Democracy as a Catalyst for National Integration - the Nigerian Example

Being Text of a Lecture by His Excellency, Dr. Abdullahi Adamu (Sarkin Yakin Keffi & A'are Obateru of the Source), Executive Governor of Nasarawa State delivered at the 2005 Champion Newspapers Better Society Lecture Series, Concorde Hotel, Owerri, Imo State on Monday, November 28, 2005.

Great newspapers do much more than discharge their professional obligation of informing, educating and entertaining the public. They stimulate public and intellectual discussions on matters of public interest in and outside their news and editorial pages. Their objective is to help politicians do a good job of running a good government. Or, so I would imagine.

When Champion Newspapers Limited instituted the Champion Better Society annual lecture in 1997, it did so in the tradition of all great newspapers. The annual lecture is also in keeping with the motto of the newspaper, to wit: "for a better society." Its objective is to widen the scope of its social responsibilities and, in the words of its managing director/editor-in-chief, Mr. Emma Agu, "promote liberal democracy and true federalism." I firmly identify myself with this objective.

I am truly privileged to have been asked by the management to deliver this year's lecture, the first to be held here in Owerri, the beautiful capital city of Imo State. I can think of at least two reasons why the management chose Owerri for this year's lecture. The first is that Owerri is the capital of the home state of the publisher of Champion newspapers, Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, the suave businessman and, something rare among politicians, a gentleman. If this charity of the Champion annual lecture did not begin here at home, it has now come home. The second reason must be that the management of Champion Newspapers Ltd wants us to taste the traditional hospitality of Imo people and their culinary delight, the famous ofe Owerri.

I am delighted to carry out this family assignment at this time in our political history right here in the heart land of the south-east geo-political zone. We, in Nasarawa State, are members of the Champion family. I am privileged to number Chief Iwuanyanwu among my close friends and political associates. The deputy governor of Nasarawa State, Mr. Labaran Maku, was a very senior editorial staff of Champion newspapers. The state commissioner for youths and sports, Mr. Silas Agara, served his one year national service under the NYSC scheme with Champion newspapers. Indeed, Mr. Agara earned his place in the company as the best youth ‘corper' in his time. Mr. Emma Agu is also my close friend. I salute my big brother and my small brothers and sisters in the Champion family. I extend to them my very warm fraternal compliments. (Da lu nu)

As we move towards the end of the two-term tenure of the president and most of the state governors, demands for a new locus of power at the centre and in the states are becoming increasingly contentious in the news media. Tribal champions, who claim to be the authentic voices of their people, are emerging from all corners of the country. Some of these self-appointed leaders seem to prefer a verbal war to a reasoned argument. They are beginning to heat the system and creating fears that 2007 might be the ultimate litmus political test for our country's survival. We owe our country a duty to promote the cause of its unity and integration. A forum, such as this, is not, to use my favourite phrase, a talk shop. Every time we meet to discuss certain aspects of our national challenges, we either build a new bridge across the gulf of ignorance or level the mountains of mutual suspicion.

Champion newspapers, and indeed, the Nigerian news media, have a sacred duty to champion a better Nigerian society in which all Nigerians would be judged more by their character and the content of their brain and less by the accident of their tribal birth or by their religion. We must welcome, no matter how small, every effort directed at helping our leaders at all levels to build a country which, in the memorable words of our national anthem, no man, or woman for that matter, is oppressed; a country in which all men and all women are brothers and sisters and a country in which the breeze of patriotism and unity will always tame the storm of disunity. It was the end for which our redoubtable champions of independence fought and suffered. It is the end to which all of us must, unapologetically, rededicate and commit ourselves. The challenges of democracy and nation-building that face us today are as critical as those the heroes of our independence faced. They were not daunted. We should not be daunted. A united, fair and just nation cannot be wished for. It must be built with the bricks of honesty and the sweat of its people. Patriotism is a call to do the nation's duty. It is not a one time call. It is an all time call. A nation's duty is an all time duty.

