yar’Adua by Jonathan equal to the mountain’s cataclysmic birth pangs, how about the clang and clamour over his running for the office on his own steam?
Given the crude majority-takes-all credo of the political class, it became a test whether or not a minority could ascend to the leadership of the country. And because this minority candidate happens to come from the Niger Delta, from whence the oil and gas flow to fund the banditry called the government of Nigeria, the expectations were high, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that he might rouse himself to steer a new and enabling course.
And after months of post-inauguration lethargy, out came his first path-breaking idea. What worries me most about it, and which has not received as much attention as the charge of misplacement of priorities, is the assumption about democracy that informs it.
Democracy, Jonathan asserts by his solution, is inherently expensive. And so, he joins the odious chorus of senators and representatives who have been singing that song to justify their looting of the treasury in the guise of salaries and emoluments. Consequently, they no longer speak of ‘the dividends of democracy.’ That, you might recall, was the deafening refrain soon after the military reluctantly withdrew to the barracks in 1999. Now, we hear only of ‘the cost of democracy. ‘
To Jonathan, as the plundering ‘politicians’ who breathlessly intone this cost of democracy song, it is not the philosophy (or absence of it) and practices of the bankrupt parties, not the dearth of democrats and statesmen that people them, but democracy itself that is to blame. But how would Jonathan’s single-tenure magic rate in a parliamentary system, the sort practiced in Britain’? Under that system, there is strictly speaking, no limit to tenure subject to the will of the people as expressed in scheduled and called elections. So, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister for II years and Tony Blair for eight years. But they both had to have their mandates reaffirmed by the electorate; in the case of Blair, three times in just eight years. Are we to assume that democracy suffered as a result?
On the contrary, periodic elections, especially in a parliamentary system, are a cost-efficient way of holding those in power accountable and maximising any good of which they are capable. To take a local example, it ought to be possible for a Governor Raji Fashola to be returned to office for as long as his electorate retain confidence in him. For the most urgent tasks confronting a state governor or the president in a stone-age country like ours are long-term in nature, not what tasks could be completed in four or six-year cycles.
If democracy has become a high-stakes casino game played by Nigeria’s so-called politicians, whose fault is it; the people (democracy) or the politicians (the anti-democrats)? Why does Jonathan not seek other ways of curing the evils of our casino democracy? He could, for instance. start by implementing to the letter the findings and recommendations of the Uwais panel on Electoral Reforms set up by his former boss, the late Yar’ Adua. Or by setting the nation to the task of restructuring a warped and predatory post-colonial entity, which has far better prospects of instilling the requisite sense of governance as nation-building, as service and not an avenue for graft.
The question of how Nigeria has come to symbolise the notion of democracy as prohibitively expensive is not hard to answer. It is a fairly recent phenomenon, the ills of the First Republic aside. It is the outcome of a total rejection of the ‘demo’ in democracy, that part which speaks of civic duty and responsibility. The roots of this rejection lie deep in a dysfunctional political structure inherited wholesale from a colonial past whose goals were conquest, repression and blind exploitation. Under such a system, Jonathan’s single-tenure solution proves diversionary and a disservice to democracy, properly called. Since a single tenure can neither imbue vision nor selfless service nor manufacture democrats, where shall it all end?
By withdrawing faith in the people, a process that inculcates the genuine spirit of democracy, Jonathan’s solution reminds me of another for the then divided Germany famously lampooned by Bertolt Brecht in a poem entitled: ‘The Solution.’ I have taken the liberty of rewriting its concluding rhetorical question (and urge the reader to consult the original): ‘Would it not be easier, for Jonathan, to abolish democracy and install its opposite, which is cheaper?’
Ifowodo teaches poetry and literature at Texas State University, United States of America