Triple celebrations, triple democracy(s)

Please don’t bother to check your dictionary. I know the normal spelling for the plural of “democracy” is “democracies” but I am interested here only in the concept. Political democracy implies “one person, one vote” with the outcome determined by the number of votes one could gather, at least in theory. However, that is just […]

Please don’t bother to check your dictionary. I know the normal spelling for the plural of “democracy” is “democracies” but I am interested here only in the concept. Political democracy implies “one person, one vote” with the outcome determined by the number of votes one could gather, at least in theory. However, that is just one type of democracy and the one we are more familiar with. There are other “democracys” and they do matter.
In the market place (the economy) democracy means “one Naira, one vote,” and the depth of your pockets determine what, and how much, you can cart away. Very often those who “run things” are willing to give people the vote yet arrange matters in a way that is essentially tilted against those without the cash to “demand” goods and services. They control the public budget, the banks, the stock exchange and even “poverty alleviation” programs to ensure people are so poor that they must sell their votes making “one person, one vote” essentially meaningless. It is therefore not enough to talk about the “dividends” of democracy as if we are referring to our having a share in a “company” which we allow them to run and from where they give us some dividends from time to time. So, even more than demanding that those who seek to lead us must eliminate the massive looting that is going on, we must demand that the economy is itself democratized such that more people have more jobs and more money so they can exercise their political rights in a more rational manner. Pervasive poverty arising from chronic unemployment and low productive activities make “one person, one vote” a real joke, undermining the first democracy.  How do we ensure and entrench both political democracy and economic democracy?
This is where the third democracy comes in, and this third one is the true foundation of all the others.  Typical ruling elites pretend to listen to the people but hardly take their views seriously. They claim to know what is best for everyone, so we should leave all the thinking to them. This myth it perpetuates successfully because it controls newspapers, radios, television and even religious sermons. Leave the theorizing and strategizing to the experts, and the implementation to the bureaucrats and technocrats. Unfortunately, we have tried that and it does not work. We left banking and finance to bankers and accountants and barely managed to survive the mayhem they created. We left religion to preachers and ended up with liars, money launderers, religious chauvinists and Boko Haram. We left politics to politicians and we are now living the hell they created for us. Even the economists (and I trained as one) have limited or no idea where we are headed for. The most embarrassing case is security where the scandals are too embarrassing to even talk about openly because of “security” implications. Information or intellectual democracy means everyone’s opinion should matter, even if not equally. Yes we need experts, we need information, research and planning but without the political input of the people you simply end up with arrogance and dictatorship.
Coming back from celebrating Inde-pendence Day, Republic Day and Sallah my thoughts were randomly jumping from, and beyond, the songs and dances, the parades and traditional dishes, around and beyond the officially funded rallies of the Transformation Ambassadors and other supposedly “Non-Governmental” groups shamelessly reminding us that all is well with our polity and economy, to the daily scandals, endless lies and self-congratulatory fiction of our rulers, and wondering if we could ever find our ways back from the precipice.
The Sallah Celebration, I concluded, was not really memorable though we still pray that Allah would accept our ibadat.  Independence Day was even less remarkable as even the President resorted to cutting the Independence Cake in the Villa. The only glimmer of hope, given the gravity of the potential problems we can all see down the road, I thought, is the reality of our republican status which we decide upon on 1st October 1963, making us, potentially at least, masters of our own destiny. Thus, while securing our freedom in 1960 was undoubtedly important it is our deciding to become a “republic” that we must keep remembering even as we reflect on the new Sallah dresses, shoes (and bags) people exhibited, the tens of thousands of rams sacrificed, the colourful Sallah durbars of our Emirs, Mais and Shehus, as well as the ubiquitous posters plastered all over our cities, towns and villages to convince us to vote for one party or the other in 2015.  
So, after 54 years free from the British masters, 51 years as citizens of a republic, as masters and not slaves how come we are not developed? Here I am using the term “development”, borrowing from Ian Morris, in his 2011 tome Why the West Rules – For Now, to mean “societies’ abilities to get things done-to shape their physical, economic, social and intellectual environments to their own end” (emphasis added.) How come we cannot create jobs with decent incomes? How many tanneries can we revive if we are to use the hides and skins from all the goats, rams, and cows we slaughter regularly? How many shoes, bags, leather jackets and related factories can we start? How many jobs would these create? What of reviving, expanding and even setting up new textiles industries for all our Sallah and Xmas attire? How many jobs would these create? Just imagine expanding these to supply uniforms, shoes, belts, boots, and sandals for the police, the armed forces or even school children?
We have what it takes to develop, to learn to tackle our problems if only we decide to think, to struggle, to create, and to demand that our political leaders do the same. As the old American political song puts it: How can we be poor with the ballot in our hands? We must understand the interface between politics, money and information and ideas if we are to change our fortunes.
Hope you had a refreshing break. Happy Independence and Eid Mubarak, in arrears, to all of you out there.