Without the People

In 1983 when the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo announced on the heels of the electoral fraud that returned the National Party of Nigeria, NPN and Mr. Shehu Shagari to power, that his party, the Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN and himself were not going to the so-called election tribunals to context what they felt was the theft of the electoral victory that could have been theirs, he probably was thinking and talking about just the futility of a court fight. Their experience in 1979 when they tried and failed to prove in the same tribunal that victory was rigged from their hands and handed to the NPN and Shagari had sufficiently proved that to them.

In perhaps his last major interview to a media outlet, he told the editors of The Guardian that he had retired to his country residence in Ikenne to await the day when the people will come for him to lead them: “When the people want me”, he said, “they will come for me”. Whether or not he meant it, that assertion implies that he believed that there is such an entity, a polity capable of inspiring the kind of consciousness in “the people” and make them “come for” a leader like him, capable of leading them sufficiently well. There was of course a military coup on New Year’s Eve the same year, but no people came for him. He died the next year.

The only reason the people never came for Chief Awolowo in the way he expressed his belief that they will when they needed him is that they don’t exist in that regard. A common consensus on Nigeria is grossly lacking. Reasons abound for that. There will be another day to recount some if not all of those many reasons. But it’s the absence of that common consensus that one like Olusegun Obasanjo takes advantage of knowing that he will get away with whatever he does to retain control of proceeds from the hydrocarbons that are extracted from the Niger Delta. I have heard that Nigerians are resilient. They may be so, but they do not yet constitute the people.

If there were the people in the true sense of the word, tell me what could have stopped them from pouring out in huge numbers to protest and stop the fraud that took place in the name of elections last month in Nigeria. The absence of the people is not only real in Nigeria. It’s evident in most of Africa. Wherever the people exist, it’s often difficult if not impossible for anyone to steal elections and get away with the theft. The sort of autocracy that pervades Africa derives from the absence of the people.