Former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, is back at his old pastime of canvassing an African approach to global practices. For those who need a reminder, it was he who said that an African approach should be followed in dismantling apartheid in the heydays of the struggle for majority rule in South Africa. Obasanjo called for the use of juju that the European minority rulers presumably knew nothing about.

Even if they did not call it by the same name as we do, does that imply they don’t know or believe in it? As Africans we imagine certain things were tailor-made for us. Obasanjo is well known for his opposition to democracy by which he increasingly seems to mean liberal democracy. Perhaps what he hates are those aspects of democracy that demand respect for the rule of law as opposed to the words of one big man. 

He believes democracy is unAfrican. His argument is a version of what a few African despots have used to justify their authoritarian rule. Yet it has to be said that there is nothing wrong with Obasanjo’s position per se. There is, indeed, a lot to praise about it if it is only about calling for modification in global practices in order to make them reflect local experiences. A wholesale, unmediated adoption of cultural practices is evidence of the follow-follow syndrome that does nobody any good. We must learn to choose what is good in the culture of others and reject what may not work for us due to different cultural experiences. We should also acknowledge that democracy, broadly speaking, is not alien to Africa. 

A lot of the precolonial autochthonous cultures of African societies reflect solid elements of democratic practices. Which is to say that democracy or even representational democracy as a mode of governance is not entirely a product of colonial modernity. A lot depends on what people choose to focus on and the interpretation they give it as is the case with those that have of late been lamenting the death or absence of democracy in Nigeria or Africa. It is not a general critique of governance but a shorthand put-down of a specific example, the Bola Ahmed Tinubu-led government. The death of democracy or the rule of law is the new song on the lips of the chorus of political singers that have recently overtaken the Nigerian national space. Theirs is an oppositional dirge, an unhappy anthem that has found welcoming mouths in the overwhelmingly disgruntled congeries of politicians hoping to deny Bola Tinubu the tenancy of Aso Rock Villa beyond 2027. 

The latest gathering of these mourners of democracy was the diamond jubilee birthday celebration of Emeka Ihedioha. It was built around a public lecture in Abuja that was themed: “Is Democracy Failing in Africa?”. Keynoted by the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Matthew Hassan Kukah, the lecture had in attendance quite a number of the sore politicians suffering post-traumatically from the loss of the 2023 election. At their head was Obasanjo, a self-avowed retired politician and two-term ex-president who frequently manages to be at the centre of major political gatherings and intrigues, places where power is being allocated. Could Obasanjo have done more than he is doing were he not in political retirement? He famously made a show of destroying his membership card of a party that gave him its platform to serve twice as president. How democratic was this? 

The annoying thing about Obasanjo’s harangue about African democracy is that he never defines the specifics of what it means or how it would operate. But he and other democracy malcontents converge at the slightest opportunity to attack current practice of democracy aside meetings where many of his followers meet to announce their plan to form a grand coalition or party to oust the government in power. Atiku Abubakar, Aminu Tambuwal and Peter Obi are regulars. Although many of these politicians and their supporters have to no avail been baiting Bishop Kukah with opportunities to give a full-throated condemnation of the Tinubu administration since 2023 (they have gone to the extent of twisting his words about the lack of preparedness of the country’s leaders for their role), he has been careful not to take the bait. 

It is a matter of time before they call him out as a sellout in clerical garb, feeding fat from the purportedly boundless largesse of the Tinubu store house of corruption. They have been doing this to Wole Soyinka, a grizzled war horse and now an agile, acutely aware old man whose faculties have never been sharper- a man who has paid and continues to pay his dues but who they trail across the world, demanding basically that he condemns the Tinubu administration even as they pretend not to mind what he says. Bishop Kukah was in his lecture careful (and rightly so) to tell those able to listen without their usual prejudice that democracy is a work in progress, one that has suffered a few hindrances to its development, not the least being the weaponisation of religion. 

Peter Obi in his typically extroverted politics landed in Asia and found solace in Indonesia-style democracy. He praised Obasanjo and the late Umaru Yar’Adua for their practice of democracy in his sanitised account of the Obasanjo presidency. OBJ, he said, called and was concerned about his safety during his impeachment. Democracy, for Obi, has had a smooth ride since 1999. Until it got “knocked down” by Bola Tinubu and his gang of demolishers. Peter Obi may need a short session with Chris Ngige, Joshua Dariye, Ayo Fayose and Rasheed Ladoja to update his knowledge of OBJ’s benevolence. His disgust with Tinubu has obviously impaired his ability to remember. 

Tinubu will continue to prevail over his opponents for as long as they cannot rise above being crassly political and be true statesmen in their criticisms of his government. They are all guilty of the same political offence except that Tinubu has a much-better handle of the politics that surround it. This is what riles his opponents- the fact that he controls the game as a better-grounded politician. They look for every reason to criticise him, amplifying and recycling his faults, including matters he has no hands in or in which his opponents play into his hands. This is the case, from the crisis in Rivers State and the imposition of emergency rule, the Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan debacle and the nonsense about a misguided corps member able to spend N65,000 on lunch on an allowance of N77,000 and yet wonders why she has to pay N6,500 for a crate of eggs.