Nigeria – A Federation Mediating its Democracy

Full Transcript:

Hello and welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast, where it is my job to discuss democratic institutions.

Today I am discussing developments and issues around Nigeria’s democracy together with my guest Myani Bukar. Since its transition to a civilian democratic regime in the year 1999, Nigeria has had a multifarious journey of democratic participation and accountability. While power has been transferred peacefully between presidents, many people still feel that democracy hasn’t delivered as expected. How the federal constitution was drafted has had a great influence on how satisfactorily the various tiers of government could execute their functions. While the local governments were given limited authority, the presidency and state governors are powerful and the focus of most attention in Nigerian politics. 

Myani Bukar shares his personal experiences and assessments of political developments in Nigeria, and we discuss how local government politics could be centered around issues, rather than ethnicity or religion and whether a more proportional electoral system could be a solution to improve representation in the National Assembly. 

Myani Bukar is a Lawyer, Development Economist and Policy Researcher with extensive experience in legal research, institutional capacity building and policy analysis. He is a National Program Director of the UK funded PERL-LEAP programme, to promote public sector accountability and previously served as a Special Assistant on Legal Matters to the Office of the Vice President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He is also an Associate Researcher of the Overseas Development Institute, and a Member of the Advisory Board at Policy Vault. You can find Mynai Bukar on Linkedin and Twitter, and I’ll link to both in the show notes. 

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the seventh episode in my new podcast The Rules of the Game, where I discuss, analyze and compare democratic institutions from around the World. 

I am a political economist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland. And I previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Center for Global Development. You can find me on Twitter at skyburz and you can find show notes with links to all material discussed on my website: rulesofthegame.blog

Please subscribe to this podcast on your preferred podcast platform and you’ll always get the latest episode. You can support my work by rating the podcast or leaving a review. If you like an episode, please also share it with friends and on social media.

I am aware that this episode is quite a bit longer than usually, the reason being that the discussion includes many different aspects of the Nigerian institutions and Myani Bukar’s opinions. Having said that, please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Myani Bukar.  

Interview:

Stephan Kyburz: Myani Bukar, welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast. I’m very happy to have you. So as usually I want to do like a bit of a personal introduction of your background. So what is your first memory of democracy or of politics in general? 