The choice of topics for the six lectures delivered in the series since 1997 broadly reflects the objectives of the series. In 1997, Professor Sam Oyovbare spoke on: Democracy as Model for Development and National Integration. That lecture was delivered two years before the end of military rule. Its objective was, perhaps, to open our eyes to the inherent capacity of democracy as a tool for national unity and development. The topic for this lecture, eight years later, Democracy as a Catalyst for National Integration – the Nigerian Example, gives us the opportunity to examine how far we have used this tool for national integration and how far we have come along the road of new national opportunities afforded us by democracy in the last six and half years. From what one sees of our country today, democracy clearly enjoys a certain reputation as the big national hope. Through public lectures, seminars and workshops, almost every professional body in the country seeks to understand its role and responsibilities in a democracy and how it can best discharge them. We are all anxious, and rightly so, to play our part as individuals and groups so that the promises of democracy can be fulfilled in our country. Our immediate historical experience compels us to view democracy as something much more than "a government of the people for the people by the people." We see it as the ultimate solution to all the problems that confront the nation, among which are divisive politics, under-development and the subordination of patriotism to tribal loyalties.

For the twenty-eight years of military dictatorship, democracy was a forbidden fruit in our country. When we were allowed to eat it, it opened our eyes to a new vista of opportunities and challenges that face us as individuals and as a nation. Military rule, no matter how benevolent it may be, has no room for popular participation. When people are freed from that type of government into the warm, welcoming arms of participatory or representative form of government, they naturally invest their total hope in the new form of government.

We expect a great deal from democracy. We expect democracy to right whatever wrongs had been done to us in the past as individuals and as members of our various tribes. We expect it to heal the festering sores in our body politic. We expect it to compensate us for all the political, social or economic opportunities we either missed or were deprived of. We expect it to patch up the tears in the fabric of our national unity. We expect it to be the government for the people, capable of taking us to either the promised land or, at least put us at its threshold in the time it takes to say democracy.

These expectations may be unfair but they are not entirely borne out of a naïve appreciation of how far democracy can go to be all things to all people. Our expectations are anchored in the confident belief that the future of our country, its unity and development, rest on the survival of democracy. This total hope in democracy gave rise to a crisis of expectations in the early years of our nascent when democracy could not respond to or solve our individual problems as quickly as we had hoped. However, as democracy takes a firmer root in the land each passing day, we are learning to moderate our expectations and make them, if you like, more realistic. One can sometimes sense the unexpressed fear among Nigerians that if we blow it this time around, the fate of our country would make the heroes of our independence, all of whom are of blessed memory, turn in their graves. It is easy to over-estimate the capacity of democracy. As I have had occasion to observe at another forum, democracy is not a magic wand. It cannot turn the ugly frog into prince charming. Although democracy, perhaps, offers us the best opportunity for national unity and cohesion, it is still only a system of government. Its principles can still be sabotaged or even breached by the guardians of the holy shrine. In sum, democracy is as good and as powerful as the people want it to be. Conversely, it is as weak and as unfaithful to its tenets as the people want. My point is that the success or failure of democracy lies on the people, not on democracy itself; and therefore, in examining the capacity of democracy to do both the possible and the impossible, we should take into consideration the support system of our democracy.

Democracy has had a wonderful history and acquired cultural and attitudinal colorations as a consequence of the social and political problems of each nation. The principles of democracy such as political pluralism, one man one vote and the freedom of expression and of association, are basically universal principles, the absence of any one of which gives democracy a hallow ring. But the practice of democracy itself is anything but universal. Peculiarities of each country determine the nature of its practice of democracy. The late Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, our first and only prime minister, made this point in the legislative debate in the early years of our independence, when he said: "I find it difficult to understand what is really meant by ‘democracy.' In America, the people practice ‘democracy'; in the United Kingdom, there is ‘democracy.' France is ‘democratic,' but they are all different kinds. So, in Nigeria may be yet another kind of ‘democracy.'

