By Ken Afor
The Presidency, Monday, accused former President Olusegun Obasanjo of being culpable for the current state of Nigeria’s democracy.
Bayo Onanuga, Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, declared that the democratic system prevailing in the nation is the consequence of the involvement of Obasanjo as military Head of State from 1976 to 1979 and as a civilian President from 1999 to 2007.
“Obasanjo ought to know that he brought this thing into Nigeria. He was the one who made us adopt it in 1979. He must have seen it as expensive and unsuitable when he governed us for eight years and even wanted an extension for another four years.
“So, the way he is sounding, it is like the man is getting wiser after leaving office,” Onanuga said, reacting to Obasanjo’s post-presidential stance.
This trails comments by Olusegun Obasanjo at the high-level consultation on Rethinking Western Liberal Democracy in Africa that was held at Green Resort Legacy, Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library, in Abeokuta, on Monday, where he proposed an “Afro democracy” suited to the continent’s unique needs.
Obasanjo denounced Western-style democracy, contending that it had failed to result in good governance and progress in Africa.
He advocated the reevaluation and tempering of democracy to better provide for the needs of African nations, drawing attention to how the traditional Western model ignores African history and intricacies.
The ex-president declared that an issue with liberal democracy was its lack of native development and failure to consider African history and multiple cultural complexities, as well as other unique elements.
Pushing blames on the western world for introducing a system of governance – democracy alien to Africa, Obasanjo described it as a “government of a few people over all the people or population and these few people are representatives of only some of the people and not fully representatives of all the people. Invariably, the majority of the people are wittingly or unwittingly kept out.”
He argued that African countries should not be subject to a system of governance which they have no say in the creation of.
His words, “The weakness and failure of liberal democracy as it is practised stem from its history, content and context and practice. Once you move from all the people to a representative of the people, you start to encounter troubles and problems.
“For those who define it as the rule of the majority, should the minority be ignored, neglected and excluded? In short, we have a system of government in which we have no hands to define and design and we continue with it even when we know that it is not working for us.
“Those who brought it to us are now questioning the rightness of their invention, its deliverability and its relevance today without reform. The essence of any system of government is the welfare and well-being of the people, all the people.”
“Interrogate the performance of democracy in the West where it originated from and with us the inheritors of what we are left with by our colonial powers.”
But, the Presidency held the former leader accountable for the inadequately repeated design during his time as Head of State and, afterward, President.
it condemned the former leader for his opinions that the existing state of affairs was just a sticking plaster, rather than calling for improvement of the system. “If he believes in what he is saying now, he ought to be an advocate of the need to go back to the parliamentary system.”
Onanuga added, “We were practicing the parliamentary democracy the British left for us. Then, the military struck in 1966. And when we were going to return to democracy, instead of going back to what we were practicing before, parliamentary democracy, which was not expensive, it was this same Obasanjo who accepted the recommendation of the constitutional assembly at that time that recommended this American-style democracy.”
The Presidency further criticised Obasanjo’s implementation of the presidential system, saying, “Obasanjo also knew that he copied this presidential system very wrongly. He copied the form and structure. But he didn’t copy the spirit of it.
“Something that should have been under him in 1999 to 2007, he even made attempts to modify the constitution,” it added.
