Let me be clear. I am not here to bury the democrat. If I tried, I would fail. I am not here to praise the democrat. It does not need any panegyrics. I am here only to look it in the eye and see whether I will blink.
To ever do justice to the subject, I must say that will do great injustice to the democrat as politicians, scholars, democrats, subalterns, persons on the streets, street seller and even the area boy.
Before I look at one of the problematics of the concept of the democrat, I want to list some of the qualities we associate with a practitioner. Democrats love human rights, embrace free and fair elections, believe in citizen involvement, espouse the rule of law, defend and advance of freedom of expression and press, stand for the equality before the law, political choice and accountability and majority rule.
One of the countries with great democracies, as they say, had a leader known as Abraham Lincoln who, during a way to keep its democracy together, gave us the simplistic but most popular definition of democracy. He said it is the government of the people, by the people and for the people. We are speaking of the United States. But that is where I begin the story of how to make a democrat. If the United States, as people say, is the number one democracy in the world, then the leader, by implication, should be the leader of democrats in the entire world.
Well, not long ago, that same democrat known as Donald Trump has expanded the definition of the word, and he did it not long ago, not on his own soil but outside.
He was such a great democrat that he ordered his country to abduct the leader of another country, and one of the pretexts was that he rigged an election. He did not install the most popular and assumed winner of the election. Rather he wants to share the proceed from its oil. Backtrack. This same man, a great democrat that he is, lost an election and he claimed he won it. A democrat is supposed, according to one of the items on our list of democratic qualities, to believe in the rule of law, or what some political and historical scholars call institutionalism. But this fellow, a showboat and billionaire, rallied a nation of deplorables, misfits, thugs and rabblerousers to Washington DC, and fired their bellies with subversion and they went after every lawmaker, including Vice President Mark Spence, because they dared to stand by the will of the people.
These men were defeated after a few casualties and trepidation in the number one capital in the world. They were also convicted. If he was not a democrat, what shall we say happened four years later? This same man, who was thought not to be a democrat, not to love freedom of the press, to mock the Bible and the anatomical privacies of women, blacks, Hispanics and other minorities and who had wanted to shut down all embassies in Africa, put himself up for a proper election.
As we all know, we won, and resoundingly. Those who thought he did not have democratic qualities started to bow to how great this democrat has been. What this tells us is to beware of definitions. All those ingredients may make a democrat, but what it shows is that they can come in fakes even from the great chef, in the great chicken and served in the grandest of dinner tables.
Here in Nigeria, we did not crave democracy before a country foisted it on us. talk about a system that is based on freedom, and we were forced to adopt it. Many historians, especially of the West African subregion, have argued that the region was embroiled in wars of nation building in the late 18th and 19th centuries, and it was no thanks to the British and French that they had interrupted our efforts to create our own nations. We had the Segu-Tukolor firestorms, the Fante-Asante battlefields, Uthman Dan Fodio and the tempests in today’s northern Nigeria and of course The Yoruba wars that many tried, with anecdotal humour, to trace to a fight over a bowl of pepper.
Let us take the Yoruba environment, for instance. It was called feudal, but it was not the sort of feudalism we had in England with the Tudors, or the sort we had in the years of Russia’s Peter the Great. In some sense, we might say it had what we might call elements of a democratic society with the checks from institutions like the lawmakers in the form of the Oyo Mesi, and protocols that made a king commit suicide. That is a quality of honour that French philosopher Montesquieu ascribes to true monarchies. But in the Yoruba political cosmology, it is seen slightly differently. Honour encased the soul of the people’s conscience. In the French thinker’s world, it is about ego and competition among peers and royal households,
Yet, as the Yoruba society roiled in that century, after the fall of Oyo Ile, and the lack of a political centre for the race, a new city state emerged in Ibadan, and was beginning to craft its own unique form of system, its own brand of republicanism.
All of this was afoot when the adventures of interlopers known as white men came in and ran roughshod, taking sides, making profits and taking power, knocking heads of kings including in Lagos where the Kosoko and the Akintoye royal households began an atavistic feud that has refused to abate up till today.
All of this was going on when the whites colonized us, and that is when, in the language of Chinua Achebe, the rains started to beat us. That may be simplistic. But we can say the white halted our historic journey.
The Colombian novelist, and author of the enchanted and Nobel Prize winning One Thousand Years of Solitude, had told the west in reference to his fictional Macondo society of his novel that the west should have allowed them to live their primitive lives in pace. Garcia Marquez wove his country’s history in a style the western literary establishment calls magical realism, but to the people of Marquez it is nothing fantastic. It is their own normal. Just as our political system was our own normal until they came to disturb our peace with their own brand of a system of popular persuasion or democracy.
