Crises of Democracy: The Nigerian Experience, 1999 - 2005

Being text of a lecture delivered by His Excellency, Dr. Abdullahi Adamu, (Sarkin Yakin Keffi & A'are Obateru of the Source), Executive Governor of Nasarawa State at an Interactive Session with the Senators Forum at Shehu Yar'Adua Center, Abuja, on Thursday, July 28, 2005

Let me begin this discussion by stating an obvious fact. Nigeria emerged from the frosty winter of sixteen years of military dictatorship into the warm summer of democracy on May 29, 1999. Political leaders freely elected by the people assumed executive and legislative powers at federal, state and local government levels of our three tiers of government. May 29 meant the end of autocracy and the beginning of democracy. We recall, with nostalgia, the hearty celebrations that marked the end of one era and the beginning of a new one. May 29 proved, as Abraham Lincoln affirmed, that "the ballot is stronger than the bullet."

We celebrated it because every beginning is a promise of opportunities and worthwhile challenges ahead. The collective will of the people and the support of the international community had freed our country from the grip of its internal colonisers and restored to the people the right to freely choose their leaders at all levels of government. As it was on October 1, 1960, so it was on May 29, 1999.

The fourth republic is six years old. So far, this is the longest uninterrupted period of democratic rule we have had since our independence nearly forty-five years ago. As the Pentecostals love to say, "it is the Lord's doing, it is marvellous in our sight". But it is also in a very fundamental sense, the doing of all Nigerians. Despite the occasional heat and hiccups in the polity, things are going reasonably well for us as a democratic nation. Only four weeks ago, the Paris Club wrote off $18 billion of our foreign debts. President Olusegun Obasanjo rightly called it a dividend of democracy. I believe it is also a demonstration of the confidence of the Western nations in our commitment to sustain and nurture our democracy. I congratulate President Obasanjo for his latest feather in his cap. He has demonstrated once again his unequivocal commitment to the greatness and the integrity of our nation in the comity of nations. The debt write-off has removed the yoke of a crippling foreign debt on the nation. Thanks to him, the same burden has been lifted on many poor and struggling third world countries. Their foreign debts too have been totally forgiven and written off by the creditor nations.

It is remarkable that Chief Obasanjo carried the national assembly along with him in making a credible case for debt forgiveness. You would recall that Senator Udo Udoma led a delegation of members of the national assembly to our creditor nations to support the president's case. It shows that collaboration between the executive and the legislature is the only true magic in a democracy. Our country will always benefit when the legislature and the executive work together to deliver the dividends of democracy to the people.

I am privileged to be among this distinguished audience of former and current senators of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, under the aegis of The Senators' Forum to lead a discussion on the topic: Crises of Democracy: The Nigerian Experience, 1999-2005. The Senators Forum, I understand, was conceived as a platform for fostering interactions among our distinguished legislators and between them and other major players in the politics of our dear nation. This forum is, therefore, unique. I cannot think of a better way by which the distinguished serving senators can sustain a bridge between them and their equally distinguished former members. By inviting outsiders like yours sincerely into the hallowed chambers of this august body of august legislators, The Senators Forum is also building bridges between our lawmakers and our law executors. I congratulate Senator Alex Kadiri, chairman of The Senators Forum and the members of the executive for initiating this dialogue. As an unapologetic apostle of dialogue and bridge building as instruments for promoting national understanding and co-operation, I pledge the full and unequivocal support of my humble self and the government of Nasarawa State for The Senators Forum.

In keeping with one of the fundamental tenets of democracy, the freedom to choose, The Senators' Forum allowed me to choose the topic for this discussion. I chose the topic referred to earlier. The question might well be asked: Why do we need to talk about the crises of democracy when we should be talking about the dividends of democracy? The answer is simple. Democracy draws much of its strength from its capacity to expand the frontiers of dialogue. Constant dialogue ensures that the tenets and the institutions of democracy are kept under constant public surveillance to prevent them from being weakened or hijacked by the actors on the political stage. Our willingness to dialogue on our peculiar challenges as a nation reflects our desire to build our democracy on the rock of our collective commitment.

Those who make it a habit to criticise government tend to conveniently forget the problems we confronted at the inception of democracy. These problems were not the making of our civilian leaders. They resulted largely from our recent history as a developing nation under military dictatorship. If we do not remember where we were and what we faced, we can never appreciate how far we have travelled and what we have achieved.

