Nigeria and a Counterfeit Democracy, by Ugoji Egbujo

Without good faith, democracy is a scam. An electoral process governed by arbitrariness rather than fair play is every drug cartel’s dream. The police, electoral officers and judges are groomed and planted, part of the syndicate. Election riggers triumph. Judicial decisions are bought. Those who bought the elections sell political offices. The hopes of the poor in the streets are lifted and smashed. The rituals are expensive and hollow. The outcomes are sadly predictable.

The international community rates Nigeria as “Partly Free.”  A Freedom House score hovering around 44/100 in recent reports. They see us hold elections. They watch us go back to work once the paltry turnout figures are tallied with all the falsification.  Our docility lends our tragedy a false dignity. They know our courts. They know the state of our parliament.  We have shells as institutions. Elections happen, but can they deliver accountability? We are a democracy only on paper.

The worst kind of democracy thrives where the majority is illiterate, poor, hungry, jobless and apathetic. Where rulers are opportunistic parasites feasting ravenously on the state, deaf to the lessons of history and blind to the bleak future staring at the country. There, rice and cash handouts can turn the majority into clapping zombies. There, corruption, ethnicity and religion are pliable instruments used to deaden the consciences of intellectuals and distract the poor from the truth of their misery.

In such a democracy, leaders are lords answerable not to the masses but to their gluttony and rapacious godfathers. There are no predictable consequences for bad governance. Punishments are for those who fall out of favor with the capone.  The people become political guinea pigs in a social laboratory. The commonwealth is milked to nurse the fantasies of the ruling elite. They award trillion-naira contracts to themselves and their cronies without due process withoyt compunction. And the people clap in appreciation of their effort to build a concrete road with concrete corruption. A country where felons buys national honours and drug barons procure presidential pardons. 

A democracy becomes farcical when it fails to help the people articulate their interests or express enlightened grievances. The parliament fills up with stooges, rewarded for loyalty.  The hallowed chambers houses a greedy, rent-seeking bunch, rubber-stamping the caprice of the executive for bags of cash.  They can even amend the electoral law to permit candidates with fake academic certificates to run for office. A democracy is washed out if it cannot force accountability. Once leaders can flaunt incompetence and profligacy without stoking spontaneous public outrage, democracy has failed. As with heart failure,  the early stages is not collapse but stagnation.

When elected representatives jump into strange parties with the mandate of the people, democracy begins to look dubious. Democracy demands basic decency from its operators. When it is run by politically promiscuous politicians, there is no chance. When an elected president believes the best path to re-election is to destabilise opposition parties, bully and buy their leaders into the ruling party, democracy is in trouble. Liberal Western democracy does not expect a president to babysit his opponents, but neither does it allow him to treat them like prisoners of war. He has a duty to protect their constitutional rights and to promote democratic values.

Democracy cannot thrive without the rule of law. But what is the rule of law without a foundation of good faith? In the hands of a brute, the law is a butcher’s knife. Often it has no inherent goodness to resist capricious application. In many banana republics, the rule of law is the very smokescreen used to beat freedom and dissent into stupor. The Attorney General woke up in 2026 to remember that some parties should have been deregistered three years earlier. Critics see the move as selective enforcement aimed at vehicles being eyed for a united front against the incumbent. The president’s supporters call it overdue housekeeping against briefcase parties. Either way, the chief law officer has approached the courts on the eve of candidate nominations, seeking to deregister the political vehicle of the opposition coalition. The suspicious timing—right before multiple deadlines—makes it full-blown electoral engineering, even if the judiciary, remote-controlled by the executive, eventually spares them.  It appears the government is desperate to wind up the recruitment drives and opposition momentum.

It is no longer just anti-corruption agents seizing opposition leaders, charging them and denying them bail. Now, the chief law officer of the federation has joined the political street brawl to shield the president from the judgment of a hungry people. Many educated voices call it “real politics.” TV anchors invite conflicted intellectuals to glamorise political banditry with effusions of ill-digested jargon. They say the opposition should know that the president and his henchmen  “drink and eat politics.” This justification of perfidious, underhanded political and legal knavery as mere gamesmanship is why our democracy takes one step forward and two steps backward.  And we are too busy, too entertained by the commotion, to notice our retrogression.

A win-at-all-cost mentality has been normalised. So when thugs shoo away an ethnic group from the polls in Lagos to save the big man from another electoral home defeat, it will be hailed as “repossession of the land by its owners”—not electoral theft, not the destruction of democracy. When vote buyers flood the booths as City Boy errand boys, it will be dismissed as a teenage muscular display. When a semi-literate governor who cannot attract 100,000 genuine supporters brags about delivering 2.5 million votes and begins to conjure and cook figures, the opposition will be blamed for being too weak. Under the rubric of master strategy,  political opponents can be pickpocketed and derided as naive.

Tinubu probably wants to be remembered as Nigeria’s father of democracy. Our leaders believe we have no memories. His wife already sees him as the architect of modern Nigeria. His son calls him the greatest president ever. He masqueraded as a pro-democracy activist all those many NADECO years. Since he left the governorship of Lagos, he has remained the oracle of Lagos, the governor of the governors of Lagos. Now, as president, it’s perhaps humiliating to subject him to electoral scrutiny. He wants to fuse all the parties and make them his footstool. Who can blame him? Whatever he does, there are enough praise-singers to laud it. On his madate we shall all stand. 

When Nigeria becomes another Lagos—with a Presidential Advisory Council as the real centre of power—this democracy will be fully understood. Were our democracy dead, we would see it clearly. But our democracy lives on, hollowed out, totally flawed, limping along.

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