Now after they came and they established democracy for us, they also disturbed our elites. They manufactured our elite, but that meant they manufactured a consent. Manufacturing consent was an important vehicle for creating a democrat. A democrat after their own heart. We must note that to manufacture consent, you must manufacture content, and of course as a corollary, you must manufacture contentment. The phrase to manufacture consent was first known from the writings of thinker and journalist Walter Lipmman. But it gained great intellectual resonance with a work authored by Edward S. Norman and Noam Chomsky. This idea was focused on how the elite use media tropes and familiar cultural props to make us all think in a certain way, love the same thing, hate the same thing, and more dangerously, love the same kind of people and hate the same kind of people.
We could not however refer to how the colonial people sought to manufacture consent without talking about how they wanted to institute a rule of law. That created a problem. That has always been a problem because to make a democrat we must have the rule of law in tandem with another cardinal principle: liberty.
In the colonial era, freedom was a contradiction to the whole mammoth infrastructure of British rule. How do you create democrats without liberty. To create a free people, first you must remove your stranglehold on them. It was a hypocrisy the west was ready to live with and they have always grappled with even today in the United States. It was the same bravado of guilt that made Patrick Henry to assert that “give me liberty or give me death.” It also prompted Thomas Jefferson to assert that: “we hold this truth to be self-evident that all men were created equal.” Americans soared over its philosophical flourish and those fighting off the British thought they had created a democratic Eden. Yet we know that that same Jefferson had slaves he would not get rid off and had a child by one of them known as sally Hemmings, a fact denied by historians for over a century until truth, as Shakespeare asserts, once sunk into the earth must spring up again. Or as Apostle Paul wrote, “we can do nothing against the truth but for the truth.”
They grappled with the idea of freedom and its authenticity so much so that John Adams, one of the founding fathers, who was known to harbour mutual jealousies with the third president of the United States, that is Jefferson, dismissed what Jefferson wrote because it was gaining traction around the world. Hear Adams: “Not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years.”
The same British who were holding us down in Africa and also jealous of America came up in arms. Their leading lights were not mum. One of them was the father of utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, who described the declaration of independence as “contemptible and extravagant.” The great Samuel Johnson had his own biting rebuke: “How is that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes.”
The first thing the British did was to create a society of laws crafted in England. I am not underplaying the value of the rule of law. Never. When you have the rule of law and not liberty, the result often is to solidify the power of the tyrant. That is why I am not a cheerleader of the British trying to create a democratic society. They wanted to create a subordinate democrat. That is a fascinating paradox.
Let us go back to where the first experiment of democracy took place. That is Greek. One of the three great leaders, was known as Solon. The other two were Cleisthenes and Pericles. Solon was credited with instituting the rule of law. Some scholars call him the ancestor, because it means that all people were equal before the law. It is a very important part of making a democrat. It works with an idea we shall interrogate later: that is, equality.
What Solon did, according to many who have studied the era, is that he did a great thing to preserve peace and stability in Greece. But for whom? Many said it was already a divided society in class. it preserved the system, but it ossified the classes.
So when the British started by trying to manufacture consent, they had in mind that fact that they had to make a British citizen out of us, and then we lose our authenticity as Nigerians. For goodness sake, we were not even Nigerians by 1900 when colonialism started. The amalgamation of 1914 came after they had started their Britishisation project. Before that, they had instituted what was called indirect rule. They had also taken charge of the language of rule. Professor Tunji Oloruntimehin opened our eyes in the History department here at Obafemi Awolowo University about the paternalism of that phrase. Was there such a thing as indirect rule? They were in charge of everything but made sure the locals who related with their fellow indigenes followed the script of the master.
So, the colonial scholars, including many professors, bought the idea and some still do, when they say that the British ruled through agency. They just sat back and let the local chiefs do the work. They only left us to our devices if it did not affect their hold on power. If it was internecine local squabbles, we entertained them. We saw this displayed in some of our seminal works, like Achebe’s Things fall Apart when Ikemefuna’s death did not stir the foundation of colonial rule until Okonkwo began to stir the pot. Same we saw in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman that started as a tale of royal and cultural riot of introspection.
In moving forward, one of the strategies was to weaken traditional structures, especially the kingship institutions. They created the house of chiefs, and what did they become? A mere advisory appendage.
They created the rule of law in their eyes, with native authority and resident and divisional officers, et al. This of course followed their military conquests.
What to follow, the good old idea democracy. They gave us a constitution known as the Clifford Constitution. I remember at school feeling insulted by my teachers in the way the constitutions were presented as routines of history, as though they were meant to be. I must confess that they also seemed fascinating to me as novelties.
