EVERY June 12, we dust off the rhetoric, wave the green-white-green a little harder than usual, and remind ourselves that Nigeria chose democracy. That MKO Abiola won an election in 1993 and was denied his mandate is a story that still stings and rightly so. That June 12 is now our Democracy Day is both a tribute to a man who paid the ultimate price and a quiet admission that this country owes a debt it has never fully settled. Twenty-seven years of civilian rule. The question every honest Nigerian must sit with today is a simple one: has it been worth it?
Let me be fair. There have been genuine gains and to pretend otherwise is dishonest. Our elections, God knows, used to be something else entirely. I am old enough to remember 2003 and 2007 the era when certain presidential and governorship results arrived before the voting had even ended in some wards, when candidates received more votes than the total number of registered voters in their local governments, when ballot boxes were snatched in broad daylight with the confidence of men who knew nothing would happen to them. That era of mass thumbprinting, of announcement upon announcement while counting was still going on in the bush that was a different kind of shame.
The Independent National Electoral Commission has moved. The card reader, the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, the INEC Results Viewing portal these are real improvements. They have made it significantly harder to fabricate results at the ward level the way it used to be done. INEC deserves some of that credit. But here is where I will not allow anybody to gaslight us: the problem was never INEC alone. The recent party primaries across APC, PDP, Labour Party, NDC, ADC tore the mask off completely.
Every single party conducted its primaries like a private business deal. Forms were bought, forms were manipulated, aspirants were schemed out of contention before the process even started. The primaries exposed what we already knew deep down: there is no difference between these parties. They are all the same organism wearing different jerseys. Nobody should be blaming INEC when the politicians themselves have no democratic culture whatsoever. We are celebrating democracy with no democrats. That is our fundamental problem.
The Nigerian politician is a special breed, I tell you. He will quote the constitution in one breath and violate it in the next. He will weep on the campaign trail about the suffering of the people and sign contracts worth billions for roads that will never be built. He believes democracy is a vehicle for personal enrichment, not a system of governance. The must-win mentality runs so deep in this political class that the process has become irrelevant only the result matters, and only their result at that. We have 27 years of civilian rule but the mentality of our political elite has barely evolved from the days when soldiers walked into Government House and the real difference was only the uniform.
The scorecard on security is where I lose whatever generosity I was feeling. Since 1999, over 50,000 Nigerians have been killed by insecurity in its various forms Boko Haram insurgency, banditry in the North-West, farmer-herder clashes, kidnapping, pipeline militancy, and secessionist agitation in the South-East. Fifty thousand. That is not a statistic ,that is a town. We have watched the rise of school abductions from Chibok to Kankara to Kagara.
We have watched bandits attack the Nigerian Defence Academy. We have watched herdsmen and farmers kill each other over land in a country that should have had a grazing reserves policy sorted out twenty years ago. If I were to score the civilian administrations from President Obasanjo to Presisent Tinubu on security, I would struggle to give them above three out of ten. That is the honest assessment.
Corruption is the other cancer. What is deeply ironic and somewhat embarrassing is that the civilian era has proven itself more corrupt than the military governments it replaced. The soldiers at least stole with some restraint. The democratic era produced the scale of looting we saw with petroleum subsidies, the NNPC remittances scandal, the pension fund fraud, the NDDC forensic audit horrors, and the parade of former governors who turned state treasuries into personal accounts.
The EFCC and ICPC were created with great fanfare and they have made some noise over the years, securing convictions here and there. But the fundamental problem is our judicial system corruption cases drag on for a decade or more before any conclusion. A man loots a billion naira and spends eight years in litigation, during which time he remains a free man, a respected figure, sometimes even a senator. The deterrent effect is practically zero. Until we fix the speed of justice, the anti-corruption agencies are largely theatre.
Mind you, I am not one of those people who romanticise military rule. Those calling for a return to khaki on social media after the Niger and Burkina Faso coups clearly were not alive or were too young to remember what it meant to live under a government with no accountability, no National Assembly, no press freedom worth speaking of, and no electoral process at all. Military rule is never the answer. But democracy must deliver or it loses its argument. Twenty-seven years is long enough for results.
Like I have said previously on this page, the quality of our institutions determines everything. We can have elections every four years from now until the sun burns out if the institutions meant to enforce accountability remain weak, captured, or underfunded, the elections will keep producing the same type of politician doing the same type of damage. The judiciary must be strengthened and insulated from executive interference. INEC must be financially autonomous in practice, not just on paper. The anti-corruption agencies need prosecutorial timelines no case should run beyond three years without a verdict, full stop. State legislatures, which have become rubber stamps for governors, need to rediscover their constitutional mandate.
The civil society and the media also have questions to answer. We have been too easily satisfied with access, with proximity to power, with the crumbs that fall from the table. Our democracy needs a more adversarial press not partisan, not sponsored, but genuinely adversarial. A press that holds the governors and senators as accountable as it holds the president. A civil society that speaks truth to power regardless of who is in power. These are the pillars that keep democracy honest and we cannot outsource that responsibility to INEC alone.
Twenty-seven years in, the prognosis is mixed but not hopeless. We have more political awareness than we had in 1999. The #EndSARS movement of 2020 showed a generation of Nigerians willing to take to the streets for their rights. The 2023 elections produced genuine debates about competence and governance that we had not seen at that scale before. These are small but real signs. The country is not standing still but it is moving far too slowly for the scale of the problems.
The economy is the other measuring stick that cannot be ignored. In 1999 when Olusegun Obasanjo was sworn in, Nigeria’s GDP was approximately $36 billion. By 2014, under Goodluck Jonathan, it had grown to over $500 billion and we briefly became Africa’s largest economy. Today, after months of naira devaluation, subsidy removal shocks, and inflation running above 30 percent, millions of Nigerians are poorer in real terms than they were a decade ago. The number of Nigerians living in extreme poverty has crossed 100 million according to World Bank estimates — more than the entire population of Germany. Democracy has not yet translated into prosperity for the majority and that failure is the single biggest threat to the democratic project. When people are hungry enough and desperate enough, they start listening to whoever promises a shortcut.
What gives me some hope and I refuse to be entirely bleak about this is the youth of this country. The generation that grew up entirely under civilian rule does not know military governance as anything other than a history lesson. They are more educated, more connected, more aware of their rights than any generation before them. They organised #EndSARS with no party structure and no godfather. They are demanding more from their elected officials online and offline in ways that were simply not possible in 1999. That energy needs to be channelled into structures , into running for office, into building civic organisations, into demanding judicial reform. Anger on social media is a start, not a finish.
Democracy in Nigeria has come to stay. Of that I have no doubt. But staying is not enough. It must also work. It must feed people, keep them safe, give their children schools and hospitals that function, and give honest men and women a fighting chance at public office. We need new people in the system , younger, less transactional, less tribal, more focused on the long game. We need institutions strong enough to outlast any individual. And we need a press and a public that refuse to be bought.
- Nda-Isaiah is a political analyst based in Abuja and can be reached on jonesdryx@gmail.com. His syndicated column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Saturday.