Myani Bukar: My first memory of politics in general, I think it starts with politics then democracy much later. It is early, I think it’s probably my first memory of anything, any kind of consciousness as a child because my father was a state legislator. So I have very early memories of words that I later realized were either governance specific or politics specifics. I remember one of my older brothers and his good friend, who were much older, about seven years or so older than I was and still am, would take on cloths or towels and tie around their necks like capes and run around calling themselves Superman and Spiderman. Now, it’s funny because, you know, Spiderman doesn’t carry a cape. I mention that is because they would play in the House of Assembly arena itself, when legislators weren’t sitting. So one of my earliest memories was of the security guys, always catching them, always dragging them by the ears and bringing them back home and they’ve been reprimanded by the parents and then, you know, they’re doing it all over again, and it was just always called the House. It was like, oh, they were caught playing in the House, they were said, you went to the house. And then as I got older, I got House of Assembly. I’m talking from when I was age zeor, I can’t remember that of course too. But you know, when I was four, when we had a first coup. But I think in terms of very clear understanding, or not very clear, being aware that there’s more than one way of societies arrangement, in terms of governance was when we had as a country a military coup on 31st December of 1983, when the president democratically elected president, then as a military officer, was part of a junta that facilitated a coup. And overthrew the then President Shehu Shagari. There was a drastic change in my material reality. We moved out of a sad place. My dad was in detention for a while because he was a politician. There was martial music on TV, and we as kids had so many questions to ask us, to what was happening. And also just not forget to mention that there wasn’t just a relocation in where we lived, there was a serious relocation of social standing and material comforts. So for each child, this is easier for you to remember like, we’re not having all this cool stuff anymore. Well, because you know, the soldiers are taking over, what does that mean? So, from a more existential of material sense for me without knowing what it meant intellectually, it was just the change that affected my life as a person and us as part of a larger family and the largest group of people with friends and neighbors were in the same situation. And so fast track a few years after that, you get into school and it begins to make sense. My dad remained politically active, not so much in terms of being an agitator, or anything, on what was going on, had an opinion over family dining table, over conversations. Most of his metaphors and references to teach us at the earliest memories, kids were political. He once described the governance of the family as a parliamentary system rather than a presidential system, because he is like, I’m the queen who is the head of state, but ceremonial and and his wife, also known as my mom, was like the prime minister because she’s the head of government and she runs everything. And any of the kids being disrespectful to her was pretty much undermining their self interest. And so we had this kind of very funny ways. You heard that in everyday conversations for politics. For democracy, I think it became clearer to me much later, when in sometime between in the late 90s, I can’t remember correctly, it must have been sometime between 1989 to 1990 when Ibrahim Babangida was the dictator running affairs at that time. And there was a lot of talk about the rewriting of the constitution and a committee, did some work and the constitution was emerged with, I don’t think was ever quite implemented, I think was the 1990 constitution, or they’re about. And then there was a lot of movement to a transition back to a democratically elected governments. So then I began to understand how that was expected to be expressed in elections and parties. Well, we’ve lifted the ban of political parties. And so for me it’s like, what does that mean? And again, I had the fortune of sometimes being told not to ask me that. What does this mean? Sometimes just being around the space when he and others would have these conversations. Reinforced the questions you’re asking in school, asked with older siblings and family generally. And also just the blessing of a dad who was active in politics or being part of a large family and being at the very tail end of that family, which meant that all the siblings and relatives always living. Who would have this grown-up “conversations”. Which one you look back now? You wonder if it was very healthy of them to have let their kids hang around to listen to or not. But at that point, we had those parties began to emerge. I remember very vividly my dad coming back home with like, cases of boxes and boxes of posters, of a new party. They hear friends had been having meetings and we’re planning to fly and it was in the house for a while and then one day he comes back from work and he’s so mad and he brings them all out and just begins to destroy them to burn them up. And it’s really one might be wondering why. And he says, well there goes this so-called democratic transition. The president Babangida, insisted on calling himself the military president, just announced that the government was going to sponsor two parties and all politics must be run under these two parties and they are going to be state funded. And he’s like that’s no politics, there’s no democracy, the government can’t impose parties on people. And so we had the National Republican Convention, the NRC and the Social Democratic Party, the SDP. And so that particularly cemented all sort of, I remember vividly because it was the first time I learned that there is a distinction between having parties and how the parties emerge. That’s simply saying we have political parties, it’s not itself necessarily moving in the direction of democracy and when I look back as an older person in retrospect, so I do think that when you look back you think to yourself, I almost began to learn the nuances of those places in degree areas before even learning very clearly the concrete conceptual spaces and the definitions on what that meant, which was helpful in just grasping generally how the black and white cotton piece approaching spaces like that is mostly unhelpful. It’s a good starting point if not anything because it helps one know what one is not about. But it’s put me in a position to mentally and intellectually be comfortable with the grey spaces, the nuanced areas and the kind of conversations you need to have in those spaces. Thus I think the plus, the potential minus, I think is that it can be a bit frustrating for a lot of colleagues and people when you are involved in any kind of dialectics and discourse because folks like black and white folks, easy thinking, they like simple and they’re the same thing. These definitional boxes, we would like to have boxes and put everything and we want you to be neat. So sometimes I can be a bit of a frustrating conversationalist with others because of this nuanced approach which I’m depending on my mood of the day is, I’m sorry for that sometimes. When I’m gracious person, which is rare, mostly I get this perverse pleasure of being elusive, which it’s not fair on others and might make you feel good, but doesn’t add much to the progress in the conversation. So that’s sort of my earliest memories. So I would say in terms of politics much earlier because of where I live in house races. But in terms of democracy much later. Somewhere around the very tail end of the 80s, leading all the way to 1993 when we had, by the time we had the elections in 1993 in June 12th, I was absolutely aware of what was going on. I was aware of why people like my dad considered the entire, that entire process is Shaman of fraud because the parties were imposed. I was aware that within that sort of fish bowl that was artificially constructed democratic space. I was aware that Nigerians were very excited. I was too young to vote, but I was aware that Nigerians were very excited. I was aware that people generally felt what was a free and fair election. I followed the campaign on TV and on radio. We played around and danced to the campaign jingle songs that was played. I and my friends on the playground fashioned ourselves around, oh I have more sympathy for this party or that person. 