We must give credit to our nationalists, who were the formal beginnings of our democrats. Yet while we must thank men like Herbert Macaulay and his folks, they did not have much to hold on to other than the books they had read. Who wrote those books? Their masters. We must credit them also with a sense of native intelligence.
It is significant Macaulay had to contend with a new set of upstarts like Samual Akinsanya, Kofo Abayomi, Hezekiah Davies, Dr. Churchill Vaughn. These men formed what was first the Lagos Youth Movement and later morphed into the Nigerian Youth Movement.
Whether we liked it or not, the British had created their democrats but they were to realise later they were demons of democrats. They wanted a pliant set of men who would and could not fight. One of the great forces was Nnamdi Azikiwe, and under him arose the Zikist Movement. Three qualities were merging in these men. They were politicians, nationalists and democrats. Each was not necessarily conterminous with the other others.
Macaulay and his followers laid the egg, this is without prejudice to those who proto-nationalists, including kings and clerics and journalists. Macaulay’s Nigerian National Democratic Party lost to the young men of NYM, but a sort of homegrown democracy was being born. A democracy of men trying to be adept at their oppressors’ language, fashion, accent and manners. They wanted in their own way to do violence to them were also embracing them.
We must always remember that it was democracy without freedom. The colonialists created the positions, laid down the rules, were the umpires. There was a sense of individual excitement but they were not free. Our democrats were born piece by piece. It is like a mother hen breaking down a piece of corn to its brood who must manage to ingest it in tiny little pieces. It was democracy without sovereignty.
We must realise that they did not want to hand over power. They just wanted our people, especially the new breed elite to war among themselves, while they continued to do what brought them to Africa: exploit our resources.
They did not love us. When they brought the Bible, they also brought the plough. Mary Slessor was a great woman. It is such good Samaritan that makes tyranny so sweet. It is the friendly child of the tyrannical parents that makes system of oppression of the visiting niece so flawless, almost innocent. As stated earlier, the British had the skill to act like the mother hen who has to break down the corn to fit the appetite and esophageal tolerance of her brood.
The two qualities of freedom and equality the emerging democrats did not enjoy. Equality, though, is one of the illusions of democracy, and it is one of its greatest attractions. The French Revolution extracted its romance from its so-called equalite, egalite, liberte and fraternite. Maybe the revolutionaries did not want anything to do with the law, hence the project collapsed under the guillotine with Robespierre brothers, Danton and others. After, their constitution monger called Abbie Sieyes enunciated the principle of order from above and confidence from below.
We must know that even in Greece that has been seen as the model of modern democracy, its great lights like Socrates, Aristotle and Plato, especially Plato, had contempt for equality. They did not like what Cleisthenes and Pericles instituted by way of popular assembly where people could come together in their thousands on the public square and decide what was right or wrong for Athens. The idea of equality has always, of all the ideas of democracy, been the most fraught. The great threat to those who hate equality is freedom.
In fact, the idea of the vote is not particularly loved by some of the leading lights of democracy. Perhaps that explained why John Stuart Mill in his classic On Liberty lamented societies where there are so many foolish and so few wise. The great Benjamen Disraeli as well as the German playwright and poet Freidrich Schiller thought votes should not be counted but weighed. If all men are not created equal, how could all their votes be equal.
These ideas were explored in great detail in Russel kirk’s classic The Conservative Mind. Aristotle, the apostle of the golden mean, espoused what he described depending on what translation you read as the sophisticated man. That mind could not be subjected to what Pericles and Cleisthenes were bringing to the people by way of a system of popular persuasion. Perhaps, he and the other philosophers including Meno who said might is right, were conscious of the fact that Greece only had barely 20 percent of people who could practise freedom and democracy. They had many slaves, foreigners and women who were beneath democracy. Hence in his classic, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt asserted that in spite of the appearance of direct democracy the mass were still not connecting with the elite.
Fredrich Nietzsche, the great and often demented German philosopher, once asserted that a society should from time to time throw up men who should be above the law and do whatever they wanted because such men had extraordinary endowments and ought to sway and turn for the benefit of all.
In his novel, Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoeyevsky challenged his readers with the idea through the lens of a thieving idealist Raskolnikov, who was inspired by the rave of the era: the great soldier and conqueror Napoleon Barnaparte. Mentioned in the list of men who probably deserved such honour was Solon and Jesus Christ. Nietzsche would never add Jesus to his list because he introduced love into the world, a concept anathema to the German thinker.
So, we have always had a sense of privilege in democracies. I wonder why the idea of equality continues to figure. Maybe it is meant to preserve the myth of the idea. The writer who put this in perspective more than any, in my view, is Alex de Tocqville, in his Democracy in America. The French writer who spent some time in the United States, asserted that it was not equality that was important but the “condition of equality.” By saying you have freedom, and everyone is equal before the law, you have made them to believe you are all equal. In fact, the opposite is the case.
