By John Amoda
REPRESENTATIVE electoral democracies are opposite of direct rule democracies. In the latter, every member of the rulership participates directly and with equal voice in the government of their society.

Representative electoral democracy is a government where the rulership constitutes itself into an electorate for the purpose of electing some of the rulership as their representative in government.

The whole govern through their representatives- the elected are elected because they are deemed by their peers to be faithful steward of a democratic system and process and ones who know that their duty is to do the will of the electorate who they represent.

Representative electoral democracy cannot produce representatives with prebendal attitude to office holding. We in Nigeria seem to have invented such a system.

Elections give rise to government and office holders who treat government and the office they hold as prebends. We can call the Nigerian scheme a prebendal democracy but for the fact that there cannot be such a representative democracy given that a democracy is a rulership of equals.

The dictionary defines a prebend as (a) the part of the revenues of a cathedral paid as a clergyman’s salary (b) the property or tax yielding such a revenue. A vulgar illustration of a prebend is the wage system of waiters who are paid next to nothing but expected to earn more than a living wage from tips. A waiter or waitress knows that the job is a prebend that must yield a living wage. A prebendal attitude to office- holding is orientation of the office-holder to the office- the office being seen as a property or tax yielding a revenue.

The political culture of a representative electoral democracy is, therefore, different from the political culture of a prebendal government. In a prebendal government, the offices are prebends in some cases actually purchased. Each prebend is run as a business organised for the private profit of the office holders.

In a prebendal government all offices are for sale by the political party that owns the government. An effective prebendal government is the diametrical opposite of an effective representative electoral democracy.

The political culture of the first is that of “self-service” and that of the second is that of “representative stewardship”; the office-holder in the first pays the price asked by the “party entrepreneurs”, the owners of the government, the political investors; the second renders account to the electing principals; the elected democratic representative is an agent of the electorate, the principal that conducts stewardship audits, rewarding the faithful steward with re-elections and punishing the rebellious with recall or with defeat at the next elections.

Prebendal governments, cannot be evaluated with the same code of ethics and morality applicable to representative electoral democratic governments.

A good prebendal government is government of investors for investors and run by investors. A good populist representative electoral democracy is government of the people for the people and run by the people. The good of prebendal governance is not the good of the populist representative electoral governance. The prebendal is run for the good and benefit of political investors; the populist representative electoral democracy is run for the good and benefit of the people.

These two political systems are constructed as logical systems, as contrasting ideal types sufficient for analysis of the problems guiding their constructions. For this essayist, the purpose to be served is to point out the mistake, in this case, the category mistake, made in treating prebendal governments and governance as if they are corrupt versions of representative electoral democracy. Prebendal governments are not corrupt or imperfect versions of representative electoral governments of democracies.

What are judged as corruption by the government of the people organising themselves as self-accounting democracy are considered in prebendal societies as moral pursuits of the profit of prebends, of offices purchased and run as a for-profit business.

It is illogical to expect prebendal political parties to condemn their attitude to government and to sale of offices because it pays them to wear the mask of elected populist democratic office-holders in order to obtain international approval.

Thus we come to the crux of the matter of good government, good governance, and good leadership in Nigeria. The good is relative. The good prebendal government is not the same as the best or worst representative electoral democracy. There is no problem of corruption for the prebendalists; the good prebend is that which returns the capital and multiples of the capital invested in the purchase of offices. In a prebendal electoral polity, all is for sale, the parties, the elections, public offices and the government.

If Nigeria is a prebendal political system and the people of Nigeria excluded in the political market place from democratic rulership will, to replace that system with a representative electoral democracy, the people must not confuse a system replacement task with a system conversion or system adjustment task. A system replacement challenge is very different from a system reform task.

Corruption, representative electoral democracy, security, good governance, all these issues have to be structurally contextualized. The question must always be asked: What is the context of policy, is it system replacement or system reform?