Post by Levi Chukwudi Ezidiegwu (@Levoski)
I am becoming convinced that the version of democracy Nigeria copied from America simply does not work for Nigeria and after decades of dysfunction, pretending otherwise is becoming intellectually dishonest. It has created chaos and strong tribal division.
We created an enormously powerful presidency, weakened the regions, centralized almost everything in Abuja and built an unbelievably expensive political structure around sharing federal revenue.
Then we wonder why politics has become a fight to capture Abuja.
Go back to the era of regional government.
When M. I. Okpara was Premier of the Eastern Region, the East had its own parliament and substantial responsibility for its own development. Agriculture, industrialisation, education and economic development were not things everyone sat around waiting for Abuja to deliver. Okpara’s government pursued farm settlements, industrialisation and economic development as deliberate regional policy.
The North had Ahmadu Bello. The West had its own regional leadership. The regions had greater political and economic significance, and their leaders had to think seriously about how to develop their own economies.
That system was certainly not perfect the First Republic itself suffered severe political crises and ultimately collapsed in 1966. But there is something fundamental we should learn from its architecture.
Nigeria needs to stop running a political system designed as though 230 million people with enormous ethnic, cultural and economic differences are one homogeneous society waiting for instructions from Abuja.
The American presidential model may work for America. That does not mean Nigeria must worship it forever.
I would rather see us seriously debate a return to a parliamentary and genuinely federal system: stronger regions, greater fiscal responsibility, less concentration of power in one presidency and leaders whose political survival depends more immediately on maintaining the confidence of Parliament.
Our current structure has had decades to prove itself.
At some point, repeating the same political experiment and expecting a fundamentally different Nigeria stops being patience. It becomes a refusal to learn.
Singapore is particularly instructive not because it rejected democracy, but because it developed a parliamentary system with unusually strong state capacity, long-term planning and institutional continuity. Its political system has also been dominated by the PAP for decades, with critics pointing to significant constraints on political competition and some civil liberties.
Nations do not become prosperous because they copy a political system. They become prosperous when they build institutions capable of making difficult decisions, executing long-term plans and holding leaders accountable for results.
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