Democracy, be it in a developed or a developing country, is not without its problems. J.F. Kennedy called it "a difficult kind of government." Plato said it was "a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder." Democracy is not a magic wand given to us by a fairy godmother with which we could wipe away all the problems of all the people by simply mouthing the right incantations. It is but a form of government run by men and women. As such, it cannot be insulated from the whims and caprices that often intrude on the conduct of all men and women born of women.

Crises are not necessarily bad for democracy. The test of good governance is not the absence of crises, desirable as it may be, but their effective management. A well- managed crisis advances social progress. Crisis helps us to grow because it challenges us and fires our determination to overcome and to succeed.

I am sure none of us expected our nascent democracy to be crisis free. Our years of military rule did worse than rob of us democracy. The pool of democratic experience in the executive and the legislative branches of government was dry. In 1999, only four state governors have had a previous experience in that position. The remaining 32 governors, who came from different back grounds in business and the professions, were new. More than 90 per cent of the national and state assembly legislators were similarly new to politics and law-making. Clearly, our democracy could not but face some crises arising from this lack of experience alone.

We faced four crisis points, namely, the crisis of a militarised national psyche or mentality, the crisis of expectations, the crisis of inexperience and the crisis of power. We will now proceed to examine each of these crises in turn to see how they impacted on our nascent democracy in the past six years.

The crisis of a militarised national psyche or mentality.

By May 29, 1999, the armed forces had ruled the country for 29 years, in two phases: January 15, 1966 to October 1, 1979 and December 30, 1983 to May 29, 1999. In 39 years of independence as at 1999, we had only about ten years of democratic rule. The second republic, 1979 to 1983, turned out to be an interregnum between the two phases of military rule. This is neither the place nor the time to discuss the merits and the demerits of military intervention in our national politics. In any case, it is outside the scope of our discussion.

However, we need to note four salient points about the prolonged military rule in our country because they are central to this discussion. Firstly, a new generation of Nigerians was born and brought up during the period of military rule. Another generation came of voting age during that period. The military era babies knew no other form of government than the military; they knew no other ways of doing things than the military ways. These military era babies, like the baby boomers in the United States, have come of age and assumed leadership positions in various facets of our national life. They have a different national out look and a different mental orientation because they imbibed something of the military culture and tradition. Many civilians instinctively give the military salute. It shows how deeply the military culture penetrated our mentality.

Secondly, military rule replaced the rule of law with arbitrariness. This means that when the country returned to civil rule, one of the great pillars of democracy, the rule of law, was at best rickety. It had been eaten by the worms of arbitrariness.

Thirdly, in the early years of the Fourth Republic, the military cast a long shadow over the country. We could almost feel its breath at the back of our necks. Irresponsible speculations in the press about alleged coup plots hardly helped matters. This was unsettling for the civilian leaders and the polity itself.

Fourthly, the military authorities put the legislature effectively under lock and key. Executive and legislative powers resided in the military rulers who legislated through the issuance of decrees and edicts at federal and state levels respectively. The military authorities tolerated the judiciary but curbed its powers to adjudicate with ouster clauses in the decrees and the edicts. The civil service was re-orientated to serve the exigencies of military dictatorship.

The consequence of these four points is that the executive and the legislature at federal and state levels generally suffered from the absence of what the popular American novelist, John Grisham, calls "the sage voice of experience." The Senators Forum may, in time, generate a pool of experienced legislators from which our democracy can benefit.

In 1979, the military administration replaced the parliamentary system of government with an executive presidential system similar to what obtains in the United States. The civilian leaders inherited the same system when the country returned to civil rule in 1999. Perhaps, the first major mistake was a liberal understanding of the word, executive to mean unlimited operational powers available to the civilian leaders. We tended to equate the executive powers available to the civilian president or governor with the same absolute powers exercised by their military predecessors.

We expected the president and the governors to do things with immediate effect as the military rulers did. With immediate effect, government signed contracts and contractors executed them. This phrase was the standard-bearer of military activism. But with it, the military authorities subverted civil service rules and the financial instructions, the holy books that regulate bureaucracy. We lost the systematic ways of carrying on government business. This constituted a comprehensive damage to the time-honoured way of managing human and financial resources of government honestly and transparently. Luckily, President Obasanjo has succeeded in restoring the system through what is now known as the due process for which he created the office of a special adviser. I regard this as a frontal assault on the military mentality as it affected bureaucracy.

