Nigeria is passing through a difficult phase in its over six decades of independence from Britain, the erstwhile imperial power and colonial master, no thanks to the highly flawed and disputed February 25 Presidential and National Assembly polls by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Nigeria’s major problem, apart from absence of exemplary leadership, nepotism, ethnicism, religious bigotry, mediocrity and graft in official circles, is political corruption, which includes corruption of democratic institutions, especially the electoral agency. President Muhammadu Buhari had once said: If Nigeria did not kill corruption, corruption will kill it. What he had in mind then was fiscal corruption and never the forms of corruption that are presently threatening the corporate existence of the country and its future. The way the country is going, it will be safe to say that it is political corruption that will soon kill this big African country if it is not quickly nipped in the bud by the powers that be.

In There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, Chinua Achebe wrote: “The social malaise in Nigerian society was political corruption. The structure of the country was such that there was an in-built power struggle among the ethnic groups, and of course those who were in power wanted to stay in power. The easiest and simplest way to retain it, even in a limited area, was to appeal to tribal sentiments…” Unfortunately, the situation has not yet changed since 2012 when Achebe made this unassailable submission. Some politicians are busy exploiting our ethnic and religious differences to further divide Nigerians for their own selfishness. Political corruption is not new in Nigeria. It pervaded our first republic but has since then grown by leaps and bounds with each passing election season.

Let me quote Achebe again on when the decline started or when the rain started to beat us. According to him, “within six years of this tragic colonial manipulation Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption and misrule. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation’s wealth. Elections were blatantly rigged. The subsequent national census was outrageously stage-managed; judges and magistrates were manipulated by politicians in power.” This is the tragedy of Nigeria. It is also the tragedy of our democracy. In Nigeria, history repeats itself so rapidly that our past seemed better than our present. We look at our past with nostalgia and wish to reenact it. It is sad that the situation is getting worse after each leadership cycle and the past ones being better than our recent ones.  Nigeria will never witness the needed development until we begin to dismantle political corruption and banish it from our politics and from our electoral process.

After the 2023 elections and God keeping us alive, we must begin to unbundle the INEC in such a way that it will be strong and effective at sub-national levels. We don’t need an omnibus INEC that will oversee a national election again. Every State INEC should be independent enough to conduct every election and declare results as done in the United States where we copied our presidential system of government and its additives. Since the February 25 controversial poll, Nigeria has never been the same and all the hitherto demons in Nigeria are roaring and trying to tear the nation apart in the aftermath of the contentious poll. The outcome of the poll has opened up ethnic rivalries, religious differences and settler and indigene dichotomies and other irrational ideas that will further divide the country and question our fragile unity ably oiled and maintained largely by dollars from crude oil extracted mainly from Eastern Nigeria.

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When it is assumed that Nigeria has overcome its foundational problems, they keep manifesting in diverse forms, especially the ‘we vs them.’ The February 25 poll has exhumed our buried differences and has by far demonstrated that the concept of one Nigeria is yet to be fully embraced by all. While some see that concept as an abiding article of faith, others see it as an illusion and even question its relevance and validity in the present circumstances. Our over 62 years of nation-building has not yielded the desired goals. It has enriched the few political elite and their cronies and impoverished millions of Nigerians. It has increased our national woes and sharpened our fault lines. Even some of the achievements made so far are being negated by our brand our politics and democracy, which is corrupt, toxic and exclusive to a certain breed of Nigerians, while others are seemingly ostracized permanently from the system.

Although some politicians have extolled the virtues of democracy and even described it as the best form of government, some political pundits are having a different opinion about democracy. Democracy in our own case can be autocratic and nepotistic. It can be everything but democracy. The contest for political power in Nigeria is akin to warfare. All arsenals of war are deployed in our electoral process, including killing of people, snatching of ballot boxes, vote buying, falsification of election results, poor and shoddy conduct of elections by INEC officials, voter intimidation and suppression and threats to lives and property of some people on account of how they vote and the presumed whom they vote. Our recent election has once again opened the national question of who is a Nigerian citizen and his rights to reside in any part of the country and do his legitimate business or work without molestation. Perhaps we need to revisit the constitution and spell out these issues and how we can co-exist or otherwise. We need to further interrogate our concept of democracy and define it to suit our geography in terms of choosing our national leaders. If the current electoral process cannot work, we may devise home-made process that will make it less-acrimonious and contentious.

The culture of threatening people and burning their businesses in Lagos and some other places all in the name of politics and democracy must stop. Our ‘patch-patch’ democracy cannot work and it is not going to bring the best in all of us except we urgently effect some needed changes in the structure of the country and touch its laws.

Democracy entails making seasonal choices to choose our leaders. For Nigerians, this happens every four years. The beauty of democracy is the right to make these choices periodically and where these rights are suppressed or denied, democracy is in crisis. Our ‘patch-patch’ democracy is suffocating and killing Nigerians gradually. Our brand of democracy has unleashed so many demons on Nigerians, the demons of naira scarcity, demons of fuel scarcity, demons of hunger and demons of war and disunity, as well as demons of poverty. The demons of falsehood are there too.