The Greek and Romans practised participatory or direct democracy. Modern political scholars compare their participatory democracy with village meetings. Greek and Roman citizens gathered at public squares to freely speak and vote for or against proposed legislations tabled before them. By modern standards, we would regard their practice as undemocratic but it served their social and political purposes pretty well. Modern nations have since replaced participatory democracy with representative democracy for the greater convenience of the nation-state. We have a wide range of democratic systems. Britain's constitutional monarchy is as democratic as the French and the American republicanism. We elect our president through popular vote. The Americans elect theirs through the combination of popular vote and the electoral college. Universal adult suffrage, the hall mark of representative democracy in the modern age, was won through a series of protests and agitations in most nations. Universal adult suffrage has helped to bring women into high political offices several countries. Only last week, Mrs. Ellen Sirleaf was confirmed as a democratically elected president of Liberia. She is Africa's first and she is a challenge to Nigerian women too.

Adaptability is the strength of democracy, for therein lies its capacity to respond to the social and political needs of each country. A country's form of democracy is the sum of its history and of its experiences in the management of its affairs. Culture and tradition play a major part in both the form and the practice of democracy. They constitute, in a sense, the real foundations of democracy. Where this foundation is weak or poorly erected, democracy invariably becomes a victim of the whims and the caprices of those in charge of the temporal affairs of state. We should bear this point in mind for the purposes of an objective critique of our democracy. The progressive weakening of our traditional institution in the name of radicalism has resulted in the progressive erosion of our value systems as a people. In Nasarawa State, we recently took steps to arrest this looming disaster with an amendment to our local government laws. Under the new law, our traditional rulers are once again part of the local government administration. This is a determined step taken by our administration to marry the very successful indirect rule system introduced by the colonial authorities in Northern Nigeria with modern local government administration. In effect, we are providing more and needed support pillars for our democracy.

Some of us may still wonder, as Sir Abubakar did, about our kind of democracy. Is there a Nigerian democracy with peculiar distinguishing marks or something unique to it? Three of our former military rulers did briefly think that Nigeria could invent a political system unique to it. In August 1966 General Yakubu Gowon inaugurated the ad-hoc constitutional conference and tasked them with possibly finding "an entirely new (political) arrangement which will be peculiar to Nigeria and which has not yet found its way into any political dictionary." Generals Murtala Muhammed and Ibrahim Babangida repeated the same charge to their own committees on new constitutions too. The wise men failed to find one –and it was not for lack of trying.

Our experience of democracy has been relatively short. We had five years and three months of the Westminster type of parliamentary democracy in the first republic. We had four years and three months of executive presidential democracy in the second republic and only three months of a mish-mash in the third republic. This, therefore, is our longest experience of continuous democratic experience so far. Obviously, we have not learnt all the lessons we ought to learn about democracy. But there is abundant evidence that we are committed to it. We will make our mistakes, as we do now, and we will learn from them, as other nations did – and grew stronger by imbibing the ethos of democracy, not by gulping it down but by sipping it.

The military coup of January 15, 1966 blighted the light of democracy in our country for almost fifteen years. But at the end of it on October 1, 1979, we entered a new phase of constitutional democracy with a brand new constitution and the present American type executive presidential system of government. The 1979 constitution, drafted by the 49 wise men, ratified by the constituent assembly and finally edited by the Supreme Military Council, introduced fundamental changes in the structure of our federalism and our national politics. Its main features, at least for our purposes, are:

1. the fusion of the post of a prime minister and a ceremonial president into an executive president;

2. the total subordination of the constituent states to the centre, resulting in a strong centre and weak states;

3. the abolition of regional or state constitutions and their replacement with a single federal constitution and

4 the national spread of political parties and the outlawing of state or regional parties.

These changes were important to the image of the second republic as a period of our purified national politics. Our country had emerged from the crucibles of a corrective military regime to face the new challenges of constitutional democracy. There was more to these constitutional changes. In effect, the military responded to the ills of the first republic by adopting the executive presidential system of democracy. Politics in the first republic were characterised by extreme regionalism and divisive tendencies. The Westminster parliamentary system with a ceremonial president as head of state and a prime minister as head of government and a formal opposition was the source of endless cut-throat contest for power in the regions and at the centre. The regions were powerful political entities with their own constitutions. The centre was comparatively weak. In their wisdom, the military authorities believed that the set up was inimical to our national integration and unity. They wanted a system of government in which the centre was clearly and constitutionally superior to the constituent units of the federation. They wanted a system in which the president would exercise full executive powers as undisputed father of the nation. This new thinking was also a constitutional response, if you like, to the most critical challenge to Nigerian unity at the time – the secession of the former Eastern Region and the 30-month civil war to crush it and re-unite the country. I cite this last point to buttress my earlier contention that a country's form of constitutional democracy benefits from and is usually shaped by its remote historical and immediate political experiences.