If a military governor could award a contract for a country road with immediate effect, a civilian governor has no such powers. He must do so through consultation or due process. Consultation is a slow process and gives rise to some tardiness in the business of government. But twenty-nine years of military rule had replaced the virtue of patience and consultation with the vice of impatience and arbitrariness. Many of us even cherished the latter. I submit that this mentality created a lingering crisis in our democracy.

The civilian leaders faced a critical image problem. Military propaganda, sedulously aided by the news media, succeeded in generally portraying civilian leaders as kleptomaniacs who seek power and are in power to loot public treasuries. It would be correct to say that many Nigerians simply adopted a wait and see what the civilian leaders would do with the public treasuries this time around. President Obasanjo knew this. In his inaugural address on May 29, 1999, he promised it would not be business as usual in the country. It has not been easy but he has been as good as his word. He set up ICPC and EFCC as organs of government to tackle corruption. However, the image of civilian leadership, battered by the military, cast a shadow over our nascent democracy. The press dutifully piled up on this image with exaggerated report of cases of theft of public fund as evidence that it was business as usual. Political opponents helped to reinforce the military propaganda by sponsoring the publication of fictitious cases of corruption against state governors. Some state governors spent the better part of their first four- year term defending themselves against spurious allegations of corruption either in the press or before ICPC.

Their actions, motivated entirely by personal interests, created the unwholesome impression that our democracy had become a prisoner of venality among public office holders. It put our democracy through avoidable stress. Venality is a human disease. As it is with civilian leaders, so it is with military rulers. Military rulers were not General Clean and civilian leaders are not Chief Unclean.

Crisis of Expectation

We expect changes when political actors change. Nigerians who did not have much personal luck during the military regime expected the new political actors to butter their bread. They expected them to quickly make up for the lost years and opportunities and deliver at short notice. In our anxiety to see democracy perform where military dictatorship failed, we raised the stakes and did not consider any demands on democracy to be unfair or unrealistic. It created a crisis when our leaders could not deliver fast enough or meet all the individual needs quickly enough. The crisis of expectation principally arose from the fact that many of us took democracy for granted. We assumed, quite wrongly in my humble view, that our democracy was a turnkey project with all the parts in place. Many of us, including those who should know better, equated our fledging democracy with the more settled democracies of the United States of America and Western Europe.

The politicians are to blame. Our electioneering promises were quite generous. We raised the expectations of the people beyond what we could deliver. By the time we took over, the people were ready for us to deliver on our promises and the promises of democracy. The magic wand was missing. This created a crisis of personal disappointment that gradually rose to a crisis of confidence in the leadership.

What did we expect democracy to deliver? In a rather simplistic term, we expected democracy to make life better for us as individuals, as members of our various tribes and as members of our geo-political zones. We had individual expectations of democracy. We expected it to deliver equal national opportunities in education and employment to all Nigerians. Our political leaders have aggregated our expectations and coined a handy phrase for it, namely, dividends of democracy. This clever but unfortunate resort to the business world, gives a totally new meaning to democracy. It suggests that with the ballot paper, we invest in democracy. As investors, we expect dividends. This popular phrase attempts to demote individual expectations in favour of collective rewards. We invest individually as voters but we reap collectively as a people. It makes sense but it compounds the problems of expectations. Individuals expect personal dividends of democracy. The problem of government down the ages is how best to satisfy or meet the needs of all the people all of the time.

A notable consequence of the crisis of expectation was the emergence of associations and ethnic militia that purported to represent the collective interests of tribes or geo-political zones in the country. These groups, such as Afenifere and its militant group, Oodua Peoples Congress, in the south-west, Ohaneze in south-east, Arewa Consultative Forum in the north and Egbesu and other militia in the south-south, emerged in response to the expectations of the various tribes and geo-political zones from the dividends of democracy. All of us expected democracy to give us a fairer share of the national cake than hitherto. These groups put enormous pressure on, and heated the polity, for most of the first four years of our democracy.

We had more inter-ethnic and inter-religious crises than at any other time in our country. Various parts of the country were convulsed in inter-ethnic or inter-religious violence. The freedoms unchained by democracy became licenses unlimited. Accumulated years anger and of frustration within and among the ethnic groups fuelled violence directed at other ethnic nationalities and those of a different religious faith. The violence, notably the indigene and the non-indigene syndrome, was fuelled by frustrated politicians behaving like the dog in a manger. These conflicts did put a big question mark on the survivability of democracy in our country. Mercifully, that ill wind has run its course.

