IT is curious how a single word evokes diametrically opposite reactions from people. And yet this contrasting opposition, in more ways than one, spices piquantly people’s use of languages generally and the English language particularly.

This is an auspicious paradigm that invests both written and spoke expressions with compelling and by that fact illuminating denotations, gamut and the infinite range of the human mind. Take a relatively compact and monosemous word like “democracy”, for an instructive instance.

I have used the word “relatively “ since this same word democracy evinces, in the main, sharply differentiated emphases  and certainly incorrigent brittling of tempers. One would find that while in some climes it attracts to itself  a colouring and texturing of egalitarianism in society and transparency of government operation and operatives, bedrocked on accountability to the masses, in other climes it is just a chameleonic verbal mantra deployed at will to apologise for a working system, and to salve the consciences of government operatives whose personalities and actions are immured in cloak-and–dagger stridencies and ambiguities.

The Nigerian democratic experience, despite its boisterous vaulting reflexivity and indeed its  sybaritic, cut-throat expensiveness, is certainly of the typology of the latter configuration.

Why is ours an apology of democracy? And when did the rain start to beat us?, to quote that great late son of Africa, Professor Chinualumogu Achebe.

To answer these questions, it is expedient that we take a cursory glance at the pained evolution of this particular democratic experiment such as we got to have, to hold and to cherish, in the pulpit parlance of nuptials.

The year 1999 easily flits into the mind, the year Nigeria’s potential Hitler, General Sani Abacha, died amidst salacious controversy and the nation’s number one power slot became vacant. Ironically the man who was to succeed the maximum ruler was rotting away in gaol, together with the acclaimed winner of the 1993 presidential election, Chief M.K.O. Abiola of blessed  memory.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, our first blunder, after the conspired death of our legitimate potential president, was to pick on a man who had and still  has a military background and mindest, diametrically opposed to civilized  governance, to lead a democratic adventure even after we had been pounded black and blue by corrupt soldiers, up to that time, when we should not have touched anything military with the end of a barge pole.

That was what informed that crude dictatorial stint of the avuncular Ota farmer, who ruled Nigeria as he would a military command: with steely-fisted draconianism, an unsavoury development replicated by the PDP dominated cash – crunching legislature.

Although he fought tooth and nail for tenure elongation, but he failed woefully to gull Nigerians who had had enough of his primaeval amala bellicosity and power-toting vindictiveness. When it finally dawned on him that he had become, so to say, a self-made despot and  nuisance he  expeditiously groomed a quiescent and languid chainsmoking lackey to step into his shoes, in the person of   Umaru  Yar-Adua.

If his predecessor’s tenure was adjudged to be off-putting, Yar’ Adua’s snail- crawling apology lacked conviction, affirmation, confidence and direction, especially with the former octopus breathing down its back.

If there was anything that refracted our positive view of the Nigerian then fledgling version, throwing it up for what it was: A monstrous bastardisation of the original. It was Yar’Adua’s health problem, which a cabal in Aso – Rock was quick to exploit to the maximum material and financial advantage, which revealed the ambiguity and absurdity of our so-called democratic governance, a time of half truths and blatant lies by the pretenders to the throne, including the president’s Lady Macbeth of a wife.

Had it not been for the radical intrepidity of Pastor Tunder Bakare and his Save Nigeria Group, the hide and seek merry-go-round would have continued perhaps forever, so to say.

That was how it came to be that President Goodluck Jonathan sits on the hot chair, a development which angered the North that felt cheated in the succession power game and which crystalised and metamporphosed into the Boko Haram insurgency, the huge rabid and morbid killing machine that at presents, in the words of Professor  Niyi Osundare, “harry the hills and fritter the forest” today.

And if Nigerians had been fooled by the so-called “fresh breath” symbolism and indeed concepgineering of Jonathan’s presidency and thought there was a silver lining in the cloud of our sociological  doldrums, they were soon to be rudely shocked and disappointed by his reprehensible pseudo-cerebral personality and posturing.

Although reputedly lettered, our man could not and cannot rise beyond the pedestrian in thought, word and deed. Anybody who voiced any criticism, no matter how constructive, was simply out to embarrass the government.

Infrastructural decay reared its monstrous head. The economy was in a shambles, capacity utilization fell to an all time low. Corruption skyrocketed. Medicare became non-existent. The quality of education plummeted. Nigerian groaned, chastised by Jonathan’s whips. This situation was responsible for the current security challenges heating up our polity.

Mr. GAB EJUWA, a journalist, wrote from Lagos.