“This article analyzes the prospect of democracy in Africa and contends that the failure of democracy in Africa is associated with its colonial history. The paper used Nigeria as Africa’s case-in-point and queried why democracy is working in Singapore, despite also being an excolony.”
There are two major assumptions about democracy. Power is legitimate when it emanates from the people. Second, democracy is centered on the principle of individualism. However, the two key features of the African state are in sharp and irreconcilable contrast to these two democratic pillars.
Nigeria is a thickly divided state with hundreds of seemingly irreconcilable tongues and native orientations woven together through colonization to form brotherhood. For these reasons, harboring the interests of these diverse natives requires greater consideration than committing trust and confidence in individuals. Second, there is no rationality to the assumption of legitimate power emanating from people who are grappling with multidimensional and abject poverty, which has rendered them vulnerable and powerless to freely take a legitimate decision or a decision for the purpose of legitimacy.
Against this backdrop, searching for democracy—legitimacy and individualism—in Nigeria is a wild goose chase. This is because democracy cannot be treated as a standalone entity. It is a machinery that works for state performance; hence, the nature, character, and structure of the state are key for democracy to perform desirably.
Though colonization, as some scholars have argued, happened in some places, such as Singapore, they queried why they were able to reinvent themselves for state capacity and performance. This comparison appears weak because the structures of the state and the form in which colonization operates to produce them are not identical with those of Nigeria and African states.
The structures of Singapore are humongously homogenous, which makes it easier to recalibrate their developmental prospects. They may have suffered from the same history of colonization; the forms in which colonization operated in the country were not identical to those in Nigeria.
It is important that the analysis of state building, state reconstruction, or state restructuring start in the ecological context of how they formed ab initio. This point was made in my analysis of the ecology of the African state, in which I introduced the classical and neoclassical forms in which colonization operated in excolonies.
I presented an analysis of how Africa suffered from the crisis of superimposed boundaries, and some boundaries in America were not tempered. Some excolonies suffered the albatross of exporting surpluses from their countries to develop colonialist states; some have the fortune of being developed by imported surpluses. I added that economic purpose drove the intetest to colonize some excolonies, and to some, it was for ideological assimilation of Western-type political structures.
These differential colonial theses have implications for the structuration of postcolonial states. Decoloniality should be the context of the Nigerian state developmental discourse, but Peter Ekeh said that aside from the fact that colonization has a magnificent effect that will manifest beyond the most imaginative actors in the postcolonial era, the inherited political class preferred the colonial structure for the purpose they saw that it served the Europeans.
One of the implications of these colonial structures is evident in the public service, where recruitment must satisfy federal character. I have argued this as one of the sources that culminate in an overbloated bureaucracy. That is, where you need one staffer, to satisfy ethnic consideration, you must employ at least three. In democratic practice, employment is based on merit, trust, and confidence, even if it results in an organization having a preponderance of one ethnic group.
Tip on Restructuring:
The return to regionalism and many ideas cavassed by the restructurenists have not shown a solution to the Nigerian question. For instance, the regionalists want to keep the federation, have a regional government, and maintain state and local government structures in areas carved under particular regions. This is the colonial syndrome of building structures to keep a state: central power, provinces, districts, and native authorities. The proposal of the regionalists would not only cause additional problems. It will amount to using state resources to service political structures rather than focus on the people. There are other reservations about regionalism if it happens, of which I have a strong doubt.
On Democracy:
There is no democracy in most parts of Africa but civil rule. I wrote an essay on this where I said that civil rule is merely a form of rule that underscores that government is not operating under military rules and dictatorship. Therefore, the term civil rule is relational, merely to distinguish that the military is not in power. It may have little or nothing to do with democracy.