The Elusive Dividends of Democracy
Why Obasanjo's latest gripe typifies Nigeria's elite complacency
Democracies that aren’t visibly effective in addressing citizens’ demands and that cannot improve their material conditions risk collapse.
- Political Scientist Ken Opalo from the essay "You Can't Eat Democracy''.
Nigeria’s former president Olusegun Obasanjo was recently in the news, complaining that ‘’Western liberal democracy’’ is not working for Africa - and that there is a need for an alternative. The proposed alternative, which he dubbed ‘’Afro democracy’’ lacks concrete details or a coherent framework - but his complaint did invite a lot of critical commentary. The bulk of the criticism is basically that Obasanjo does not have the moral standing to make such a judgment because his governance record is thin on democratic credentials. While I think this assessment is a little harsh, it is not entirely unjustified. Two of the most destructive and illiberal things in Nigeria - Land Use Act and NNPC - are legacies of Obasanjo. And that is just limiting the scope to the political economy.
To dismiss Obasanjo by claiming he is also ‘’antidemocratic’’ ignores a deeper problem, which is that the Nigerian elite class (political, economic, civic) is a complacent lot and often prefers a superficial solution to a complex problem - as long as their sources of rent appear undisturbed. The country’s poor economic development stems from the lack of incentive to apply critical thinking to the sociopolitical problems confronting the Nigerian state. Now the fear in some circles is that Nigeria might be sleepwalking into autocratic governance, which will reverse the ‘’democratic’’ gains of the last two decades. However, for the majority of the population, this is hardly anything to fret about - because two decades of democracy have barely delivered any meaningful positive change to their lives. Poverty, unemployment, high cost of living, lower standard of living, and little respect for their voices are the only results democracy has delivered, while the political class does not display the slightest hint of self-awareness that the people’s concerns matter.
Democracy without Development
It is important to examine the misgivings of the former president. The crux of Obasanjo’s complaint is that our democracy is not truly representative of the people’s choices and what we have now is a majoritarian tyranny. Here is an extensive quote from his speech:
These few people are representatives of only some of the people and not full representatives of all the people. Invariably, the majority of the people were wittingly or unwittingly kept out. This is why we should have ‘Afro democracy’ in place of Western liberal democracy. The weakness and failure of liberal democracy as it is practised stem from its history, content, context and its practice. Once you move from all the people to representatives of the people, you start to encounter troubles and problems. For those who define it as the rule of the majority, should the minority be ignored, neglected and excluded? In short, we have a system of government in which we have no hands to define and design and we continue with it, even when we know that it is not working for us.
Those who brought it to us are now questioning the rightness of their invention, its deliverability and its relevance today without reform. We are here to stop being foolish and stupid. Can we look inward and outward to see what in our country, culture, tradition, practice and living over the years that we can learn from? Something that we can adopt and adapt for a changed system of government that will service our purpose better and deliver. We have to think out of the box and after, act with our new thinking. You are invited here to examine clinically the practice of liberal democracy, identify its shortcomings for our society and bring forth ideas and recommendations that can serve our purpose better.
These are hardly the words of someone who is undemocratic and the issues he highlighted are confronted by all democratic societies. The problem is that these concerns have never been taken seriously by elites, because they have found a way to design the current system for their benefit. Secondly, these concerns have never found a broad civic constituency beyond narrow civil society groups, because democracy has led to development. The latter point particularly is a wider trend in Africa as political scientist Ken Opalo wrote in a brilliant essay:
As scholars and democracy promoters fret over democratic erosion/autocratization in the region, it is worth focusing less on the behavior of individual leaders like Patrice Talon (Benin) or Yoweri Museveni (Uganda) and more on the structural conditions that facilitate their rise (and successes at autocratization). In particular, it is worth appreciating the fact that the gap between the promise of democracy and its realized dividends over the last 30 years is arguably the biggest threat to democratic consolidation in African states.
A growing share of Africans are dissatisfied with their respective brands of democratic government. Data (from 9 rounds of aggregated Afrobarometer Surveys across dozens of countries) on voter satisfaction with democracy in African states show trends in the wrong direction. The share of voters who are very satisfied with democracy is trending downwards, while the share of those not at all satisfied is trending upwards.