The Crisis of Impatience

The crisis of impatience fuelled the crisis of expectation. It was its driving force. I have had occasion to point out at another forum that "patience appears to be in short supply in the land. The rulers and the ruled are impatient with one another; the executive and the legislatures are impatient with one another."

Democracy requires a new set of attitudes and temperament. That, in turn, requires a process of learning and assimilation. At the beginning, we tended to behave as if we had sufficiently learned the ropes and put the vital lessons of democracy under our belts. Nothing could be further from the truth. We needed to be patient with ourselves and with one another. The executive needed to be patient with the legislature and the legislature needed to be patient with the executive. Democracy thrives on a democratic culture. Culture cannot be decreed or ordered by an act of parliament. It took the settled democracies of the United States and Western Europe decades, if not centuries, for their present levels of democratic culture to take root. We too must pay our dues for our democracy to find the right climate for genuine growth in our country.

The Crisis of Power

This brings us to the mother of all the crises of democracy, the crisis of power. The crisis of power was a contest of supremacy between the executive and the legislative branches of government. Many of us in the two branches of government did not quite know the locus of power in a democracy. We saw the two branches as equal with equal powers exercised equally. After all, the president and the governors, like the legislators were elected by the same electorate. The executive had no powers, legal or moral, to treat the legislators like junior partners in government.

The framers of our constitution never intended this to be the case. No human society subscribes to the wisdom of having two captains in one boat. The locus of power is in the executive branch of government. The function of the legislative branch is to superintend the exercise of that power and ensure that the executive branch does not exceed its constitutional brief or the limits of its constitutional power. Some of our legislators saw their over sight function as a passive one. They yearned for activism and, being generally young and inexperienced, saw nothing wrong with enlivening their legislative functions with a dollop of radicalism. Youthful exuberance is a privilege of the young. No one can deny them that privilege.

The first four years of our democracy witnessed attempts by the legislature to assert its authority over the executive branch of government. In several cases, the shouting match headed for a show down and the threats of impeachment. On more than three occasions, the national assembly initiated steps to impeach the president. At least eight state governors faced the same situation at one time or the other. In the state assemblies, the crisis of power led to the removal of speakers and other principal officers of state assemblies. In at least three states, the legislature was factionalised. In Enugu State, for instance, one faction of the legislature was temporarily based in Abuja. When they returned to Enugu and were barred from the state house of assembly, they dutifully conducted their affairs by the barricaded entrance. Although the senate was never factionalised in the same way but it says something of the politics of a new democracy that the upper house has five presidents in six years. It may be a record not worth envying by the senate else where but it was Nigerian democracy in action.

'Power,' the late Moshood Abiola once said, 'is sweet.' Elective office confers a sense of personal importance and power on individuals. When men and women flex muscles, their primary objective is to demonstrate their level of power and authority in the society. Perhaps, what happened was inevitable. Perhaps it was good for democracy. But certainly, it was part of our learning process of the mores of democracy.

What was the general impact of these four crises on our democracy? I have attempted to show how each of them affected our democracy in one way or another. Their cumulative effect alarmed us at the beginning. It created room for fear over the survival of democracy. These crises shook our faith in democracy and its capacity to prove itself as the government of the people, by the people and for the people. But we did not lose that faith. Democracy may not have delivered on all its promises to the people, but it has not failed them. It may not have solved every political or social problem that our country faces but it has provided us with the necessary tools to better manage the affairs of the nation and its federating units in a more democratic manner.

Even the most cynical among us would admit that we have made great progress in providing the enabling environment for our democracy to take firm roots. The 2003 general elections, warts and all, were a successful transition from civil rule to civil rule. There is less rancour between the executive and the legislative branches of government today. The recent removal of the deputy governor of Akwa Ibom State or what I called a democratic noise which passed for another attempt by some elements in the House of Representatives to serve the president with an impeachment notice, do not challenge that assertion. Pockets of conflicts such as these will always remain with us as a democracy. We cannot wish them away.

We have discarded much of the baggage of military mentality in the conduct of our national affairs. The democratic temperament is gradually replacing the military mentality. There is greater patience with government at all levels today. Our people have even learnt to temper their expectations from democracy with the reality about the capacity of democracy to meet all and their every need.