Stephan Kyburz: Cool. Thanks a lot for these memories, which are very impressive. And it’s also cool to see or interesting to see how, you know, in your family already, politics seem to have been a very, very central topic. And then also the importance of parties which are themselves like organizations of political power, and how they can be, you know, used either in a very democratic sense or in a more authoritarian sense as well, I guess. But they are central obviously to our politics. So let’s move on to the kind of main part of the discussion and where I think the parties also will play a central role. But first, I want to kind of know from you in Nigeria, you know, you have kind of deep insights into Nigerian politics and as you said already as a kid, you’ve seen, you know, how politics can be working or or also used, or are used for, you know, preserving power, political power. So which institutions do you think are working well in Nigeria and maybe others, which you think need lots of improvement. 

Myani Bukar: It’s one of those questions that I think it’s because of Nigeria’s context, which politically and also in terms of governance can probably not be discussed soundly outside of historical context, can be approached in quite a number of ways. I am, just a bit of caveat for me, most of my research and just observations so far the whole of the space of Nigeria’s political governance and has been that I think what I see as the fundamental challenges, rather the challenges I find that we deal with on a day to day basis, are themselves either offshoots or symptoms of deeper foundational and structural maladies that have either not been thought through to be seen to be a causal cause, or just been approached by a few folks and considered near impossible and daunting. So we sort of find ways to content with marginal successes that can help Nigerians in their everyday life now, and without necessarily addressing the nature of the state. So, in looking at that, my tendency has always been to look at not just the institutions, but sort of the political economy from a historical point of view about how those institutions have emerged and maybe I’ll talk about them a little later. But in terms of direct answer to your question, I think that from what I see, I’ll start with institutions I think have not done so well. The local governments, now, I don’t know if I’ll call those institutions per se, but we run a federal system that breaks down governance into three concentrates, the federal, state and local government. There’s been quite a contention in interpreting if the Constitution releases a Federalism that has three federated units like I mentioned, or two. Most state governors in the past I don’t know about now have contended that the Constitution really mentions in terms of power negotiation, a federation between the federal and the states and that the local governments are sort of subsidiaries, if you may, of the state and as such are not quite quasi independent federated units in and of themselves. Like I said, that has been a contentious matter with varied interests to find convenient definition that suits. A desire from where I see it to have power concentration. Right? So because of that, since 1999 till this day, I think that the parts of the institutions within governance who haven’t worked as good, if at all, for factors that are more extraneous to them, have been the local government. Now, I start with the local government because I think that governance, good governance as determined has emerged sadly when, when you see good governance and then you go ahead and in a prescriptive manner have features of good governance, I think you end up making what ought to be social and nuanced and socio economic technical, which comes with a whole world of problems. So when I say good governance, I’m not referring to the previous definition as defined by international financial institutions. So good governance is the presence of this, if you tick off these boxes, you have good governance, which has been sort of the the global political economic, water cooler conversations for good governance as governance that serves the people in the material way that makes them content with a social contract that is forever being negotiated and refined to reflect the changes in times and the needs of the citizens and the state as a construct that serves the citizens, for which the citizens let go or submit certain liberties in order to have those services. That’s what I refer to. And taken from that, I like to think very traditional definition: for me governance cannot be, is I fail to see or I struggle to see how you can have governance that serves people in that manner when the lowest point of the point where governance meets people the most, which is the local government is weakened, if not absolutely, disempowered. So, there’s so far in the Nigerian experiment from 1999 until now, the fact that local governments have been weak, I don’t know if I would say weak and then further weakened. So I’m now distinguishing here from a structural point of view of what the constitution or what the laws lay out. We’ve started out this journey with a serious disadvantage as to how local governments