THE ESSENCE OF DEMOCRACY DAY
Much more needs to be done to make democracy meaningful
As Nigeria marks another Democracy Day, it is important to note that the last 27 years have been the longest stretch of civilian government in our history. Indeed, longer than all our earlier republics combined. Under the current dispensation, Nigeria has also transferred power from one political party to another at the ballot box, a thing that once seemed impossible. Today, Nigerians argue loudly and in public. Our citizens take to the streets, as the Nigeria Union of Teachers (NUT) and civil society groups have done in Oyo, Kano, Lagos, Plateau, and beyond these past weeks. That right to protest, petition, and vote their choice is the machinery of a free society. And Nigerians exercise it so routinely that they now take it for granted.
Even on the economy, where the pain has been real, there are signs that the worst may be passing. Inflation that roared above 33 per cent in 2024 has been brought down to around 15 per cent; the Naira, which not long ago seemed in free fall, has steadied below N1,400 to the dollar; our foreign reserves have soared. These are not abstractions. They are the difference between the currency a family can plan its life around and one it cannot. But the same figures that comfort the policymaker offer cold consolation to the trader in Bodija market or the civil servant in Kaduna, for whom the price of a bag of rice and a litre of fuel remains punishing, and for whom ‘easing inflation’ still means prices that rise, only a little more slowly. A macroeconomy can stabilise while a household sinks, and democracy is judged, in the end, not in the briefing rooms of Abuja but at the kitchen table.
Then there is the matter that no Democracy Day broadcast can talk its way around: the safety of the citizen. What is the essence of holding elections every four years if a child cannot sit in a classroom in Oriire without being marched into the bush at gunpoint? When the gunmen who took those Oyo pupils make demands, they are a standing rebuke to what government represents. So, has democracy served the people? The honest answer is that it has served Nigerians unevenly, and that it has too often been democracy in form, not in substance. We have mastered the ritual of the ballot but not the discipline of accountability.
This is not an argument against democracy. The cure for the failures of democracy has never been less democracy; it is more of it, and better. Every alternative some people might be tempted to romanticise in frustration, Nigeria has already tried. And they are precisely what June 12 was a revolt against. The whole meaning of the sacred day is that the people’s verdict, freely given, is the only legitimate foundation for power, and that no amount of order purchased at the price of freedom is ever worth the buying.
That precisely is why Nigerians mark June 12 today, even with many children still in captivity and the living conditions still tough. The work that remains -securing our communities, lifting our people out of want, building institutions that serve – is the work of deepening a democracy, not abandoning one. The symbol of that democratic struggle that gave Nigeria June 12, Moshood Abiola, did not die so that we could hold galas. He and several others died so that the Nigerian people might one day be served by a government they truly choose. We are not there yet. But the road there runs through the ballot box. The people returned their verdict in 1993. Our task, three decades on, is to prove ourselves worthy of it.
We wish al Nigerians Happy Democracy Day.