These levels of dissatisfaction are objectively justified. While most African states have witnessed significant economic growth over the last 30 years, it is also true that much of that growth has not resulted in sustainable development for the vast majority of Africans. Poverty reduction in the region has stalled. Urbanization has largely created consumption rather than production cities. Whether as subsistence farmers or informal urban workers, large shares of citizens are condemned to live precarious economic lives. From climate change to inflation, few African governments seem to have any coherent policy responses. The quality of public services is abysmal in most countries. Several countries struggle to guarantee basic physical safety.
Faced with some or all of these challenges, people across the region are justified in their demand for a system of government that does more than allow for ritualistic punishment of incumbents every election cycle.
After the transition to democracy in 1999, the country had a decade of economic boom and was one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. However, this commodity-fuelled growth was unequal and concentrated in the urban service sector. Binding constraints on the economy like trade policies, logistics infrastructure, and public investment in human capital like health and education languished. When the commodity boom ended, the country struggled to transition to a new growth phase and went into decline. The result was that after a decade of growth, there was no significant reduction in poverty, no economic transformation away from low-productivity agriculture, and no industrial expansion to create jobs. The real tragedy was that the following decade was characterised by political and policy incompetence that failed to reckon with these problems. This is what Nigerians got for two decades of democracy.
Rather than deliver a good and prosperous society, what Nigerians did get was a repeated fetishization of the ritual of cyclical elections. Public discourse about the shortcomings of our democracy is most vigorous during election disputes and the allocation of state resources. Admittedly, this is a hangover from decades of military rule - but the inability to grow up has hampered the capability to make democracy deliver credible governance. For Nigeria’s democracy to be less fragile and sustainable, the solution is not some amorphous ‘’Afro democracy’’. One of the absolute basic conditions must be improved livelihoods for Nigerians.
Elite Bargains
A common assumption about democracy - especially in societies that have been under autocratic rule for an extended period - is that having elections is enough to transition to an open and impersonal rule-of-law society. The reality is that governance often relies on informal agreements on how to distribute political power and resources among influential groups. These networks can be very narrow or broad, depending on the bargaining leverage of different groups. Failure to reckon with this reality has created tensions and contradictions in Nigeria. Some examples include the operability of a secular constitution in a widely religious country with highly influential religious groups, the desire for a meritocratic bureaucracy in an ethnically heterogeneous country where political power depends on having a broad ethnic coalition, and so on.
This is not to say that an inclusive secular society or a meritocratic bureaucracy is not desirable and attainable. However, attaining such goals involves constant pressure and a change of incentives of the underlying power structures and elite bargains in the country. The flip side of this coin is that without the pressures and incentives to evolve, a country can remain stuck in a corrupt and destructive elite bargain that inevitably pushes it towards collapse.
For Nigeria’s democracy to work and be sustainable, the structure of our elite bargain has to be understood and engaged. Simply relying on weakly institutionalised totems like political parties, courts, and constitutions to work without understanding the underlying bargains that make them work will lead to the kind of ineffective mimicry Obasanjo is now worried about. You cannot fix political representation without reckoning with the personalised (Sai Baba, On Your Mandate) nature of partisan politics where individuals or groups switching parties can swing elections - because political parties are not platforms for ideas. You cannot design efficient fiscal federalism without facing up to the subnational absolute power of state governors and the collective lobby power of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum. You can write a modern constitution and citizens can repeatedly cite it to defend their rights, but without engaging with the origins of the current Nigerian state and the implications for the kind of bureaucracy and social contract we have, the constitution will remain functionally ineffective.
Overall, understanding the elite bargains and arrangements that sustain our political system is how we can see nodes and entry points for reforms.
Centralisation
In reaction to President Obasanjo, political analyst Cheta Nwanze writes:
In my opinion, Western-style democracy works best in culturally homogeneous countries or in countries that are, at best, absolutely dominated by one cultural group. The more diversity you have in a society, the more likely that fears of domination will derail democracy, especially when demographic changes are happening. That is what we are beginning to see in countries like Sweden. That is what we are seeing in Israel. The experience we have had in most African countries, especially those colonised by the UK, is that inter-ethnic competition takes up all the political oxygen.
