We must prioritise institution-building in Nigeria

‘ The sustenance of our so-called democracy really rests on the goodwill of the leader in charge at a particular point in time and not on any assumed institution(s) we may think we have built

President Muhammadu Buhari does not speak much, at least in public. But anytime he speaks, he speaks from the heart. He says it exactly as he feels and thinks it. That has not always helped him politically. That was why when the Southwest All Progressive Congress ( APC) wing adopted him as their candidate for the 2015 election, they expertly managed him, curating all his speeches and public engagements.

Of course, after winning the elections, they could no longer manage his public utterances as they had done during the campaigns. That was when we began to see and hear from the real Muhammadu Buhari. At one of the first occasions where he had to speak extempore, in July 2015, at the United States Institute of Peace ( USIP), he revealed his truest feelings about the Southeast and Southsouth. After his prepared address, members of the public were invited to ask questions in a moderated session by Johnnie Carson. Pauline Baker asked him about the security situation in the Niger Delta in relation to the amnesty programme and the issue of bunkering in the region.

Buhari struggled with the question and had to confer with Carson. Thereafter he looked at Baker and said with a straight face: “I hope you have a copy of the election results. The constituents, for example, who gave me 97 percent [of the votes] cannot in all honesty be treated on some issues with constituencies that gave me 5 percent.”

Here’s a newly elected president admitting to the world that in all honesty he can’t treat constituencies that gave him 97 percent of votes equally with those that gave him a mere 5 percent. And he has kept to that promise since then.

I have since learnt to discount his prepared and curated speeches and rather pay close attention to his extempore remarks to know exactly what the president really thinks and plans to do. It is from an extempore remark, for instance, that we knew that as late as 2018, after his government has successfully repatriated some of Abacha’s loot, that he still believes that Abacha is a patriot, did not steal any money from Nigeria and was one of the best leaders this country ever had.

So when early last year, while hosting governors from the Northeast, Mr Buhari declared that he could have sent the army, police and other security agencies to overrun the states during the 2019 general elections, but he didn’t do it because he was kind hearted, I felt it told us everything we need to know about our country. The bitter truth remains that the sustenance of our so- called democracy really rests on the goodwill of the leader in charge at a particular point in time and not on any assumed institution( s) we may think we have built. For avoidance of doubt Buhari was quoted as saying:

“With the use of the army, the police and the rest of them, we could have overrun you. We just wanted to show that we are humane and we are Nigerians.”

That admission should send chills down the spines of Nigerians but it has largely gone unnoticed.

What we have done is to build a system that confers almost absolute powers on the president and where the president can use his powers not only to subvert just any institution and bend it to do his wish, but where the occupier of the office of the president can decide the fate of the country’s democracy.

Nigerians tend to celebrate the defeat of Obasanjo’s third term as a sign that democracy has taken roots and its institutions are working. What they didn’t realise is that our institutions are not up to scratch and they can be easily destroyed by a power-hungry president like Buhari has done to the legislature, judiciary and any other institution that stood on his way. The only reason why Obasanjo’s third term gamble failed was because he threatened the elite inter- ethnic alliance and pact to rotate power among themselves and not because of any institutions we may think we have. Nigeria, unlike many other African states, has a diffused power base with no one person or region strong enough to control or dominate the entire country. That fact makes inter- ethnic/ interregional pact inevitable.

Nigeria, like most underdeveloped countries, suffers from the personalisation of power by the leader. This necessarily involves the deliberate destruction and weakening of state institutions to ensure that the machinery of government depends on the whims and caprices of the leader. Generally, as I enunciated on this page before, such practices play out in three ways: there are no institutions in place, the institutions are weak and unable to check the excesses of politicians, or there is what is called isomorphic mimicry - the creation of institutions that act in ways to make themselves “look like institutions in other places that are perceived as legitimate,” but which, in reality, are not.

Nigeria suffers from isomorphic mimicry. We have all the institutions a supposed democracy has, but in reality, they are not effective or are designed not to be. We may have an Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for instance, that is supposed to ensure that elections are conducted freely and fairly, but we all know in reality that those who vote do not really determine the outcome of elections as much as those who do the counting of the votes. We supposedly have a third arm of government – the judiciary, which is theoretically independent from the executive and adjudicates disputes between the other arms of government and protects individual liberties from government overreach. But the very head of the judiciary was illegally booted out of office, justices of the Supreme Court harassed and intimidated into silence and the courts have become more or less the mouthpiece of the executive such that no one is left in doubt as to where the courts stand these days. We could all see how the judges disposed off the electoral cases against the election of the president. Both the judges at the court of appeal and the Supreme Court were not just content with dismissing the cases for lack of proof, but they actively turned defendants of the president in the case on perjury.

The little said about the legislature, the better. But we see how all the obnoxious bills rejected by the 8th National Assembly have all been illegally brought back in the 9th National Assembly and are all being passed without any questions or debate.

What about the security agencies whose main preoccupation is regime protection and survival than the lives and property of citizens?

Like I have always argued, the major task facing Nigeria and indeed Africa is that of institution building; strong institutions of restraints that will rein in the worst instincts of our politicians. Until we can assure that our institutions can without the intransigence of our leaders, we do not really have institutions yet and ultimately, our democracy and country is not safe.