The political history of our country, even before independence, shows that we have been pre-occupied with national unity or integration for as long as anyone can remember. Our efforts are a kaleidoscope of honest attempts and false steps. Before independence, the minorities agitated for states or regions of their own because they feared their domination by the big three tribes would deny them opportunities for full participation in our constitutional democracy and, ultimately weaken democracy itself. Whatever might have been their real political reasons, the young majors who struck on January 15, 1966, believed they were offering the country an alternative form of government with a greater capacity for integrating the country. Our first military ruler, the late Major-General J.T.U. Aguiyi-Ironsi's unification decree, otherwise known as decree 34 of May 1966, abolished the federal structure and replaced it with a unitary system of government. He believed he was cutting a unique path to Nigerian unity by putting an end to a multiplicity of governments. The Yakubu Gowon administration introduced the National Youth Service Corps scheme in 1973 to, if you like, catch a new crop of patriots young. The Murtala/Obasanjo administration posted military governors to states other than their own. It also posted vice-chancellors of federal universities outside their catchment areas. Section 14 (3) of the 1999 constitution, borrowed from the 1979 constitution, provides that "the composition of the government of the federation or any of its agencies and the conduct of its affairs shall be carried out in such a manner as to reflect the federal character of Nigeria and the need to promote national unity.."

These and other constitutional and administrative steps such as the creation of states and the setting up of the Federal Character Commission were, and are, meant to give every Nigerian a stake in the Nigerian nation. They were and are steps towards the very desirable goal of national integration. Given the plethora of these constitutional and administrative actions aimed at national integration, why are we still talking about national integration? Have they failed to achieve their desired objectives?

Some of us may be readily tempted to conclude, and some people have indeed concluded, that they have failed and their failure has condemned the nation to an endless search for a more potent formula for national integration. Such a conclusion would derive from a superficial appreciation of the process of national integration. National integration is a process given life through political tradition and culture, both of which are evolutionary rather revolutionary. We should not expect that laws by themselves can force the evolution of a political tradition, even if the laws are with immediate effect. We must have the patience and the right attitude towards these measures to achieve their objectives.

My humble submission is that this country is more united than ever before in the course of its political history. This statement would come as a shock to those who would readily point to the activities of such ethnic militias as MASSOB in the south-east, OPC in the south-west and the Delta Peoples Volunteer Force in the south-south as evidence that the centre is not holding and things are falling apart. We should be worried that the activities of these and other groups committed to the defence and the promotion of ethnic or religious interests, however those interests are defined, are creating fears in the minds of the gullible. I agree with their right to pressure the system but I do not agree with their method. We must condemn their resort to violence and the attempt to see themselves as alternative governments in the country. However, their existence does not negate my submission here. The ostensible defence of tribal, racial, sectional and religious interests is no more than the normal pressure exerted on the system in a democracy. The superiority of democracy over other political systems is not the absence of such pressure groups but, indeed, their presence and the capacity of the democratic system to accommodate them within the bounds of civilized behaviour and the rule of law.

One is fully aware of the fact that legions of foreign experts have seized on this to make outrageous predictions about the future of our country. An American intelligence report has even said that our country would fail and disintegrate in the next twenty years. We are told that we cannot question is the oracular pronouncements of experts. We take that advice. We need to point out, however, that inter-tribal problems are not unique to Nigeria. Indeed, some of the countries that delight in predicting a certain end for our country are themselves confronted with historical crisis of racial and religious divide. If they have not become failed states by their own crisis, why do they think that our own ethnic crisis will end the life of our own country? But these doomsayers have thrown a challenge to us as a people. We should take up the challenge and provide them wrong once and for all.

