WHY Nigeria’s democracy is an ‘Expensive shit’ – By Obi Nwakanma

Nigeria’s Afro-Jazz legend, Fela Kuti wrote a song in 1975, which he titled, “Expensive Shit.” It was a lyrical satire, an account of one of his numerous run-ins with the powers of the Nigerian state, which forced him once, as a means of collecting evidence on him to, not expectorate, but dislodge fecal matter. It was from suspicion that he had destroyed evidence by chewing and swallowing down marijuana. “Expensive Shit” thus became an eloquent, amused, riff on Nigeria’s inefficient, and poorly run state, and the excesses that attenuate it. Were the irrepressible Anikulapo to be alive and about today, he might surely have thought not much different about Nigeria’s current situation, particularly the running of its democracy.
Democracy by its very nature requires patience; some might even argue that it is messy and expensive. Nigeria’s democracy is certainly messy and expensive. The latest I’ve had is a poignant, perhaps even churlish description of Nigeria’s democracy as “shitty.” I’d like today to proffer a “shit theory” of Nigeria’s democracy by looking at it from the prism of Fela’s insouciant lyric, “Expensive Shit,” by which I mean, that Nigerians are now forced to endure a hazing in the name of public governance. Nigeria, by all accounts runs the most expensive public administration in the world. In a territory not larger by much of the State of California, we have thirty-six states and one Federal or Union Territory – the Federal capital, Abuja. Each of these states has an elaborate unicameral legislature, a bureaucracy, and a judicial apparatus of varying proficiency.

The federal or central government itself has a central bicameral legislature, and an extensive bureaucracy. All this raises the bill of administering Nigeria to a most ridiculous overhead. Supporters of the current system often point to Nigeria’s large population; its multiethnic character, and the need to bring what they call government “closer to the people.” The people of the East are even now agitating for a further creation of a new state out of what is often now referred to as the “South-East zone” of Nigeria. This is to achieve zonal parity and greater access to “federal largesse” particularly because, the federation of Nigeria seems to be organized as a top-down system.
The central government often acts like some feudal lord who doles out gifts to these minion states as standard grants or allocation on which most of these states, many otherwise unviable, must survive. I think this point has often been made, particularly by critics of the current structure, that Nigeria’s current federal system is deadweight and in the long term, unviable. The “Orbit” supports, and wishes to re-emphasize this position. A central problem in the administration of Nigeria is that government has actually not reached the people in any meaningful way. If anything, the structure of Nigeria has fully atomized and fuelled unnecessary division among Nigerians.
People who once felt a shared affinity now see themselves as representing different interests in different states.
The fight over national revenue has been exacerbated. But above all, the cost of administering the nation has sucked up usable resources that could have been more genuinely deployed to solving the basic problems of the people into maintaining unviable and unproductive state administrations.
The inefficiency of the Nigerian state system has created far too many Naijaskeptics, and dangerous forms of alienation among its citizenry which portends its greatest national security danger.
The alienation of Nigerians is the result of that deep feeling that Nigeria is a graveyard of dreams; that Nigeria does nothing for its citizens; that the only beneficiaries of what we now call Nigeria are those who are in government either as politicians or political appointees into government boards and Agencies, or the very few with access to the reigning administration. Nigerians think that the nation no longer belongs to them, and that they do not matter in the larger scheme of things; that Nigeria is an “artificial creation” that benefits its creators and their inheritors. This powerful feeling of distrust for a nation that does nothing for its real stakeholders – the generality of its citizens – but runs the most expensive state system that does particularly nothing is a toxic ingredient in the rising broth of national discontent. This is the greatest national security threat to Nigeria.
Many Nigerians today, would, if given the choice, pick up arms in support of a foreign occupation of Nigeria, rather than fight to preserve this country as it is currently advertised to them. This fact calls for a review of Nigeria’s national agenda, and the structure upon which the federation is based.
The veteran journalist and public intellectual, Areoye Oyebola, former Editor of the now defunct Daily Times, at one point Nigeria’s most important nationally-circulating daily newspaper, in a very articulate essay in the Guardian this past week, titled, “Nigeria Centenary: A Nation in Pretence” captures some of the contradictions that make Nigeria’s democracy, well, “expensive shit.” Among these include, a lack empathy for the public; the mindless, self-serving extravagance of governance and state administration; the ridiculous cost of running National, State, and Local government legislatures, and the executive payloads that includes, arbitrarily fixed and unaccounted Security votes.
With these security votes, you’d also wonder why Nigeria has been unable to deal with problems of domestic insecurity – assassinations, kidnappings, robbery, insurgencies, and the like. The mindboggling bill for servicing only a few people in public office could generally have been utilized to rebuild failing infrastructure and thus make life more livable for most Nigerians.
The result, Mr. Oyebola notes is, that “it has completely retarded our economic development, and kept us in perpetual underdevelopment.” For one thing, Nigeria does not need thirty-six federating states. It needs a maximum of six to eight regional administrations. Only last week, India, with over three thousand ethnic groups and over One billion people, and a territory more than four times the breadth of Nigeria, only just created its 29th state; the new state of Telegana from the state of Andra Pradesh.
From data collected from Asia Briefings, this new state with a population of 35.2 Million, the equivalent of Canada, and a GDP per capita income of $7,000 Per annum, the equivalent of Morocco and the Chinese Province of Anhui, is equivalent in size and proportion to the entire West of Nigeria, by our current estimation. Nigeria must wake up, and the urgency is now.