Our legislators are maturing on the job and are learning to moderate their youthful, legislative exuberance with greater maturity. State governors have similarly matured on the job. They and their legislators are no longer in a needless contest for power. We have come a through a circle of crises of democracy. Al Smith, a U.S. politician, suggests that "all the ills of democracy can be cured by more democracy."

I believe we have cured the crises of our democracy with more democracy rather than through extra-democratic means. Our individual experience of our six eventful years of democracy may differ but on the whole, the experience has been frustrating experience and exhilarating experience. It was a learning experience and it was a maturing experience. As I look back past six years and look to the future of our country, I am strengthened in my firm belief that the future is great for our country and the future of our democracy is assured.

It is my hope that the experiences we have gained individually and collectively so far in running a democratic government in the past six years would be deployed to strengthen the institutions of democracy. However, as we look forward to the immediate future of our country, I am constrained to draw the attention of this distinguished audience to a couple of lice in the lock of our democracy.

Firstly, I draw your attention to our attitude towards former public officers. Once a man leaves public office and can no longer dispense favours, he becomes a historical relic. In 2007, going by the 1999 constitution, the president and twenty-eight of the thirty-six state governors would not be eligible for re-election. Some members of the national and state assemblies face the same prospects. The constitution permits them to go on for ever but zoning formula in the name of equity, may force some of them to let other geo-political zones produce the next legislators.

For the first time in our country, we will have a large pool of people with rich executive and legislative experiences. What will be their role in the future political administration of the country as former public office holders? Would it be the end of the road for them?

I raise these questions to draw your attention to the shabby treatment the public meets to our former public officers. We put them out to pasture as have-beens; men and women on whom and on whose act the curtain has come down. There is a disconnection between current and former public officers. There is no known bridge between them. If there is traffic across this void, it is characterised by barely-concealed mutual hostility.

Our attitude towards former public officers is cynical and cruel. When former public officers are appointed into public offices by a new administration, our usual cynical reaction is that these 'expired men and women' are being recycled to deny the young people their God given right to play their part in government. There is reason to fear that this may be the fate of the president, the governors and the legislators who will not be returning to public office in 2007. The fear of shabby public treatments has often pushed many African leaders to amend their constitutions and cling to power.

I do not support sit-tight political leaders. But if the public has a generous attitude towards its former public officers, sitting tight would be a less attractive option. A nation owes its former public office holders a modicum of respect. I advocate here and now, a re-orientation of our attitude towards our former public office holders. It may be necessary to find meaningful roles for such men and women as a national policy. The only role our constitution has for a former president is his membership of the National Council of State. That is a limiting role. We do not necessarily need the constitution to tell us how we should treat and relate with our former public officers. Nations build their stability on the synergy between their serving and former public officers. Our experience of the past six years of democracy will only serve us in the context of its contribution to our political stability.

Former presidents and former governors are private citizens only in the sense that they can no longer call the shots in the decision-making process. They are private but not ordinary citizens. Or, if you like, they are private citizens with a difference. The violation of their persons amounts to the desecration of their former offices. One recalls, with sadness, the humiliation of former public officers by the military regime after the 1983 coup. They were treated like common criminals and, being presumed guilty, by the Buhari administration, were locked up for months, and in some cases, years to prove their innocence before military tribunals. Former President Shehu Shagari and his former vice-president, Dr. Alex Ekwueme, as well as former party functionaries, governors, ministers, special advisers and commissioners suffered this humiliation as detainees in prisons or detention centres. Alhaji Shehu Shagari nearly lost his sight. Other detainees suffered various illnesses from which some of them, like the former governor of Ogun State, Chief Bisi Onabanjo and his Benue State counterpart, Mr. Aper Aku, later died. When he was toppled by General Ibrahim Babangida, General Buhari and his chief of staff, Supreme Headquarters, the late Major-General Tunde Idiagbon, were similarly detained for a long stretch. The humiliation of our former public officers reached its nadir with the arrest, trial and imprisonment of the then former head of state, General Obasanjo and the late Major-General Musa Yar'Adua, former chief of staff, Supreme Headquarters, on charges of plotting a coup in 1995. General Yar'Adua died in prison in circumstances that suggested the agents of state murdered him.