Our colonialists knew all these and allowed our budding democrats to pretend to bloom. But they were actually forming into something of their own democrats. We can say of the British how Poet Lord Byron described the dictator Metternich attitudes in Austria: “He had no objection to true liberty except that it would set them free.”
History intruded on the Nigeria’s behalf. The Second World War. After enlisting us to fight their battle for us, they called it a World War, whereas we in Africa had no skin in their conflict. They use our men and resources as well in the fight. When the war ended, there was a pressure on Winston Churchill to cede the colonists under international trusteeship enroute to independence. “Never. Never. Never.” Yelled the prime minister who would be rejected in a few a few months in the polls. “I did not become the Queen’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.”
The British had to leave but not before setting up a series of constitutions that seemed to belong to us but always approved by them. As the politicians formed and the democrat in them, we began to see qualities that would determine how to make a democrat in Nigeria. One was seen in the conflict that arose over who should be the premier of the Western Region, and whether it should be an Nnamdi Azikiwe. It all seemed Zik was innocent when he lost out in his bid but proceeded to play the tribalist back home and ousted an outsider so he could be the premier. We had inaugurated what you might call the tribal democrat. We also had the unwilling free. When Anthony Enahoro wanted us to gain independence, a section of parliament said no. It was a sort of spoof of Jean Jacque Rouseau’s line: force them to be free. Many scholars have seen it as the source of authoritarianism. You cannot impose your freedom on me. We also had the politician with their own version of the city of God. The were the religious democrats.
In a new book, The Gun Hegemony, Ayo Opadokun digs up archives and eyewitness accounts about what happened in the aftermath of the January 15, 1966 coup. That brutal chapter had come to an end and the coup plot had failed. The coup leader believed by many to be Emmanuel Ifeajuna had fled to Ghana. He and fellow traveler Kaduna Nzeogwu would later die in the civil war. The prime minister Tafawa Balewa had been slaughtered. Since the coup had failed, the First republic was supposed to be intact. So, the parliament held and decided that Zannar Bukar Dipcharima should take over as acting prime minister. It was the honours of acting president Nwafor Orizu to swear in the man from the northeast. Orizu would not on the flimsy ground that he had no such powers. Azikiwe who was believed to have fled to the high seas even fearing to land, had formally handed over powers to Orizu. How on earth would Orizu not swear in the parliament that was not sacked and the Republic still intact? Richard Akinjide and Shehu Shagari, both members of parliament and cabinet wrote that they could not persuade Orizu who suddenly woke up and said he wanted to swear in the colourful K.O. Mbadiwe. It was in the midst of this that a man who wanted to be grateful to the coupists, General Aguiyi-Ironsi, who spared his life decided read the riot act to the elected officers. His way or the gentleman surrender.
That was one episode that changed the history of Nigeria and careened the country to the civil war. The other incident was the relationship between Samuel Akintola and northern establishment. In Opadokun’s book The Aristocratic Rebel, a biography of Nigeria’s top spy and former inspector general of police, M.D. Yusufu. According to Yusufu’s own account, he had received Akintola a day before the 1966 January coup in Kaduna in audience with Sir Ahmadu Bello. The Sardauna had told Akintola that they wanted to sever all ties of Akintola’s party and the northern establishment with him and his NNDP. They said they were responsible for the strife with him and his Yoruba kinsmen. They did not want that to continue. They said he should go back home and make peace with them.
That was January 14, 1966. My theory is that there was no way Akintola could have gone on his knees to Awo and is AG folks. When the soldiers came on his return home, he had the chance to surrender. Akintola fought to the death. Did suicide or death save his honour? Even if they were going to kill him, was it a better way out than the dishonour of political solitude and opprobrium?
Before concluding, the distinction must be made between a republic and a democracy. Countries often call themselves democracies. A republic installs an infrastructure of mediation between the people and state. Democracies pretend there is none. Democracy is idealist. So, there is no real democracy, including the United States. All who operate in republics call themselves democrats. So, if democracies are aspirational, why should the democrat be perfect?
The democrat was not fully formed as the First Republic was aborted. The same were the stories when Shagari and the Second Republic were sacked and Babangida’s rigmarole and Abacha’s leprous extravaganzas.
In our own case, it is because the democrat has always half-born. It was half-born before and at independence. It was twice again in our history. To have a democrat in full they must be allowed to grow with all their witchcraft and beauties.
Too many ingredients make a democrat. The most important one is often not canvassed by scholars. It is called time.
(Being the full text of a lecture delivered at the Faculty of Arts 2nd Distinguished Alumni of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, on Thursday, January 29, 2026)
