Between Saturday, February 25, 2023 when the presidential and national assembly elections were held in Nigeria and today, the mass media have been replete with calls for the next president to compose a government of national unity (GNU). The argument is that such a strategy could calm frayed nerves and create some measure of unity between winners and losers of elections.  

However, an overview of elections in Nigeria does not reveal the commitment of our politicians to national unity. What history seems to attribute to them is the propensity to always get into one office or the other only to perpetrate their hobby of primitive appropriation and accumulation of public funds. In which case, the call for unity government which is usually instigated by the political class is essentially to keep on course opportunities for their personal gains. 

For example, in 2003, when General Muhammadu Buhari the then presidential candidate of the defunct All Nigeria Peoples Party ANPP was at the middle of an election petition to claim his mandate, officials of his party were scrambling to share the few positions allocated to their party in the government of national unity instituted by the victorious PDP. The greedy officials neither put their presidential candidate into confidence nor did they follow the guidelines of the party for aligning with another party. The decision to be part of the so-called unity government was made by the party officials whose basic motivation was the material benefit they looked forward to from the arrangement. In 2007, many of those who accused President Olusegun Obasanjo of a third term ambition were leading politicians from outside the PDP who had hoped that the third term government would be that of national unity that would include them.  In 2011, opposition parties didn’t show much interest in Goodluck Jonathan’s proposed unity government but ample background work was done concerning the idea. 

One of the pillars of democracy is majority rule. Consequently, good democrats have no business in a government formed by a political party to which they do not belong. Except a political system provides for proportional representation in which seats in the legislature are awarded to political parties in proportion to their strength in an election, government of national unity is unnecessary. It is only in Nigeria where politicians seek to function as permanent state actors that those who lost elections always agitate for a government of national unity. After 24 years of continuous democratic rule, it is time for Nigerian politicians to grow up and allow the majority party to form a government which should be placed on its toes by a viable opposition. Otherwise, we shall continue to have a pseudo-democracy in which everyone bows to a ruling party so as to be appointed into some government position. It is for the same reason that the 9th national assembly under the guise of collaborative federalism functioned all through from the pocket of the executive.  

Luckily for our commercial politicians, the so-called victorious parties are always favourably disposed to the institution of a government of national unity because the acclaimed winners feel the way out is to placate owners of stolen mandate. Indeed, in many constituencies in the past, votes were swapped to make losers become winners while in some other locations, election results were simply procured for polling booths where voting did not happen. Following the failure to put a halt to election rigging, it will certainly be difficult to stop the agitation for government of national unity. It is true that smooth talkers who can fluently defend our bogus elections abound in the nation but such partisan orators often look at election rigging from a narrow perspective. Those who give pass marks to INEC and the election process often focus on the pictorial display of election materials arriving in different states in the country; orderly queuing and ballot casting in voting centres and the beautifully adorned conference centre where results are cosmetically finalized.

If the truth must be told, Nigerian elections have not been good. Our people should not allow themselves to be misled by the diplomatically coated reports of international election monitors and observers. What should always be noted is the unending caution which the same observers always put in an idiom that”the devil of Nigeria’s elections is in the details.” What this idiom means is that Nigerian elections look simple on the surface but the details are usually convoluted and problematic. Our elections are likely to remain knotty if we continue to overlook the fraudulent details of the collation of results that are hurriedly declared with fanfare. Of course if the right process is followed, we could easily move one step away from incessant and selfish calls for government of national unity after every election. Such a trend would ensure good elections which are more likely to produce visionary leaders that would initiate and implement good public policies capable of improving the living standards of the people

The point that is being made is that what can best unite a given society is good governance and not the struggle for power by politicians. This presupposes that those declared winners of elections must be prepared to bring on board only persons who can add value to governance. Whereas a new president is free to appoint some of his supporters into his government, such appointees must first and foremost be visibly capable of doing the job. Critical offices ought not to be used just for rewarding party supporters. A new president or governor must remember that many people who voted for them are not necessarily members of their party. In other words, being a member of the victorious party should essentially serve as an added advantage for appointing people. Governance is a tough task that requires the best hands, otherwise success may be hard to achieve.

In the case of heterogeneous societies such as Nigeria, the old order of emphasis on state of origin should change to a clear understanding of the expedience of good management of diverse cultures. One reason Nigeria wins more awards in sports than governance is because only the very best find their way into our sports teams while everyone no matter their visible deficiencies get into our governance teams. Today, Nigeria does not have a state which lacks strong hands, why not bring into government the best hands of every state as a double advantage that reduces the cry of marginalization and enhances the quality performance of officials? Nothing else can engender unity more than such an inclusive approach to governance which was in the first instance the framework which the federal principle in our constitution was designed to achieve.  

Nigeria had in the 1970s worked assiduously towards national unity by formulating strategic policies such as the National Youth Service Corps programme. Until quite recently, the NYSC served as tool for national unity and integration. But like many Nigerian policies, most of the lofty ideas of its founders have been greatly diluted. The federal character principle on its part has been politicised and poorly managed. In fact, the commission which was set up to ensure the smooth implementation of the principle by other societal institutions has itself been found wanting in upholding the same principle. This is where elected leaders should pay greater attention to because what the nation desires is unity among its disparate groups and not the class unity which the politicians harp upon. 