This argument is not as strong as it sounds, because you can easily make a case in the opposite direction. Many analysts and researchers have also claimed that cultural homogeneity is a sustaining factor for authoritarianism. For example, China is acknowledged as homogeneous but the governing Communist Party of China is one of the most fearful and paranoid about the democratic expression of Chinese people. There are also many examples of ethno-culturally diverse societies where the successful capture of power by a group has plunged the country into violent conflict.
The real challenge for Nigerian democracy in handling diversity is finding the balance between centralised and decentralised governance. As Feyi always says, Nigeria seems to be an entity that is always trying to pull apart. A capable central government will be useful to unite the different cultures and ethnicities around a common vision of statehood. A capable central government can also achieve better coordination on things like tax and trade policy. Nigeria as a single common market can become an economic and geopolitical regional leader. But we also need to realise that centralisation has limitations. The current federal government struggles severely to project its power and legitimacy in many local communities across the country. Resources need to be allocated towards strengthening the capabilities of local governments and making them accountable - while the central government must uphold itself to the standards of an impartial arbitrator of last resort.
A Word for Liberalism
My job in this essay could have been easier had Obasanjo provided clear descriptions of what he disliked about liberal democracy, and what he meant by ‘’Afro democracy’’. Democracy itself can mean different things to different people. As I have stated, for many, elections are what satisfies the basic conditions of democracy. But as Obasanjo himself complained, when democracy is reduced to simply going to perform a voting ritual for people thrown in your face through a system you cannot influence, it becomes problematic for the emergence of political representation to be described as a product of democratic choice. On the other hand, a truly representative democracy cannot be designed a priori, and it hardly guarantees credible governance. These problems confront all democratic societies everywhere throughout history - and are the subjects of many philosophical debates.
One description of democracy that I like was recently provided by the economist Rafael Guthmann:
I define democracy as follows: Suppose there is a state, an organization with a monopoly on the use of violence inside a territory. A pure democracy is when the power to control the state (that is, political authority) is perfectly dispersed across the population. A pure autocracy is when the political authority fully concentrates on one individual. No pure autocracy has ever existed, as well as no pure democracy. All present and historical states exist in a continuum from pure democracy to pure autocracy.
I will proceed to add that a liberal democracy is one where the rights and freedom of the individual are accepted as constraints on the powers of the state. This is an important qualifier because, in many democratic societies, including Nigeria, you are only protected from abuse by the powerful and the state when you can act in groups. My bold claim here is that whatever local variant we come up with will have to be a close approximation of what I just described to be a useful basis for the democratic and social advancement of Africans - whatever name we choose to call it. Liberal democracy as I have described it is not different from science and technology - they are universal despite having diverse applications. It would be a great mistake to shirk from the hard work of nation-building with a pejorative rejection of universal ideas and ideals as ‘’Western’’. I will leave the last word to Professor Deidre McCloskey:
The would-be tyrants say that liberalism is ‘Western’ or ‘Northern’ or ‘imperialist’, and therefore you in China or South Africa need not pay attention to it. ‘A free press? Open election? No, those are Western ideas, not good for the Central Kingdom or a true Ubuntu.’
But the desire to be a liberated adult is universal. We humans spent hundreds of thousands of years in hunter-gatherer bands in which tyranny was quickly checked. Walk away if the headman in a Khoesan band goes too far. Or, for that matter, throw a rock at his head. But the coming of agriculture after the last Ice Age in nine different locations from New Guinea to Central America made for permanent masters, the ones with swords and horses who could lord it over you because you had to stay close to your crops.
True, there is another universal desire, which is to be led like a little child. We all grow up in families, which in their good versions are like the ideal of socialism, ‘From each according to her ability, to each according to his need’. Good families achieve an equality of outcome, or at least an equality of opportunity. (In their bad versions, they are more like the worst of fascism, what the Party man O’Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four was delighted to imagine as the future of humanity, ‘A boot on a human face, forever’.)
But for larger societies than a family or a group of friends, equality of outcome –equality at the end of the race – kills incentives to work for others and therefore for all. St. Paul said rightly, ‘He who does not work should not eat’.
Equality of permission is the core liberal right to run the race – though, as Ecclesiastes says, ‘time and chance happeneth to all’. The result, says the economic history, has been in fact a closer approximation to actual equality of outcome and of opportunity than all those other systems we have tied from time to time.
This is a really good essay! Excellent thinking, I quite enjoyed it all.