The signs of our progress along the path of national integration cannot be ignored by objective experts on the politics of Nigeria. No one can dispute the fact that our political parties are now national. Or, to put it another way, they enjoy national spread. This country will no longer have room for regional or zonal political parties. What happened to AD in the 2003 general elections in the south-west zone must be taken as conclusive confirmation of this assertion. Even the smallest of the 30 registered political parties has membership that cuts across at least two of the six geo-political zones. Political parties are the driving force of democracy. Political parties with a national spread are easily the most potent instrument for national integration. My own party, the PDP, is a wonderful example of how far this country has come in creating a conducive atmosphere for political birds of the same feather to flock together – and pursue common national goals.

I believe we have weathered much of the storm of our nascent democracy. But I would be the first to admit that we still have much work to do to educate our people not only on their right to demand for the dividends of democracy but on their responsibilities to democracy itself and their duty to the nation. After all, the task of democracy is never fully accomplished because social dynamics throws up new challenges and new problems. Competition for power or comparative social and political advantages is a permanent feature of constitutional governments.

It seems to me that often when we examine the level of our national unity or integration, we do it from only one perspective, namely politics and the locus of power. The tribes and the geo-political zones assess their benefits from the political system on the basis of their access to, or denial of, access to power. It is not enough, as some protests in the past showed, for someone from a particular geo-political zone or tribe to be a minister of the federal republic. His tribe or geo-political zone feels marginalised if he is not a minister of a "juicy" ministry. The various administrative and constitutional steps taken so far, which we referred to earlier, were more or less based on the belief that once we get the political equation right, every other thing would automatically fall into place. We need not contest this for the very simple reason that we are political animals.

If we judge the level of our unity or national integration solely on the basis of which tribe or geo-political zone presides over the sharing of the national cake, we are bound to miss the point. There are other indices of national integration without which access to political power would even be meaningless in the long run. Our access to economic opportunities is as important as our access to political power. Political access is vertical and therefore admits only such number as can be accommodated at the top of the ladder at any point in time. On the other hand, economic access is horizontal and, therefore, has more room for more people than political access. It is economic access that brings home the bacon. It is also true that political access is a short cut to economic access. So, as it is in political parties, so it is in economic and business ventures. To put it conservatively, almost all major business or economic ventures in the country today, ranging from manufacturing companies to banks can boast of investors from across tribes and geo-political zones. Almost every boardroom is a rainbow collection of the tribes of Nigeria. The pursuit of common economic interests cannot but be a source of national unity because the success of these ventures and their prosperity and, therefore, the prosperity of their managers and investors, depend on a political system that guarantees individuals the freedom and the liberty to pursue their legitimate aspirations any where they choose and with whoever they choose.

Socially, we have broken down much of the walls of ignorance that insulated one tribe from another and created mutual fear and suspicion. We are now more open with one another because our increased interactions at various levels of human endeavour all the way from our educational institutions to politics and business have created mutual understanding. I believe that there are more inter-tribal marriages in the country now than there were at any point in time in our national history. In my state, Nasarawa, we encourage inter-tribal marriage among the members of the National Youth Service Corps deployed to the state for their primary assignment. The state supports and pays for their wedding expenses. We also offer them permanent and pensionable appointments in our public service. This is part of our contributions to building a nation united by strong family bonds. In the past six years, we have also employed 1,800 teachers from virtually the 35 states of the federation in our secondary and tertiary institutions on permanent and pensionable appointments. One of my senior special assistants is from the south-east. We have appointed people from the south-east and the south-west into the boards of our parastatals. In Nasarawa State University, there are no differential fees between indigenous and non-indigenous students. All of them pay the same fees and are equal in fact and in law as students of the university. We know of no other state in the federation that has adopted and practicalised these liberal attitudes towards our national integration. Our objective is to make Nasarawa State the new beautiful and desirable face of Nigerian unity. Our state is the beautiful rainbow collection of the tribes of Nigeria. It is our duty to keep this rainbow permanently beautiful as a practical demonstration of our faith in the Nigerian nation, its unity and cohesion.

