The True Price Of This Democracy
By Debo Adejugbe
It is simple. You don’t have to be a genius to understand it and at its best, it makes for a good Nollywood movie. You don’t necessarily need a good director or producer; the story flows seamlessly and all the ingredients of an epic ending are all there.
I have watched several American movies patterned along the way their government and democracy works, you will never get enough. The cast, always awesome and the way the story gets delivered –even when corruption screams at you on the screen- gives you the idea that corruption in its entire element is not a value to uphold and they don’t censor it.
When you decide to bear the excruciatingly unfathomable pain that a Nollywood movie elicits most times, you can’t but get depressed when it is a political thriller you decide to feed your eyes on. It is a sign of the times we live in and the more we move along in this democratic journey, the more odious the air gets, yet so many people are enjoying it as it is.
Do not to misconstrue my intention in this piece as a lone wolf crying out in the alley of our National misadventures with civilian rule; as the plot for this brand of democracy we practice thickens, the ominous chords playing in the background of the movie is alarming, depressing and altogether doesn’t paint a picture of a perfect future for our nation.
When Abraham Lincoln blamelessly defined democracy as “the government of the people, by the people, for the people”; you can’t but get flummoxed at the mention of the brand that Nigeria champions. Not necessarily the worst, but the most inhumane I have ever heard of or seen anywhere – well, that is me.
In this democratic dispensation, we have lived more on a ledge, encouraging the next person to take a plunge while we wait in perpetuity for the promised messiah. Don’t get it twisted folks; he is not coming all blazed up in glory from heaven. We have to make do with what we have, and it is you……or you, or you.
Maybe it is our fault?! Noah Webster might have been talking about Nigerians’ love for electing the worst among men to govern them when he said: “If a republican government fails to secure public prosperity and happiness, it must be because the citizens neglect the divine commands, and elect bad men to make and administer the laws.” Just insert PDP as you deem fit. You get the point?
Reading Chinua Achebe’s “The trouble with Nigeria” published in 1983 as a book dissecting our problem with leadership and the festering corruption of the Shagari era, you will have to admit it feels like Déjà vu all over again. Our democracy has grown in corrupt leaps and bounds confirming Achebe’s fears and all what he noted in his pamphlet as an alarming reality – He died experiencing worse. We now practice “Kleptocracy”; a system where the flippant among us governs with careless abandon and the rest of us –the “siddon lookers’ and high-grounders-lushly savour our temporary safety nets rather than dig in, get dirty and rile those in power to sit up or get out.
Benjamin Franklin aptly opined that: “They, who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty nor security.” I tend to agree wholly with him. We have, in a bid not to sound too critical of the government or a particular group of persons, traded our essential liberties for the temporary security that comes with democracy. At what price? The real cost is the future of generations unborn who will cluelessly saunter and revel in a problem they never fabricated or supported, yet faced with the daunting task of going their entire lives looking for solutions to.
This democracy, as flawed as it is was fought for, with the blood of thousands on our streets. They died for the future we graciously embrace in the hope that life would get better. Is this the future we fought for? As a young kid in secondary school in 1993, I ran into the streets to protest with others against Babangida’s annulment of the Presidential elections. Many died and countless others were massacred, maimed, imprisoned, murdered, silenced and exiled in the brutish Abacha regime that followed.
Eventually, we got the PDP and their cohorts who have waged a relentless war on our psyche and treasury since 1999. We are continuously paying dearly for this democracy with every looter parading the street, every idiotic and clueless executive decision being made, every irrelevant policy, every thieving minister and every pro-corruption pardon being forced on us without even a simple whimper of detestation to show our opposition. Things are getting worse.
It is an absolute fact that not doing anything as a citizen to work towards correcting this anomalous situation means you are tradingyour essential liberty for temporary security. Hear this: you deserve neither!
I am an apostle of 2015 and the message that “it is never too late to start”. Take back your “essential liberty” and throw their “temporary security” back in their faces. The journey to stop paying this continuous humongous price for a democracy whose foundation was laid with the blood of thousands on our streets starts with taking a stand to be counted come 2015. Have you?
Let us borrow a little of Chinua Achebe’s wisdom. He said: “To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor’s real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume!”
Are you aware that you are being oppressed and have fallen from great heights? Do you know the real name of this oppressor? Do you intend to end the rule of the oppressor? In this piece, my answers screams out and I’m hoping you have yours ready.
If not, you will leave for your children a worse Nigeria than the one you met and give credence to John Adams, who said: “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” Think about the Shagari era and ask yourself: “are we bracing up for the end of the present republic constitutionally or waiting for guns to chase them out for us?”
I’m @deboadejugbe
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