The humiliation of our former public officers does not end with the violation of their persons. It extends to the violation and the abandonment of the policies and programmes of their governments. Their successors in government claim the divine right to cancel those programmes and initiate their own. The high mortality rate of our public policies and programmes has the unsettling effect of, to use a familiar expression, raising the hopes of the people and dashing them to pieces. Abandoned development projects are cruel reminders of this attitude and its deleterious effect on our national progress and development. In the process, we have denied ourselves a sense of history. Our leaders come and go and are easily consigned to the pages, if not the foot notes, of our history. Part of the reason the military administration opted for the presidential system was to help raise national father figures around whom the nation would rally in and out office. So far, the Nigerian factor has proved an obstacle to this noble objective. A thousand pities. I know of no nation that has progressed by starting from the beginning each time its leadership is changed. Leaders build on the foundation laid by their predecessors.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that some of us are beginning to entertain genuine fears over the fate of the programmes and policies we have initiated and to which public funds have been committed. Will they die with our leaving office or will they be seen and continued as the responsibilities of government and not of individuals?

I do not raise these issues to open up old wounds. I do so because I sincerely believe that if we must build the democracy and the nation of our dreams, as we must, then we must take necessary national steps to protect our former public officers from being subjected to ridicule and humiliation. I do not suggest that former public officers should live above the laws of the land. I suggest that the nation should protect them from being victimised by the petty whims and caprices of their successors in office as well as those of their political adversaries. A man, who has had the privilege to serve his country as president or governor or in other exalted capacities, is fully entitled to a fair treatment by his country. A man about to leave public office should have no fears that once he leaves, the Nigerian public will offer his body as a grub to his enemies or political adversaries. When a man has no such fears, he will always give his best in the service of the nation and its people.

I do not make these suggestions because I am involved as a governor who would have served his two terms in office in 2007. This is not about me; this is not about you; it is about the stability of our democracy. We have a moral obligation to do whatever is necessary to reinforce the pillars of our democracy.

My second point is the role of the political parties as pillars of democracy. Political parties here as elsewhere, have the capacity to undermine democracy. Experiences in the past showed that this was an option readily exercised by parties that lost elections in this country. In the second republic, the losing parties ganged up as progressive parties and opposed the leading and ruling party, the NPN, and portrayed it as a conservative party committed to the old order. They progressively and comprehensively undermined the NPN controlled federal government. They inadvertently gave some ambitious elements in the military the excuse to truncate the second republic. It was our collective loss.

Some of our political parties are behaving the same way today. They are offering themselves as progressive alternatives to a "conservative" PDP. More than two years after the 2003 general elections, inter- and intra-party election petitions against state governors and legislators are still being heard by the courts. Only four weeks ago did the Supreme Court dispose of the case between the president and the presidential candidate of the ANPP, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari.

General Buhari exercised his option as a candidate for an elective office to challenge Chief Obasanjo's victory through the legal avenue open to him - the presidential election tribunal and the Supreme Court. In both instances, the courts did not find in his favour. It is naturally for him to feel disappointed by these verdicts. Like all litigants, he expected the verdicts to favour him. They did not. We do offer him and the ANPP our commiserations. We expected him to accept these judgements in good faith. If he is right and the courts are wrong, it is still the decision of the courts that matter in a democracy. If a man subjects himself to the judgement of a court of law, it means he is prepared to accept it, whichever way it goes. One is thoroughly disappointed, therefore, that General Buhari would have none of this. He takes his loss in the courts so badly that he feels justified to say that the Supreme Court, by its verdict, had legalised election violence in the country. Utterances such as this from a man who wants the nation to believe he is a democrat, makes democrats wince. I call on the ANPP to condemn, without reservation, the utterances of its former presidential candidate since the Supreme Court ended his current quest for the presidency. Those who seek to lead us cannot afford to show contempt for the judgement of the highest court in the land.

The national assembly must take urgent steps to amend the 2002 electoral act to set a time limit for the conclusion of all petitions arising from the conduct of elections in the country. These cases should not linger beyond a reasonable period and put unnecessary stress on our democracy and the rule of law.

My objective in raising these issues is to suggest to this distinguished audience the need for a constant shake up in the system to tailor democracy to the peculiar needs of our nation and its people. Democracy is a living political organism. It has its own needs for survival. The destiny of our democracy is in our hands. As public officers or legislators or private citizens of this great country, all of us have our role to play to sustain democracy. We have a moral obligation and a constitutional duty to play our part, no matter how exalted and no matter how lowly our positions in society may be.

Thank you and may God continue to bless our efforts.