By Tatalo Alamu
The ways of democracy are truly strange. Without democracy, a nation is a disaster waiting to happen. With democracy creaking at the joints, even the most advanced nation is a debacle anxious to unfold. With the apparent failure of the regular democratic process in America to rein in a convicted felon and prevent him from upending the system, with the ethical collapse of the political class in Britain and the rise of far right xenophobic movements all over Europe, it is clear that the world is witnessing an antidemocratic whiplash.
Predicated on and sustained by the ancient Athenian myth that it is people’s power (Demos plus cratos), the people often find that their power ends when the quest for liberty is consummated. More often than not the people have to be protected from their own worst impulses by wiser counsel which cannot come from the rabble. Yet the fact also remains that the human spirit cannot thrive under authoritarian shackles for long without something giving.
After wresting power from tyrants, people often cede power to tyrants. This is because people’s power cannot sustain itself or enrich the society for long. After ridding themselves of their Bourbon tormentors, the heroic French people could only watch as Napoleon Bonaparte, a harsh, no-nonsense authoritarian law-giver, collected power to save them from themselves and from anarchy and chaos. In England, the same thing had happened much earlier with Oliver Cromwell just as it would happen later in Russia as Tsarist monstrosity was exchanged for Stalinist catastrophe.
And then the struggle for human liberation and emancipation is joined anew, possibly under a new set of actors and on a different political and historical canvas. Perhaps no one has explained this paradox of people’s power better than Unamuno, the great Spanish poet and philosopher, who noted that under tyranny people seek liberty but under liberty they also seek tyranny. If democracy were to be an old woman, it would be a whimsical and self-indulgent grand matron indeed full of great wiles and an unrivalled capacity for self-delusion.
This is what has led many sober analysts to conclude that rather than being a destination, democracy is indeed a process, a tortuous and tormenting open-ended process at that, full of daring advances and stunning reversals; full of open stumbling and faltering, riddled with landmines and volcanic craters; bristling with detours, diversions and digressions.
It is in this respect that President Tinubu’s historical stumble at the podium of democracy last Wednesday in Abuja should be seen for what it truly is: a symbolic capture for posterity of a people’s subliminal anxieties about the prospects of democracy in a deeply polarized and alienated nation. Yours sincerely watched it live and from a ringside perspective too.
Always historicize! Thus admonishes Fredric Jameson, the great American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist theoretician. “History is what hurts”, we are told, and “however much we choose to ignore history, history in all its alienating necessities will not ignore us”. Dear readers, please follow us as we take a grand historical excursion into Nigeria’s perplexing and intriguing journey towards full democracy and organic nationhood in the past thirty one years of struggle and in the last one year of the Tinubu dispensation.
