NIGERIA'S ELITE WRITES OFF DEMOCRACY
Beckett, Paul A .
Nigeria's Elite Writes Off Democracy Democracy has failed again in Nigeria. Major General Mohammed Buhari tells us so, and also tells us not to worry: It was not a "real democracy" anyway, he...
...They thought democracy would produce good government, but it brought corruption instead...
...Why, in particular, are so many members now ready to discard the democratic experiment after what seems to have been only a superficial trial...
...One Africa scholar has coined the phrase "the absent bourgeoisie" to denote a situation in which bourgeois control is imposed from abroad...
...If that is the case, the actions of indigenous elite groups are, at best, only marginally important...
...Democracy makes the politicians, rather than the elites, the connecting links to the local populations...
...It is one of the great ironies of the Third World that capitalism, associated historically and ideologically with democracy, seems to make the maintenance of democracy extremely difficult...
...A Mercedes-Benz auto assembly plant was opened to satisfy the requirements of the rich, while hundreds of thousands are homeless in Lagos...
...Rarely in human history has a class made up mainly of public administrators and technicians, academics, and professionals exercised so much control as have the highly educated in the first two decades of Nigerian independence...
...Two days before the coup, Shagari announced austerity measures that were widely seen as capitulations to IMF pressures...
...Grafted on to a social structure characterized by increasing inequality, democracy spawns politicians who are incapable of fundamentally reforming the society and who have no interest in doing so...
...The foreign debt had ballooned to something in excess of $14 billion...
...But members of Nigeria's intelligentsia view their role quite differently...
...All in all, it is scarcely surprising that Nigeria's highly educated elite would acquiesce in the coup and even applaud it...
...President Shagari had been able to stave off most of these through the elections held last August and September, but he could not postpone them indefinitely...
...At the same time, their own place in the society has come under challenge...
...It can be suggested, in fact, that almost everything that happens in Nigeria is determined by the patterns and forces of world capitalism...
...The post-independence world conceived by the elite middle-class professionals has begun to crumble...
...Though the democratic system was far from perfect and corruption was rife, repair seemed possible...
...Oil income had decreased by half since 1980—a catastrophe in a nation that derives about 90 per cent of its government revenues and foreign earnings from oil...
...And it had become apparent that the International Monetary Fund was insisting on the imposition of austerity measures...
...If this elite, this public service "bourgeoisie," has been in control, why has it not installed and preserved what theorists of the Left would call "bourgeois democracy...
...Still, the coup—and especially its timing—came as a surprise...
...On the one hand, democracy as an idea is part of the ideological package provided by their "Western" education—a sign of political "development," an element of "progress...
...The pressures on the democratic system were extreme...
...But, on the other hand, democracy as a real thing is difficult, inefficient, messy, expensive, and dangerous in ways the textbooks never discussed...
...Paul A. Beckett (Paul A. Beckett, an African studies scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has taught in Nigeria...
...They expected economic growth to bridge the gap between rich and poor, but it only made the gap greater...
...Part of the answer is that the highly educated elite is, in fact, quite ambivalent about democracy...
...Major General Mohammed Buhari tells us so, and also tells us not to worry: It was not a "real democracy" anyway, he contends...
...For fledgling and fragile democracies, the pressure often becomes too much, and the reins of government pass—sometimes bloodily, sometimes peacefully—into the hands of the military...
...They, rather than the politicians, were the true inheritors of the colonialist administrative state...
...Before the coup, Nigeria's ingenious Second Republic constitution of 1979—designed mainly by academics, administrators, and professionals—had survived two general elections...
...The elite increasingly resembles a class rather than a meritocracy...
...As head of the large and apparently united military organization that pulled off an almost bloodless coup on New Year's Eve, Buhari is in a position to say...
...The politicians value the money that the businessmen can give them more than what the elite has to offer—credentials, technique, brilliance, and, at least in self-image, probity...
...And burdened by an economy oriented to Western markets, Third World nations are inevitably subject to the vagaries of international trade...
...They are the only ones fully equipped to transcend the local and ethnic systems of Nigeria, which—like most countries of colonial origin—comprises a patchwork of smaller entities...
...Democracy puts the emphasis on mass opinion rather than on the opinions of the highly educated...
...And most Nigerian opinion leaders seem to agree with him...
...While some may refer to it as "bourgeois democracy," democracy really tends to run contrary to the class interests of this bourgeoisie...
...But once Nigeria's educated elites decided the constitutional vehicle wasn't worth fixing, it was bound to be scrapped...
...Futhermore, the last episode of democracy in Nigeria brought a new force into being—a class of big businessmen, "tycoons," as members of the elite sometimes call them with mingled humor, condescension, and fear...
...The situation in which President Shehu Shagari's regime found itself should have warned anyone to keep hands off: The outlook was not promising...
...As a sort of mandarin class, members of this elite, behind the scenes in civilian as well as military regimes, have been in a position to control the main lines of continuity and change (or lack of it) in independent Nigeria...
...In a book entitled The Educated Elite in the Nigerian Society, Professor E. A. Ayandele, himself a part of that elite, has commented on the tendency of the highly educated to perceive themselves "as the class around whom history has been revolving in modern Nigeria...
...In addition to the emerging business class, a puzzling and disturbing mass of men, women, and children has invaded the cities, living in misery and squalor, utterly without hope...
...And they are right...
Vol. 48 • March 1984 • No. 3
