The political debate and the struggle for democracy in Nigeria
Authors: Ibrahim Jibrin 
Published: July 2007

The cream of political scientist in Nigeria met in Lagos under the auspices of the Nigerian Political Science Association in May 1986 to discuss the theme, Alternative Political Futures for Nigeria: 1990 and Beyondas part of the debate towards a new political system. During the deliberations, oneof the major issues that arose was whether there should be a recommendation that Nigeria should return to some form of liberal democratic arrangement in 1990. The Conference resolved not to make any such recommendation. What was important about that decision was that a sizable number of both right wing and left wing protagonists converged on the conclusion that political scientists had no business proposing a liberal democratic framework. For the right wing, the reasoning was straight forward. One of their representatives, Inno Ukaeje argued that if Nigeria wants to develop, it must develop a Garrison‐Managerial State System which means that:

by 1990 the country should adopt a new form of government based mainly and purely on the rule of the armed forces and the police utilising coercionas the proper basis for securing the compliance of citizens with the laws of the polity, (emphasis in the original).

Many of the left wing protagonists at the Conference correctly identified the multiparty liberal democratic form of government as bourgeois but wrongly concluded that socialists had no business struggling for a ‘bourgeois form’. Most of them argued that Nigeria should have a popular one party socialist system, some form of corporate system based on representation of popular organisations or at the very least a two party system with a conservative capitalist party face to face with a socialist revolutionary party. This situation they argued would simplify and bring to the fore the ideological struggle and thereby hasten the transition to socialism.

The views expressed at the Conference were fairly representative of the general tenor of the present political debate in which liberal democracy is no longer assumed to be part of the desired civic culture and in which authoritarian political forms are being openly propagated as inevitable or even desirable. This is a new development in the Nigerian political psyche that could be a harbinger of the new reassertion of fascism, spearheaded by the Americans and their institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank the world over, the policies and the world views of which are beginning to take root in this country. It is worthy of note that in the 1940s and 1950s, there was an unquestioned linkage between the acquistion of independence and the establishment of a Parliamentary form of bourgeois democracy. The debate that occurred concerned the structure around which this form was to be organised. The crisis generated by the contradictions inherent in the structures and processes chosen led to a collapse of the whole system by 1966 and the entry of the military into politics.

The military were, however, seen and they saw themselves as a transitional team to steer the country until a new democratic form could be arrived at. This is why until the time of the handover of power to the Shagari regime in 1979, the desirability of some form of democratic government for the country was never seriously questioned. The political debate at that time was directed at solving some of the perceived constraints and contradictions of the previous democratic experiment. It is only in the present political debate that there is an orchestrated open campaign against liberal democracy and for some form of authortarian government.

This new tendency started becoming clear in 1982 when the Nigerian ruling class began to articulate the necessity for control and coercion to resolve the country's economic crisis. The inability of president Shehu Shagari and General Muhammadu Buhari to properly ‘manage’ this control and coercion played a major role in the inability of their regimes to survive. The Babangida administration is learning from their mistakes and striving to surpass them. It is thus not surprising that any political debate conducted under this atmosphere would reflect the state of the nation.

The central political question that arises at this point is that as much as the Nigerian ruling classes are being compelled to move towards fascism, liberals and socialists have a stake in combatting that move. Their survival as well as their capacity to advance their politics might well depend upon being able to block the advance of fascism, hence the need for a liberal intervention in the current political debate. Against this background, left‐wing authoritarianism tends to weaken the much needed anti‐fascist solidarity of socialists and liberals.