One of the few things I can still remember from my primary school days is the definition of democracy. I remember chanting it repeatedly with my classmates when our class teacher introduced the topic in social studies; democracy is a government of the people, by the people and for the people. I learned that it is the system of government practiced in my country Nigeria and there are other types of government such as monarchy, autocracy, bureaucracy and so on. I read a lot of current affairs books when I was a kid and that was how I learned about Nigeria's history of flipping between military and democratic governance.
The last military government ended back in 1999 when the military handed over power to Olusegun Obasanjo who was elected as the civilian president. So, since then, we have been in a democratic system of government, or so it seems. One of the main features of democracy is that the people have the right to vote for whoever they want during an election and an independent body will ensure that the candidate with the highest number of votes actually gets elected but most of the time, this is not what happens as a lot of crazy things go on during elections.
Free and fair election is one of the things you often hear in a democratic government as it is a fundamental pillar of democracy but in Nigeria, the elections are not always free and fair. It is often marred by violence, rigging, intimation and corruption. You see a case where political thugs take control of a voting centre and start threatening people to vote for the candidate they choose. Some don't use violence and rather try to use money to entice people to vote for another candidate. If maybe they realize that their candidate is still going to lose that polling unit, they snatch the ballot box and run away with it.
Let's use the last presidential election that took place in 2023 as an example. There were lots of stories of this sort of rigging and violence in many voting centres. But the major highlight of the whole election process was the direct rigging of the result. I mean, people stayed and observed the votes being counted in their polling unit but when the result was sent to the local government headquarters, the numbers had changed and someone else had taken the lead. The most annoying part was when the independent body in charge of the election (INEC) ended up betraying the entire country.
It started with them saying that the election process (accreditation, voting and collation of results) will mostly be done by a machine called BVAS which will reduce human intervention and subsequently make it a lot harder for manipulation to occur but during the day of the election finally arrived and while the machine was used in some parts of the country, it wasn't used in some others. And then during the collation of results, it wasn't even used at all. This made it a lot easier to rig the election because all it took was to change figures with just a pen by INEC officials.
At last, a winner was declared and Nigeria got a new president but everyone kept wondering how it all happened. Well, not everyone actually, because some people voted for him and brought us into this current mess we are all in right now. A lot has been going on with the country since this new government took over and it just keeps getting worse every day. The crazy part is that you can't even complain because when you try to do so, you get arrested and locked up. A protest was done a few weeks ago after everyone couldn't take it anymore and a lot of people got arrested... For protesting.
A few days ago, the president of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) was arrested just a few days after he accused the president of betraying civil servants. Now I don't want to go into the details of all that but the summary is that they had a deal with the president where they agreed to the new minimum wage as long as the president doesn't increase the price of petrol. Well, the price of petrol has been increased and that was why the NLC president said the federal government had betrayed them, then he was arrested a few days later and accused of all sorts of things like money laundering, financing terrorism and so on.
So I ask again, are we still in a democracy? Because it's starting to feel like a dictatorship where you can't even complain. I guess the president expects everyone to keep quiet as people keep dying of hunger every day. Nigeria got suspended from the commonwealths after an unfair trial and public execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa just because he accused the government of exploiting the oil resources of his region while ignoring the environmental and human rights impacts on the local communities. It was during the military regime of Abacha but still, it attracted a lot of condemnation from around the world.
Today, the same thing is still happening and people are being arrested for criticizing the government. One thing I have noticed that is always at the centre of this whole issue with democracy in Nigeria is oil; politicians will kill to remain in power just to have a share of the oil money. There have been a lot of controversies arising recently because of this and investigative journalists who are exposing some of these things are either silently disappearing or getting arrested. Well, that's a topic for another day as it will require a full post to discuss that topic.
For now, I don't see things getting better anytime soon and the only change I feel can help us as a country to make sure our voices are heard is unity but tribalism and religious sentiments will always be in the way. The politicians know this and that's why they use religion and tribalism as a tool to put us in check. I mean, it's a lot easier to handle the citizens when they are divided; the Yorubas and Igbos against each other, Christians and Muslims against themselves, then the North vs the whole country. That's why when there is a protest against the government, you see some sets of people protesting against that protest. It is well.
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