However, let us also remember that our efforts in Nasarawa State would not achieve objectives of national integration if the beneficiaries of our liberal attitude fail to embrace the state as their home to which they must owe their allegiance and to whose development they must commit themselves totally.

As I have said, we have made tremendous progress in integrating the nation through a series of legal and administrative actions as well as some constitutional provisions. Some of us rightly feel frustrated by the fact that despite all these steps, our country still faces problems of ethnic conflicts and tribal sabre rattling and threats to our national unity. In my humble opinion, there are, at least three obstacles to the full flowering of our efforts towards full national integration. These are:

1. Economic opportunities. Despite the efforts of the Obasanjo administration to eradicate or reduce poverty in our country, it remains a fact of our national life. The unfortunate consequence of this is that we tend to regard our various states as our exclusive economic zones from which, as much as possible, others must be kept out. This attitude is itself inimical to the improvement of the economic circumstances of the states themselves. Economic activities generate economic activities and, therefore, help to create wealth and reduce poverty. But this age-old fear that if you let in people from other tribes or states, you are scuttling your own economic opportunities, has a rather long history. It is one wall we must break down. It hardly makes sense that President Olusegun Obasanjo is wooing foreign investors into the country, yet Nigerians themselves are being prevented from engaging in economic activities in other states of the federation. We can tame this monster through public enlightenment and the progressive opening up of our states to other Nigerians in search of jobs or opportunities for private economic activities.

2. Indigenes versus non-indigenes. In almost every part of this country, including areas that are ethnically homogenous, there are those who believe they are the original owners of their communities and all others are strangers. This is a wide spread national problem. No state of the federation is free from it. Most of the inter and intra-ethnic conflicts and violence in the country are directly or indirectly traceable to this problem, also known as the non-indigene syndrome. Again, this problem has a bearing on the desire of the tribes to protect their turfs for greater economic and political benefits. My own simple approach to this problem is a constitutional provision that stipulates a minimum period of residence by a Nigerian to qualify as an indigene of the state of his residence and, therefore, fully entitled to the privileges of indigeneship such as government scholarship for his children, a pensionable appointment in the civil service of the state and the right to be voted into an elective office.

3. Ethnic loyalty. None of us here can pretend not to know that ethnic loyalty is quite strong in our country. Some of us are more loyal to our tribes than we are to our nation. Patriotism is not the sum of a nation's ethnic or racial loyalties but the full and unequivocal commitment of all its citizens to the nation itself. My nation first, right or wrong is the motto of the patriot. Our undue ethnic loyalty is at the expense of our nation and its unity. No Nigerian feels sufficiently confident to call wherever he lives and earns his living his home. We carry this to such a ridiculous extent that the only home to the average Nigeria is his village. We retire to our villages. The dead are buried in their villages. We prefer to build our mansions in our villages which some of us visit only once in a year, rather than where we live and make our money. Few Nigerians bother to contribute to the development of the communities in which they live. It is this reluctance on the part of non-indigenes to identify with and support the communities in which they live that fuels the indigene-n on-indigene problem. If we adopt the constitutional option suggested in the preceding paragraph, I am sure that over time, this problem will fade from our national life.

These are tough problems. They are not insurmountable. But we cannot wish solutions to them. We must tackle them. Every one of us has a role to play in removing these and other obstacles to our national integration. What we do as individuals or as government may be small and even insignificant but like the steady drops of water on a rock, they will eventually make the right impression. My message to Nigerians is simple. We have preached enough about national unity. The time has come for us to show that we are what we preach. Let the doomsayers know that they have nothing to gain from their gloomy predictions about our country. Let the foreign nations and their legion of experts know that Nigerian unity cannot be reduced to mathematical equations of two plus two equal unity or two minus one equals disintegration. If each one of us does his own little bit, if governments at the federal, state and local levels do their part and if all Nigerians are committed by both words and action to the melding of the tribes into one, strong and indivisible nation, then our obstacles would be our stepping stone to the great nation of our dreams.

Thank you and God bless