By John Amoda
DEMOCRACY for the Civilian Elite was the subject of General Abubakar’s address. This is not the Project of Democracy for the Masses, Democracy for the Majority may preserve constitutionalist governments and therefore civilian constitutionalist governments, Not so for Democracy for the Civilian Elite.

Indeed, it may be argued that both factions of the Nigerian Elite, Military and Civilian may be equally opposed to Democracy for the Masses. Why? Because the Elite-Mass differentiation is economic and distributive: it is an organisation of access to the pooled wealth and resources of all Nigerians, Control over this pool of wealth and resources is vested in Government and therefore controlled by the administration in office on behalf of the Elite in Nigeria.

This is the structure of the Nigerian Economy; an economy whose resources of wealth production are controlled and administered by Governments, This was the colonial structure of the economy and it is the present structure of the postcolonial economy, This fact puts the current Nigerian Privatisation Project in perspective.

The Democratic Project that is compatible with the Privatisation Project is elite driven. Its ultimate objective is to transfer that which Government presently owns and controls to segments of the elite constituted of those who presently can pay the asking price, What is the effect’!

It is this: Government that can be influenced by the voter is being replaced by the private sector who can only be influenced by the share holder. A system of power where the public sector becomes a service provider for a private sector created by governments’ irreversible privatisation programmes consolidate the Elite-Mass Divide, thus aggravating the elite-mass wealth and income inequalities.

So it is clear that a choice must be made between the present Nigerian Civilian Elite Constitutionalist Project and the Democracy for the Majority Project. The first has a doubtful future because it is essentially authoritarian and the Military are better in managing authoritarian politics than the civilian; hence the frequent breakdowns of civilian constitutional governments sustainable only through authoritarian means.

The not so secret, secret is the fact that authoritarian governments can be constitutionalised. But such project involves the buttressing of elite-mass economic stratification with social welfarist support for the masses. This is the Liberal Democratic Capitalist System that the Neo-liberalist parties of the West have emasculated and in so doing reinforced the elite-mass stratification of their societies.

The exportation of Neo-liberal structural adjustment programmes into Africa’s postcolonial societies, whose governments are inheritors or state policies that have concentrated economic ownership and administration in the hands of government, ensures the consolidation of wealth and power in an elite composed of (i) serving Armed Forces officials, (ii) retired Armed Forces officials (iii) Civil servants and (iv) the government created Private Sector.

The result or such economic policies is class polarisation; thus the trend of present economic policy is towards the replacement of the elite-mass dichotomy with that or the rulers and the ruled, a reality captured in General Abubakar’s definition of democracy.

He speaks prophetically concerning the political economic effects of present economic programmes of governments – they will produce societies divided into rulers and the ruled. The question is whether in such societies democracy as hereby described by General Abubakar is feasible.

For the General. “democracy is a limitation on the freedom or rulers that must be imposed by the ruled themselves”. A democracy of rulers controlled by the ruled is a contradiction of terms. Rulers may be inl1uenced by the ruled but the ruled cannot impose limitation on rulers.

A democracy where those in office operate within limitations imposed by those not in office is a representative system of power and government. It is a system of power, because those in government are put in government by those who have the power to remove them from government, and that power includes coercive ejection if those in government rebel against those with power; it is a representative system of power, because the powers of the sovereign are exercised under governments determined by the sovereign.

It is this representative system or power that is constitutionalised as a system of government. Such a democracy is the attribute of a class that is sovereign for it is the administration of sovereignty that is instituted as a representative system of power and government.

The Democratic Project in Nigeria should therefore be about contributing to the emergence or an empowered majority largely and presently the subjects of governments, as the sovereign. None of the existing parties, and none of the recently registered, ones has committed itself to organising the Majority for power.

The mass; is an economic category, it is composed of those who presently have very little beside their labour power as capital. The mass are those who must seek employment in order to live; they are those who not having more than enough cannot invest the surplus as capital into profit making enterprises.

The mass are composed of the few who have just enough and the majority who have less than enough to live upon in a market day. Some have more than others, but they all operate “on enough or less than enough for a market day” household budgets.

They are however ethnically and religiously, culturally segmented; they are for example the Igbo, Hausa, Yoruba, Edo etc constituents of the mass, who see themselves firstly as Igbos, Hausas, Yorubas etc and secondarily as members or the mass.