have been positioned just by the letter of the law. I think further compounded is that I think state governments as embodied by state governors and I’m not referring to individuals, but the institutions, have also found that the less negotiation they have to do, to undertake, the model get their will. And I don’t think that that’s necessarily a shock. That’s just human nature. We want to get away with as much as we want to get away with. We want to consider as little as we can afford to concede. So, because of the structural weakening from the very beginning, it’s been quite convenient for state government to further weaken local governments. So you’ve got, and by that in clear terms, I mean things like we’ve got an arrangement of a consolidated account where the monthly remittances from the sale of oil, another whole month had to be discussed in a different manner and way. Or just the fact that we run the Nigerian State by selling oil and splitting the bucks. There’s a consolidated account where the federal government through the NNPC, acting on behalf of Nigeria as its trading face with the rest of the world When it sells our oil would remit to a consolidated account that is managed, signed off and superintendent by the states on behalf of state and local governments. When you don’t have a say in how the bucks comes to you, you’re already weakened. The federal government has a national Independence National Electoral Commission, which is a federal body responsible, fully responsible for facilitating independently elections at the federal and state levels. The states are all expected to have a state Independent Electoral Commission that would be solely and independently responsible for local government elections. Most states have barely constituted that where they have, they are far more existent in form than in function. They are hollowed out shell and there are more states that have not had local governments elections periodically. And where they do, the trend has been the ruling party that the state governor is from wins  a 100%, doesn’t mean that elections and we’re not free unfair, just seems potentially slightly dodgy. At the very least, it leaves room for certain fundamental questions to be asked. So local governments have been disempowered because they don’t get to have a say on their money. They also don’t get to have elections periodically run. And so that’s what I think has barely functioned. What I think has functioned well is strangely, I think, for most people who know me, really the federal government and I’m not necessarily doing sort of treaties on those three tiers of government as expressed by an executive. But I think because we have a federalism with such a concentration of power and responsibilities of the federal government, the federal government has had the most attention. It’s been the most x-rayed, it’s also been the most that has been held to account and as such, it’s easier for one to look at ways that the federal government has attempted to and in varied degrees succeeded or failed to execute its functions. Over time we have had some serious reform that one can look back to with with a sense that it’s not only been very good for Nigerians and for Nigerian state or sustained in very specific terms. We have had reforms in our task regime. A few years ago we had a bunch of “young technocrats”, a term I have no respectful, working as heads of different government, federal government agencies, reformist minded and, you know, whatever the media calls, superstar public servants these days, and we saw very concerted effort to just improve the manner the taxes collected and the revenue generates for the government and the hike in that, which has been impressive. I say it’s impressive not because, I’m necessarily only applauding that we have strengthened ways that government collects money from citizens, but because within the political economy of understanding social contracts, tax is a legitimate tool for accountability in the relationship between state and citizens. I do not know if we have any sound research that has been undertaken yet to inquire into how much, if there’s any kind of correlation in terms of the trajectory between of how over time we’ve seen tax reform and improvement in terms of just the amount of Naira the federal government collects on the one hand, and if that has lent to more strengthened accountability, on the other hand. I don’t know, it has been done thoroughly, it is from an anecdotal point of view, one would presume that there is a correlation. It may not necessarily be a positive relationship, I think a correlation can be found. And that’s just one instance in that sense. But just a last thought on that is I think also just generally in terms of the institutions that have worked decently, pretty well is we have seen where the judiciary has over time, I think especially sometime between 2003 and 2010, been very instrumental as a tool for really examining the outcome of elections and in a decent amount of cases, actually overturning it in a manner that the voting public felt reflected their will a lot more. So in that sense, coming out of decades of military dictatorship where there is no legislature and there’s a