THINK of a Nigerian born in 1999, the year civilian rule came back. That person is twenty-seven now. They have never lived under a military government. But they may have finished school and not found a job. They have probably learned to plan trips around insecurity, and they almost certainly run a generator at home. Democracy has been part of their whole lives. Whether it has given them any real say over that life is another matter.
That is the strange thing about Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. Civilian government has lasted, but citizens’ power over it remains uncertain. We count elections, administrations and anniversaries. We should also count how often institutions protect ordinary people, public money becomes public benefit, and those who abuse power face consequences.
Continuity matters. Our earlier republics were cut short by soldiers. The system established in 1999 has survived successive handovers, including 2015, when President Goodluck Jonathan lost and conceded. That achievement deserves protecting. But survival is the beginning of democratic development, not proof of its completion.
Democratic continuity means civilian rule keeps going. Democratic consolidation means its limits can be relied upon. Presidents accept restraint. Opposition parties can compete. Judges can rule without political intimidation. Citizens can obtain justice without a godfather. Democracy matures when those protections hold precisely when powerful people would prefer to ignore them.
The test often comes after an election. Can winners tolerate scrutiny? Can supporters acknowledge their leaders’ wrongdoing? Can losers accept a credible result without feeling excluded from the country? Consolidation requires rules that prevent loyalty from becoming immunity.
Time alone cannot deliver that. Institutions can grow older without growing stronger. Repeated elections may teach politicians to respect competition, or simply to manipulate it more effectively. What matters is what the system learns, and who benefits.
That is the continuity trap. A system that keeps rewarding its insiders gives them little reason to change it. Politicians who benefit from expensive nomination forms, opaque campaign funding and weak oversight have scant incentive to widen access. Each election that returns them to influence confirms that the arrangement works. What citizens experience as dysfunction, insiders may regard as a successful bargain.
The trap survives because its costs are scattered while its rewards are concentrated. One community loses a clinic, another loses a road, and a third loses confidence in voting. Those benefiting from the arrangement know exactly what they stand to lose if reform happens. Citizens need to connect these separate disappointments into a sustained demand for better government.
This explains how we can have so much politics and so little service. Parties organise lavish conventions while hospitals lack medicines. Legislatures approve budgets while communities cannot identify the contractor behind an abandoned project. The machinery for renewing power receives more attention than the machinery for making it answerable.
Institutions should correct that imbalance. Electoral bodies protect voters’ choices; legislatures scrutinise executives; courts defend rights; anti-corruption agencies investigate misconduct. Their independence has a practical test: can they act when doing so inconveniences those who appoint or fund them?
The 2023 presidential election exposed the stakes. Results did not appear on INEC’s Results Viewing Portal as promptly as expected. European Union observers reported that upload failures and poor communication weakened trust. The failure did not, by itself, establish that every disputed result was fraudulent. It did leave citizens struggling to verify the connection between their ballots and the announced outcome. Technology creates confidence only when institutions explain failures and make verification possible.
Courts have a legitimate role in resolving disputes. But litigation cannot replace an electoral process that voters can understand and check. Nor can anti-corruption agencies retain credibility if party affiliation appears to determine who faces investigation. Institutions must explain their decisions and apply consistent standards.
Low participation should concern us. Insecurity, logistical failures and distrust can all discourage voting. Yet staying home carries a cost: organised political machines do not withdraw alongside disappointed citizens. Disengagement can strengthen the networks people distrust. Rebuilding confidence and sustaining participation therefore go hand in hand.
Nigerians can remain committed to democracy while losing faith in those governing in its name. That distinction leaves room for reform. Public frustration is not necessarily a demand to abandon democracy; often, it is a demand that democracy finally deliver.
Economic hardship makes that demand urgent. A parent choosing between food and school fees, a farmer afraid to reach his land, or a graduate trapped in insecure work needs citizenship to mean something in daily life. Security and functioning services give democratic promises substance.
