By Paul Onomuakpokpo
No one can easily impugn the sense in making democracy to be
responsive to the special needs of the milieu in which it is practised. But
such domestication retains its validity to the extent that the objective is to
serve the people. We need not split hairs in so far as the reformulation of the
concept of democracy is not a precursor to an accommodation of the crude
cravings of some benighted leaders. What must, however, trigger vigilance is an
attempt to tinker with an essential principle of the democracy – periodic
elections.
 |
| *Pres Buhari and Nasir el-Rufai |
For here in Africa, we are not unfamiliar with the truncation of democracy through such tinkering. From Zimbabwe, Equatorial Guinea, Angola, Algeria, Chad, Congo, Sudan, to Burundi, there are relics of democracies that held so much promise when they began but were later truncated through the greed of their leaders that made them to choose to perpetuate themselves.
Back home in Nigeria,
democracy has been subjected to serial betrayals by the nation’s leaders.
Either they are failing to make the people choose those they want to serve them
or they are reworking democracy to be amenable to their quest for
self-perpetuation through a third term. It is in this regard that we must take
note of the contemporary reformulation of democracy by President Muhammadu
Buhari and Nasir El-Rufai, governor of Kaduna State.
Yes, they are not yet afflicted with the incubus of self-perpetuation like the
Robert Mugabes of Africa. Yet, they have
demonstrated a tragic propensity to rework democracy to serve not the people’s
interest but their own. What the duo have brought to the table of democracy is
neither a celebration of the rule of the majority nor a clarion call for
adherence to the rule of law and equality of all. It is rather the
reformulation of democracy in such a way that it derives its legitimacy from
the barrel of the gun.
Clearly, Buhari and
El-Rufai got to their offices on the back of elections that they won. But if
they got to offices through elections by the majority, they are not now being
sustained in those offices by amenability to the wishes of the majority. What
is obvious now is that Buhari and El-Rufai are now beholden to a travestied
version of democracy that could be identified as guncracy – a process of
legitimising democracy through guns. In no way are guns metaphorical here. For
even in unlawful incarceration as in the cases of a former National Security
Adviser Sambo Dasuki, whom courts have asked for his freedom many times and the
leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) Nnamdi Kanu, the guns of the
state security operatives were used to shove them into prison having been
branded as implacable threats to the state.
Buhari has long embraced guncracy. He has
demonstrated this in the South South and South East. In the South South, Buhari
has deployed soldiers. They are on the prowl and under the guise of searching
for militants and safeguarding oil facilities, they are destroying property and
killing innocent people. And in the South East, Buhari has deployed soldiers
under the portentous rubric of Operation Python Dance. This was shortly after
the Amnesty International indicted the military for killing and maiming
innocent citizens in that part of the country.
