Nigeria’s democracy clocks a quarter-century today, a long time for a country only five scores and 10. How should we take stock? There is something to cheer about, no doubt, but on the whole, these have been 25 years of missed opportunities and what could have been.

That Nigeria has remained one indivisible nation, despite the centrifugal forces unleashed by conflicting ethno-religious and regional cleavages, is certainly something to cheer. A stretch of 25 long years of unbroken and uninterrupted democracy in Nigeria is surely something to cheer about, too, whatever its many imperfections.  Constitutional development has been slow and frustrating, but ongoing.

The many amendments made to the 1999 Constitution, since it came into effect this day 25 years ago, have combined to make Nigeria more federal. There are more items in the Concurrent List in our constitution today than in 1999. The quality and integrity of our national elections have also improved markedly, culminating in a peaceful election transition between two different parties for the first time in our history in 2015.

Beyond these, there have also been modest improvements in socio-economic development too. Nigeria’s economy is today the largest economy in Africa, with a GDP well above $400 billion. The middle class, previously wholly marginalised, has grown in size, now accounting for about 23% of the population and purchasing power in excess of $28 billion annually. Economic sectors, like the creative industries, banking, telecoms and the digital economy have grown remarkably over the past 25 years, even if still lopsided nationally. Access to education, particularly higher education, has likewise expanded considerably, from less than 40 universities in 1999, for example, to more than 170 today, even though the quality of degrees and other certificates churned out annually remains a serious concern.

Yet, all of these are no more than a story of what could have been. In many big countries like Nigeria, politics is deeply rooted to a clear national philosophy: whether to stay ahead of the world or to catch up with it. In Nigeria, however, our politics still lacks any sense of an underlying higher purpose. Politicians and political parties routinely fight for power by all means but for hardly any identifiable collective mission other than self-aggrandisement or enrichment. Almost no politician or party has articulated a higher purpose for politics or imagined a new vision for Nigeria that citizens can value and follow. The result is largely a politics of empty rhetoric, violence, intimidation and the wanton use of money to get elected, which then throws up leaders at all levels who have little idea about what to do once in office.  

The chief arenas for this purposeless politics in Nigeria are the political parties, in government or in opposition. In many a functional democracy, political parties are the guardian angels, not just of government but of democracy itself. They generate policy ideas, actively identify leadership talent for governing or organising, and campaign to raise funds and votes for a chance to implement those ideas. Nigerian political parties are anything but functional or democratic. It is not just that our parties have been unwilling or unable to develop enduring forms of internal democracy; it is that they are effectively anti-democracy. They have neither the interest nor the capacity for generating sound policy ideas, let alone to actively search for leadership talent that will embody those ideas to win elections or form serious governments.

Whether at the federal, state, local government or ward levels, our political parties are a one-man show—usually the highest bidder—who controls the entire machinery of the party for their own personal or patronage ends. Particularly at the local levels, our political parties are peopled by memberships that are frequently unemployed and uneducated, and lacking political ideology of any kind; they are available for purchase by all bidders during primary elections. This is why the most corrupt and violent elections are those that take place within the political parties, rather than between them. The result is a democracy without democratic politics and a political leadership without vision or meaningful purpose.  

These deficiencies of political leadership are most manifest in economic and security policies. More than half of Nigerians (63% or over 133 million) are “multi-dimensionally poor”, according to the government’s own figures. Yet, no government or party has fashioned out any home-grown and context-sensitive policies for lifting millions of Nigerians out of misery. Instead, since 1999, we have seen only an intensification of externally induced neoliberal economic policies that are designed to gloss over the problem, not seriously tackle it.

From former President Obasanjo’s economic empowerment programme, lifted straight out of the World Bank’s “poverty alleviation strategy” documents, to current President Tinubu’s “remove subsidy from everything” policy, the role of the Nigerian state in economic management has been shrinking, even as poverty has been worsening and the government itself has been expanding and spending an increasingly larger share of the annual budgets on itself.  Of the security of life and property, the less said. Nigeria is now not just almost ungovernable, but effectively ungoverned, except when clamping down on citizens.

Nowhere is this sorry state of affairs in politics and governance more evident than in the states. Nigeria is now effectively a country of 36 emperors and one president, because there is far more democratic accountability at the federal level than in the states, individually or collectively. One evidence of this is the total collapse of the local government system, which for all intents and purposes, has long ceased to be a tier of government in any sense of the term. The state legislatures, which are supposed to ensure checks and balances, are today, worse than rubber stamp legislatures: they are no stamps at all. In the past, even during the military, state executive cabinets were agents of subnational development as commissioners and permanent secretaries contributed to policy formulation and led their implementation within their own ministries or departments. Today, a commissioner in most Nigerian states is worth scarcely higher than the Governor’s Personal Assistant (PA), or worse, within the state’s governing structure.

The airwaves and the newspapers will be filled today with lengthy speeches by leaders at all levels thumping their achievements. But after 25 years of democratic governance, this is the Daily Trust’s independent balance sheet on behalf of Nigerians, and it is only the tip of the iceberg.