Still, prosperity cannot excuse repression, and hardship alone does not invalidate an elected government. Difficult reforms may be necessary. Their legitimacy depends on honest explanation, fair burdens, protection for vulnerable households and a willingness to correct mistakes.
The 2023-naira redesign offers a concrete lesson. In his February broadcast, President Muhammadu Buhari acknowledged the difficulties citizens faced during implementation. Whatever the policy’s stated aims, the shortage of usable cash exposed the distance between an official timetable and people’s capacity to cope. Reform must be tested against everyday transactions: buying food, paying transport fares, keeping a small business open. Announcing a policy is easier than making it workable.
Trust also depends on visible restraint. Leaders asking citizens to sacrifice should curb their own excesses. Criticism should prompt answers, not accusations of disloyalty. Admitting that a policy needs adjustment is part of governing responsibly.
The “japa” debate reflects this wider crisis of confidence. Migration has many causes. But when young people see their best prospects elsewhere, patriotic appeals are insufficient. Staying must become a sensible choice, supported by safety, opportunity and institutions that reward effort fairly.
Elite capture makes that harder. Defection can be legitimate, but parties that revolve around proximity to power offer voters little dependable policy choice. Open finances, credible internal contests and clear programmes would help turn parties into vehicles for representation rather than bargaining platforms.
Women, young people and candidates without wealthy sponsors must have a realistic route into office. Excluding them narrows the experience informing public decisions. Inclusion improves government and makes it fairer.
Our diversity also requires secure citizenship. Representation matters, but ethnic and religious loyalties should not shield poor performance. People must be able to criticise leaders from their own communities without being treated as traitors.
Federalism remains unfinished business. Bringing authority closer to citizens can improve responsiveness, but proximity does not guarantee accountability. Governors can abuse power too. Any transfer of money or security responsibilities needs enforceable safeguards and remedies ordinary people can use.
Public spending offers both a warning and a possibility. The Second Niger Bridge, commissioned in May 2023 after years of planning and development, shows that civilian government can deliver substantial infrastructure. The democratic lesson is to make completion routine and maintenance dependable. Citizens should not have to wait for a departing administration’s legacy ceremony to see their needs addressed.
Two specific reform demands follow. First, amend electoral law to require publication of polling-unit result images and corresponding collation records within defined deadlines, with a documented procedure for technical failures. INEC should publish an independent technical audit after every general election. Breaches should trigger enforceable sanctions, subject to due process. Voters deserve a verifiable chain from ballot to declaration.
Second, require every federally funded capital project to carry a public identifier linking its appropriation, contractor, contract value, payments and independently verified completion status. Publish the records on a searchable portal, updated quarterly, with penalties for withholding or falsifying information. Citizens should be able to follow a project from budget approval to a working service.
These demands make accountability practical. They also give journalists, professional bodies and communities evidence with which to challenge official claims between elections. Public service must become the measure of political success.
Accountability should also be something people can practise close to home. A residents’ association asking why a funded borehole remains dry is doing democratic work. So is a professional body examining a ministry’s spending. These ordinary acts matter because they turn frustration into questions officials must answer and make public pressure harder to dismiss as partisan noise.
Authoritarian rule offers no dependable shortcut. Removing scrutiny also removes the tools for correcting failure. Nigeria must repair democratic government while protecting the freedoms that make repair possible.
Reform must outlast a government’s honeymoon. Leaders need to accept safeguards that may constrain them later. Citizens need to defend those safeguards when their preferred party holds office. Otherwise, accountability remains something we demand only of opponents.
Twenty-seven years have given Nigeria experience, institutional memory and repeated opportunities to improve. They have also exhausted the excuse that our democracy is too young to face serious standards.
The generation born in 1999 deserves more than a life without soldiers in power. It deserves a government it can influence, institutions it can trust, and a country where hard work leads to a real future. We should judge the next Democracy Day by how far we have moved towards that. Nigeria has kept the clock running. Now it must make the years count.
- Dr Dakuku Peterside is the author of bestsellers, Leading in a Storm and Beneath the Surface. His syndicated column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Monday.