Democracy
By EricJames Ochigbo
Abuja, June 13, 2024 (NAN) Mr Adebowale Olorunmola, the Country Director, Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), says Nigeria’s democracy must strive to address corruption and insecurity in the country.
Olorunmola made this submission in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Thursday in Abuja in commemoration of 25 years of unbroken democracy in Nigeria.
He said that though Nigeria’s democracy was “work in progress”, it must also address quality of governance, rule of law, accountability and competence of public officers.
WFD is the UK public body dedicated to strengthening democracy around the world and has actively supported democracy across continent for more than 30 years.
The WFD country director said that though Nigeria’s democracy had made progress and had witnessed transition of governments over time, it was still not where it should be after 25 years.
He said that the high expectations of Nigerians in the area of good governance, leadership, public service had not been met.
According to him, Nigeria is not yet there because the rule of law is still very weak; there is a lot of corruption, impunity and competent people are not getting into the political space.
He decried the cost of accessing political platform to get to power saying that it was beyond the reach of many competent and well intentioned people.
Olorunmola regretted that Nigerians still saw all manner of conflicting pronouncement from courts on same issues.
He said that the judiciary was supposed to be the last hope of the common man but that at the moment looked to be on trial.
The country director said that the judiciary must rise up to overcome the current situation where it was regarded as an instrument in the hands of the powerful, if good governance must be entrenched.
He explained that the Legislature had a responsibility and a duty to contribute to good governance through oversight function, instead of being complacent.
Olorunmola also said that the 10th National Assembly must rise up to the occasion of effective oversight for Nigeria to begin to witness good governance.
He said that the executive must set targets for itself and work to reach those targets in terms of good governance, services delivery based on budgetary allocation for dividend of democracy to take root.
Olorunmola noted that the situation where citizens who were professionals in various fields were selling their property to relocate en masse to other countries for greener pastures did not speak well of Nigeria’s democracy.
”Democracy is about the people; however, a situation where about 50 per cent of the population who are women and over 30 million Persons With Disability (PWD) are not represented in government leaves much to be desired.’’
According to him, every country uses the strength of their young people but Nigeria is yet to appreciate the strength of its youth and deliberately use them.
”When we are able to deal with these, then we can be talking of making progress democratically, and importantly when citizens are safe in any part of the country.
”At the moment, Nigeria’s democracy is work in progress just as in every other country.
”But leadership needs to roll up their sleeves and realise that it is not business as usual; there is work to be done and followership also need to be watchful.
”Citizens must be able to call leadership to order and place a demand on leaders to be more productive than.”
Olorunmola, however, disagreed with calls to return to parliamentary system of government and calls to run a one term elective office of five years.
He said that the problem of the country was not the system of governance but getting the right people into office to address growth and developmental challenges.
The country director said that until Nigeria addressed the quality of governance, rule of law, security, corruption, accountability and getting competent people into governance, a change in system of governance would not do much. (NAN) (www.nannews.ng)
EOO/DCO/CJ/
==========
Edited by Deborah Coker and Chijioke Okoronkwo
Leave a Reply