The recent fatal stampedes that have occurred in several parts of the country, where starvation-gripped citizens have trooped out en masse, searching for free food, constitute a serious and disgraceful indictment on our system of government. If these avoidable human tragedies are the expected deliverables of democracy, then we should be rethinking democracy’s relevance to our circumstances. People should not be dying miserably in hunger in a country that is as richly endowed in arable lands as Nigeria and with a functioning government in power. This is a moral, social, cultural, economic, political and constitutional aberrations combined.
For example, both the Preamble and the very first section [(1 (2))] of the 1999 Constitution clearly prescribe that the only way that this country can be lawfully and properly governed is through the democratic system and they went further to prescribe in great details the procedures and mechanics for the election of such governments and clearly set out their legitimate goals to include both the security and welfare of the citizens as the primary duty of any government that is constituted within the textual and philosophical frameworks of that same document.
Unfortunately, what we have in the country is a situation wherein government is seemingly at a loss about how to fulfil its basic constitutional obligations to the People in whose name it governs. The insecurity and hunger in the land constitute substantial breaches of those fundamental obligations upon which the legitimacy of government is rested, a reality which then brings forth the important question of whether the electoral mandate awarded to the government at the polls has, in Rousseau’s social contract performance evaluation formula, been breached by its failure to meet some of the key items in the Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles (Chapter Two) which every Nigerian constitutional government must fulfill in order to retain its mandate and safeguard its legitimacy.
Akpabio and Abbas
Citizens dying embarrassingly through stampedes occasioned by hunger and poverty are the clearest evidence yet that the government has abandoned its crucial mandate within the expectations of the Constitution upon which it was inaugurated. These hunger-related deaths are inescapable under-performance blemishes that tend to undermine democracy. A constitutional government under our legal order must make citizens welfare a cardinal governing policy within the specific framework of the Constitution which they publicly swore an oath to uphold.
The expanding inequality in the country especially since the introduction of the seemingly inevitable economic reforms by the present administration is not exactly indicative of remarkable compliance with those critical constitutional directives, which include the directive that “government action shall be humane” – section 17 (2)( c ). According official policies ‘a human face’ in Nigeria is more of a binding constitutional directive than a mere moral precept.
Without mincing words, there is everything wrong with the current income and remuneration schemes applicable to Nigerian political officeholders, minimum wage or no minimum wage.
To say that the Nigerian political class has totally discredited democracy by their greed and avarice is simply an understatement; they are actually destroying democracy by unduly turning it into a huge exploitative machine, thereby inflicting unbearable economic burden on the citizens. There is the possibility that they could one day, due to unbearable frustration, act to repudiate everything about democracy. After all, they do not feed on democracy.
Those who run our government and all the political institutions and structures that are involved in the selection of those who contest for political offices and those who eventually occupy those offices are all members of the parasitic elite class, the so-called “Obidients”, “no shishi” parliamentarians inclusive. Together, they have greedily executed a very heinous “state capturing” coup that has placed Nigeria in the current situation in which political power is routinely deployed to impoverish the masses.
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Whereas democratic governments are elected to serve the people, Nigerian politicians curiously see government offices as an open cast gold mine to be ruthlessly exploited and ravaged for personal gain, leaving the governed to be standing helplessly at interminable queues, waiting for food handouts, a shameful process which has become very deadly lately.
The original idea of democracy is basically that of service to the community in representative capacities. But how can the Nigerian brand be accepted as a government “for the people” when its primary goal is to divert the resources of the commonwealth into the private pockets of those who are supposed to be working for the People?
When Senator Shehu Sani first disclosed the monthly take-home per senator in a country where the minimum wage was then barely N18,000 (now N70 000) some years ago, most people were shocked about the disclosed huge disparities between what they take and the pittance they drop for the people, they saw the emerging figures as a manifestation of grand corruption callously perfected by way of “State Capture” wherein corruptly-minded individuals artfully manipulate the electoral process to their own advantage and then take hold of the entire governing machinery and, once they assume power, they would proceed to loot and recklessly plunder and dissipate the resources of the State via seemingly legitimate or selfishly legitimized processes such as the budgetary allocation of stupendous employments to themselves.
If those figures disclosed by Senator Sani generated such furore then, what our present set of lawmakers and other government officers, including the Judiciary, are now hauling home can only lead the exploited citizens to see the reality of a subsisting State Capture; it throws the immorality in the current unfair reward system into bold reliefs: a “baboon de work and monkey de chop” scenario.
The proportion of the nation’s treasury unabashedly allocated to satisfy the gluttony of government officials in all the branches and agencies of government is so outrageous that so little is ultimately left for the development of the human and material needs of the country. It is that kind of crazy logic, for example, which has blunted their consciences into importing expensive high-end SUVs for their own hedonistic use when most Nigerians are dying on long queues seeking for anything edible!
The impression given in the circumstance is that this administration has unwittingly bestowed unbridled oligarchic bonanzas on the already rich and powerful government officials and their cronies at the expense of the toiling masses even though the same government came to power on a progressive mantra wherein the interests of the poor are supposed to be paramount. No more.
President Tinubu’s modus operandi, at best, is like those misleading claims and ads for processed foods and beverages saying something like “no additional sugar added”, suggesting to the gullible consumers that “there is no sugar” in them whereas what the ads actually imply is that no additional sugar has been added to those naturally sugary stuff!
It is easy to see why Nigeria is developmentally jinxed; the aggregate drain that such gargantuan expenditure on government officials directly inflict on the economy could ordinarily lead to national bankruptcy and Nigeria is, for all intents and purposes, almost bankrupt, what with the widespread hunger within and the people’s desperation to survive just by the day due to the stark material and nutritional deprivations currently overwhelming the country.
The most ironic aspect of this form of “State Capture” and the resulting opportunity provided for public officials to plunder the resources meant for public purposes is that they occur mainly in under-developed countries. For example, (and this is really shameful), compared to the nation’s GDP, Nigerian legislators are the highest paid in the whole world, followed by other equally poor African countries such as Kenya, Ghana with South Africa closely behind. On the contrary, legislators in the US, Japan, Canada, Australia, Germany and Britain earn only about a third of the salaries of Nigerian legislators.
It just does not make sense that politicians in poor underdeveloped countries earn more than their counterparts in the wealthy and developed nations. It stands economic logic on its heads. Anyone associated with the fixing of such incredulously anti-people reward system should be called out for what they really are: Enemies of the People. Democracy is irredeemably discredited whenever politicians, in total disregard of the limited carrying capacity of their national economy, greedily proceed to plunder it just because they have custodian access to public funds, the same mindset animating armed robbers and buccaneers. This cannot be the way of democracy. This one is crazy!
