The outing today would have come under any of these subheads,”Democracy without democrats” This still would have fully captured the malady plaguing our political culture but it is one title that has been overused. So, I had to run away from using it. Next one that ran through the mind was, “A country without stand.” This is apt but from the writer’s book of rules it would task the mind of the reader since he would have to spend some time scratching his head to catch the import.
The cardinal rule in writing is “keep it simple and plain,do everything to carry your readers along.” This led to the title you have on the discourse for the day. Every Nigerian can relate to it even before going into the details of the piece. Integrity deficit. It is a change very pervasive across all areas of human activities in the country. It has become part of the culture and that is because the leadership class has successfully incorporated the ugly art as part of the political culture.
Cheating and subverting to gain undue advantage. Double speaking, talking and propagating virtue when in fact one doesn’t mean it. The act of saying something good and progressive in public and when the time comes to do the right thing the person once advocated, you change and take to the path of perfidy. A minister in our country who is also a former governor is on record to have said, “Betrayal and politics are the same brothers, if you don’t want to be betrayed don’t go for politics, stay in your house.”
Another pointed to what ordinarily should amount to a grievous infringement in a public officer’s conduct and said since the law regulating the aspect of public conduct wasn’t very strong, the important question of morality shouldn’t come into the mix at all. The man who said this happened to be very educated yet he couldn’t come to terms with the effects of playing down on the centrality of morality in the affairs of society. Any society that does away with morality would never be in a position to deal with the very essential issues of equal rights, fairness and justice.
These are abstract matters if taken from the surface but they remain the bedrock for progressive development of any human society. Remove them or play them down and what would be left would be loss of faith, tension, climate of instability and ultimately fatal kinds of conflicts of various nature.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo said last week in Abuja, the country’s federal capital that “democracy has failed in Africa.”  His proofs included corruption and travesty of justice. By talking about Africa instead of mentioning Nigeria, the former President did what we used to know in journalism in the eighties as “Afghanistanism,” a euphemism for leaving your problems to dwell on analyzing one that is far off.
Peter Obi, former governor of Anambra State hit the nail where it mattered most when he said: “Democracy was collapsing in Nigeria.” Authors of take it easy have raised issues with “collapsing”, they did rather prefer “work in progress” – another tinge of hypocrisy. Refusing to call a spade by its name is a worse act than one who picked up a gun to shoot one citizen dead. Their veil acts that result in death of citizens on a massive scale. This is the case when on policy issues we call red, white.
From Independence we subscribed the country to democracy but nothing in our practice suggests what we do is democracy. We killed democracy from the word go. Chief Obafemi Awolowo described the forced coupling of independent units as “mere geographical expression.” Many lampooned him but it didn’t take long before he was proved right. In the North the regional head, Ahmadu Bello, said he would prefer to outsource job opportunities to foreigners than citizens who hailed from outside the North. The practice gained widespread acceptance and has remained.
Minus June 12,1993 election which was annulled by the military, no election held in the country has passed the credibility test. The entire process has always been heavily compromised. Every contestant and his party must keep special funds for the electoral officials, the security agents and for the voters. Result collation has become something else. Today, the President, a partisan, picks electoral officials who are cronies of different shades. Where we are today is the point where courts and not the people declare winners of elections.
Government is designed to be three in one, but where we today, the legislature and judiciary have become agents of whoever wields the ultimate power at the different levels of power management. To those who tell us “work in progress” should tabulate the gains and lessons, the improvements and achievements democracy has brought to us since the country adopted it as the core of the governance system.
If a President can threaten an elected governor or public officer anywhere, can this be called democracy? When we can’t organize something as simple as elections, can what we do be described as democracy? If the citizens would have to be induced to come forward to participate in the charade just to give democratic colouration to shams we pass for elections, can that system be called democracy?
Tomfoolery becomes when a mass of people wallow in deliberate acts of deceiving themselves. We sow thorns and in the end expect to harvest rice. This is tomfoolery of the highest order.