In summary, Nigeria is in dire of needof national development which can only be attained through the instrumentality of visionary leaders that are freely elected by voters. For this to happen, ruling parties must stop appointing partisan officials into INEC that is supposed to be an impartial umpire. The electoral process must be credible and not the charade we watched on national television during yesterday’s governorship and houses of assembly elections in well-known volatile are as like Lagos. Painfully, the credibility of our security agencies who had earlier read riot acts while claiming to be battle ready to stop all disruptions was rubbished.If this culture of electoral malpractices continues, government of national unity as a damage control strategy cannot help Nigeria to grow.

In 2014, Nigeria navigated a crucial corner in a supposed ‘democratization’ by having an opposition party win an incumbent president. The beautiful part of that story is that the incumbent president, a certain peaceful man called Goodluck Jonathan, decided not to contest his defeat, unlike many African rulers who lose an election, rewrite the result and imprison opposition leaders. Many scholars of democracy and democratisation mistook this instance of civility as evidence that democracy is consolidating in Nigeria. That is false. It is a dangerous assumption that can make us fail to perform the real tasks required to make Nigeria a democracy.

The truth is that Nigeria is not a democracy. And maybe it has never been. Nigeria came to being in 1914 through an amalgamation that did not truly happen. As Sir Clifford reported it, Lord Lugard was halfhearted about the project. He did not want to be trapped in the bureaucratic work of managing a truly integrated Nigeria, so he kept it loose and simple, so he can frequent Liverpool every weekend. The result of this diffidence is a country that lacked strong nationality and coherent statehood. Add to this ill conception the foundation of military dictatorship that further destroyed civility and regularity. Since 1999, Nigeria has evaded the bullet of a military takeover of government. But it has not evaded its autocracy and authoritarianism. Somehow, the military still rules the Nigerian state through its surrogates and culture.

Nigeria used to be described as a ‘hybrid democracy’ in the typology of democracy in the world. A hybrid democracy is one that has the forms of democracy but operates by the logic of authoritarianism. In such a political society, elections become a means of authorising one despot and not the other. No matter who wins an election in a hybrid democracy, the characteristics of state institutions are that they undermine the freedom and liberty of citizens. The competition and liberalisation required in a democracy are missing, replaced by political monopoly and coercion.

The shocking thing is that this characteristic remains even as the country advances in the technology of elections. Like the rest of the developing or transitioning countries of the world that have been seduced and captivated by the concept of democracy called ‘electoralism’, Nigeria has embraced ‘electoral democracy’, the democracy whose hallmark is competitive and periodic elections. Many people argue about the democracy-ness of electoral democracy with its restrictions on popular participation and acceptance of gross economic inequality. But even its limited merits are missing in Nigeria. The most important feature of electoral democracy is contestability which reflects in the simple fact that the opposition can always easily defeat the incumbent whenever the people are displeased by the performance of the incumbent.

No matter what else electoral democracy is, it is, as Robert Dahl pointed out decades ago, a system that forces those in political offices to respond to the preferences and expressions of citizens. As a form of representation, democracy enables the people who are outside political authority to influence what those in political offices do; how they use state resources. The chief tool of this control is free and fair elections. Elections are free and fair only if they are organized in a manner that the opposition can easily win. Free and fair election is not defined by the design and arrangement of ballot and the niceties of electoral management.

The most important things about elections are not about the votes. They are more about the working of state institutions. At the minimum, these institutions, like the police, the courts, the electoral management body, and state public service must be politically neutral. In simple language, if the people say they wanted the president or the governor out, the police, the courts, and the public service will not keep him in power. These institutions would have, through their organizing logic or evolution or structural character, become unusable to keep people in power. The political neutrality of state institutions and the liberality of the political environment to the extent that the people enjoy expansive civil and political and economic and social rights are the very necessary and sufficient conditions for democracy defined as polyarchy.

If these features are absent, like in Nigeria, then you are not a democracy even if the technology of your electoral system is sophisticated. If the governor of your state has prohibited political opponents from campaigning in the state and uses state institutions to arrest and incarcerate them before the vote, then you are not a democracy. If citizens can threaten other citizens with violence if they don’t vote for the incumbent and your police do not make arrests and protect those citizens to vote their preferences, you are not a democracy. If your electoral umpire can show open partisanship and rig the elections it is conducting through deliberate and audacious disregard for the fundamental rule that guarantees transparent vote count, then you are not a democracy. If your cultural leaders can wantonly employ culture and tradition to ensure that the people do not vote on the day of the election to suppress votes in areas that their preferred candidate cannot win, then you are not yet a democracy.

Some people may think this is half-full and not half-empty. So the narrative is that Rome was not built in a day. True. The democracies of the world evolved over time. But we are living in a global village where outsiders have access to the ingredients which the established democracies used to prepare the cuisine. So, we can also prepare the meal of democracy. But more than that, we have a problem that if we want to travel the path these democracies took, we need to invent wars and experience the social convulsions that rocked their societies many centuries ago. We cannot afford such anymore. Therefore, we must intentionally fast-track to democracy, not evolve to it.

One truth is that what we have in Nigeria today is not democracy. This is the reason the University of Gothenburg in its Verities of Democracy labelled Nigeria an ‘electoral autocracy’. We are not a democracy because our elections are not competitive. You cannot have competitive elections if the state is captured, and its institutions are functionally and ideologically committed to protecting the autocracy of the dominant political group. Until such institutions internalise the norms of neutrality and autonomy and operationalise such in the defence of the little citizens taking on the entrenched autocrats, you do not have a democracy yet.