Nigeria in Search of Democracy

Larry Diamond

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1984

Article preview: first 500 of 9,190 words total.

Summary:  Once again, Nigeria is governed by the military. For the second time since Independence in 1960, a democratic constitution that was not working has been overthrown in a military coup. Like the first coup 18 years earlier, the action of the soldiers last December 31 has met with broad popular support. Yet it has been a stunning blow to those who had hoped to see democratic institutions prosper in this largest and most potentially powerful African nation, as a model for other African states.

Larry Diamond is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University, and was a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer at Bayero University, Kano, in Nigeria during the 1982-83 academic year. His research on Nigeria has been supported with grants from the Institute for the Study of World Politics and the Vanderbilt University Research Council.

We are intoxicated with politics. The premium on political power is so high that we are prone to take the most extreme measures in order to win and maintain political power, our energy tends to be channelled into the struggle for power to the detriment of economically productive effort, and we habitually seek political solutions to virtually every problem. Such are the manifestations of the overpoliticization of social life in Nigeria.

-Professor Claude Ake

Once again, Nigeria is governed by the military. For the second time since Independence in 1960, a democratic constitution that was not working has been overthrown in a military coup. Like the first coup 18 years earlier, the action of the soldiers last December 31 has met with broad popular support. Yet it has been a stunning blow to those who had hoped to see democratic institutions prosper in this largest and most potentially powerful African nation, as a model for other African states.

Many early reactions in the West have portrayed the coupmakers as a bunch of power-hungry soldiers, with no appreciation for democracy, eager to dip their hands into the nation's coffers. This is a gross misreading of the coup. The new military government may, in the end, fail the expectations of the Nigerian people as badly as previous governments have, but it has swept into power on a deep tide of disillusionment and disgust with civilian politics. Its primary purpose appears overwhelmingly to have been national salvation, not personal aggrandizement. Its motivating spirit has been popular and redemptive, not authoritarian.

II

What caused the coup was not the ambitions of the soldiers but the decay of the country under four and a quarter years of civilian rule. This decay had three components: staggering corruption, crippling economic waste and mismanagement, and the vitiating of the electoral process through violence and fraud.

It is another misconception to argue, as many Western newspapers have, that corruption under the late Second Republic was no worse than it had been under previous regimes, and hence was only an excuse for the coup. In fact, corruption in Nigeria has grown more widespread and brazen with each regime, and was more out of control than ever under the last one. To some extent it is true that the civilians only applied more intensively and perfectly devices that had long been in operation, in particular the pervasive inflation of contracts to cover the costs of kickbacks to ministers and parties and of commissions to politically connected agents. The almost universal padding of these contracts by 50 to 100 percent meant that only half as many projects could be undertaken. And the payment of huge "mobilization fees" before the performance of any substantial work meant that many were never completed. The shells of unfinished hospitals and public housing, the treacherous craters of ungraded roads, the idle cranes and pumps and bulldozers, stood in virtually every state as vivid testimony to what was happening.

Continually, the newspapers published exposes of fantastic corruption, ...

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