Dialogue With Nigeria By AKIN OSUNTOKUN
It is a measure of his enduring relevance that, next to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, former President Olusegun Obasanjo arguably possesses the biggest political megaphone in Nigeria today—and perhaps in Africa.
Since 1989, Obasanjo has repeatedly knocked on a particular ideological door. In his book, Constitution for National Integration and Development, he proposed a single-party or inclusive governing arrangement in which key elected officials—presidents, governors and local government chairmen—would automatically participate in the executive structure. His aim was to reduce disruptive factionalism.
Lately, he has become more forceful in advancing essentially the same proposition. He has elevated it into a sweeping critique of representative democracy, which he considers unsuitable for Nigeria and Africa. He restated this position at the Goodluck Jonathan Foundation Democracy Dialogue 2026 in Bauchi last month.
Before engaging Obasanjo’s reservations, it is important to note that criticism of democracy is as old as democracy itself. Winston Churchill famously observed in the British House of Commons in 1947:
“Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Churchill was right on both counts. Democracy is imperfect, disorderly and vulnerable to inefficiency, corruption, demagoguery, divisiveness and the elevation of unsuitable leaders. Yet the enduring question remains: what is the better alternative?
With some exaggeration, Obasanjo argues that representative democracy is a government of a few over the many. In his view, elected representatives speak only for sections of the population, while the majority are, knowingly or unknowingly, excluded. Once governance shifts from direct participation by all citizens to representation by a select few, he argues, problems inevitably arise. And if democracy is defined as majority rule, what becomes of the minority?
He also contends that there is no such thing as African democracy:
“We were given Western liberal democracy by our colonial masters… The West inherited it from monarchy. Hence, you can have a government and a loyal opposition, loyal to the monarchy. But when you talk of loyal opposition in an African setting… opposition means enemy.”
There are two problems with this argument.
First, democracy is not limited to representative democracy. Participatory democracy offers another model—one in which citizens play a more direct role in political decisions and policy-making instead of relying exclusively on elected representatives. Such an arrangement substantially addresses Obasanjo’s concern about exclusion.
Second, the notion of a “loyal opposition” is not universally rooted in allegiance to monarchy. While that may describe Britain’s historical evolution, it does not apply to countries such as India or the United States. American democracy was founded, explicitly and dramatically, on the repudiation of the British monarchy in the Declaration of Independence of 1776.
There is also compelling evidence that neither Africans generally nor Nigerians particularly possess an anti-democratic political DNA. The American political scientist Richard Sklar observed that the Yoruba of Western Nigeria had deeply democratic political traditions before colonialism. According to him, Yoruba monarchy was substantially constitutional in character, while Ibadan had an even more democratic arrangement: no crowned head, but a council of city fathers and military leaders whose tenure rested, to some extent, on public approval.
Obasanjo’s argument, therefore, is more accurately understood as a condemnation of colonialism than of democracy itself. In the parlance of political sociology, the argument essentially ‘highlights both the need for an autochthonous transformation of the state in Africa using endogenous knowledge’.
But colonialism cannot be condemned without also interrogating the very idea of Nigeria. Like other victims of the Berlin Conference, Nigeria would not have existed without colonialism. The country began as an arbitrary British construction. Its peculiarity lies not merely in the forced amalgamation of diverse peoples, but in the deliberate cultivation of division and distrust among its constituent ethnic nationalities.
The tragic irony of British rule in Nigeria is that it was the creator of the country and the inseminator of the incurable virus afflicting Nigeria. No one invested in the rancour and ill will plaguing Nigeria, including the very act of creating the country, more than its British patriarch.
As Ruth First observed:
“In land policy, in a dozen different fields of colonial government, the administration reinforced not the unity of the colony, but the differences between North and South.”
Jide Osuntokun made a related point, noting that colonial officials such as Charles Temple and Richmond Palmer indoctrinated Northern emirs about their supposed political and racial separation from their Southern compatriots. Sir Theodore Adams even claimed in 1941 that the emirs viewed the Northern Provinces as a separate country and that enforced cooperation with the South could eventually produce a demand for “Pakistan.”
Sir Arthur Richards merely gave constitutional expression to the reality of divide-and-rule politics that British colonial authorities had consciously fostered.
Brimming with malice, this was how Lord Lugard described the people of Lagos in a letter to his wife on 9 December, 1916: “These people here are seditious and rotten to the core… the people of Lagos are the lowest, the most seditious and disloyal, the most prompted by pure self-seeking money motives of any people I have met.” ‘
It may tickle the imagination of racist anthropologists to believe otherwise, but there is nothing intrinsically European about democracy, just as there is nothing inherently anti-democratic in African societies. What distinguishes societies is autochthony—the extent to which political institutions grow from indigenous history, values and social realities. A state that lacks this organic foundation is more likely to fail.
Western civilisation rests substantially on Judeo-Christian traditions. Yoruba political culture draws from the Pan-Oduduwa monarchical heritage and Ifa cosmology. The Sokoto Caliphate and the wider Islamic North may similarly claim theocratic governance as an indigenous political reference point.
If institutional opposition has become destructive to Nigeria’s wellbeing, British colonialism bears considerable responsibility. Nigeria’s dysfunctional democracy is not proof that democracy is alien to Africa. It is, rather, an epiphenomenon of colonial legacy and the continuing absence of a political order rooted in genuine autochthony.