judiciary only in name, the judiciary has sort of also executed itself, not without contention, but well, as a “independent arm of government”. So, yeah, those are, you know, kind of the ways that are those that I think has seemed to have as a whole worked well. Finally on that, and I apologize for talking a bit too long, I think there is, and I say this because I don’t know where to capture it in terms we use and when you ask a question around like the institution, I think the very fact that we came out of, so Nigeria in my lifetime, at least, it’s an all time high in just the repression in the absence of liberties, sometime between 1996 and 1998, when the late dictator Sani Abacha run things. And I was sort of roling into my late teens at this point and getting ready to be old enough to vote for the first time, I turned 18 in 1997. And so by 1919, I was just kind of waiting. When are we going to have this elections, expressed my franchise and all that. It’s quite impressive when one looks at just the space of how repressive Nigeria felt then, and the ways that Nigerians keep right now expressing themselves, hold government to account, to demand for improved governance, to demand that government does better, to actually keep pushing the lines expecting that we have a social contract that works. Just there’s such progress with me moving from, to use the term by our great, most respected, me and my friends we call him a national uncle, Wole Soyinka, the nobel laureate, when you see the kind of climate of fear that we all lived under in the late 90s and where we are now, so like I said, I don’t know how to capture that by putting it in a neat box of an institution, but I think the whole space of democracy, through politics, all being tools for getting, evolving a social contract that absolutely works in favor of citizens and the state, and its fair and it’s open and it’s dialectic from a point of view of an ongoing conversation to keep negotiating and renegotiating, examining and re-examining what we define things for time. And I look at it and I think that it’s only been a little over 20 years, but it may get into the 22nd year. And while there’s just amazing amount of challenges facing us in Nigeria now, I think that it’s easy to forget where we were before in that space. So I find myself sometimes in these situations where in speaking with folks from within civil society who are very active in being, and vocal in holding government to account, to remind them not in order to stifle their voices, I like to think I’m part of those voices, but to remind all of us just the very fact that we can vary passionately, and sometimes incoherently, but still legitimately, express our voices and ask for government to be better and say this is not the Nigeria we want. We want to restructure. The fact that we can stand up and say we want something. It’s in itself, I think such progress that may not necessarily be readily available to be captured in hard numbers or a rational argument, that would only want to see what the numbers look like. But I think it’s worth mentioning in general, it shows that we’re on the right track. It shows that the conversation is not really about if we should be a democratic society. The question is, how do we make this democracy work for everybody in Nigeria? 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly. And I think that is very interesting that you mentioned the local government on the one side, which is usually seen as, you know, the government closest to the people or where actually people get in touch with government and obviously the local governments in Nigeria have been, you know, I think weakened from the beginning, you know, through how the constitution was written, they were not given full independence or full, like, role within the constitution, right? So the responsibilities were always kind of shared with the state governments and that’s a problem. And I will actually do another episode for sure on local governance in Nigeria. So, I think, interestingly, as you said, it’s it’s always important to look at institutional development, you know, through history and how it has evolved. And in the Nigerian case, obviously before 1999, political power was very much concentrated right in the hands of a few and then with the transition to civilian government and to a more democratic regime, power was divided and also decentralized to some degree, right? The question is, how much was power really divided and decentralized and, as we know, the Nigerian Constitution was influenced a lot, I think, by the American constitution as well. So we have, you know, the Senate and the House of Representatives, we have a presidency and we also have a federal system. And the question is within that framework, how much is power shared, right, among different levels of government? But also what are the implications of the electoral law onto the party landscape? And we clearly see that the first past the post system, right, in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, actually, that the electoral law is kind of favouring larger parties. This system tries to produce a party landscape where larger parties have kind of a majority. And that’s also how it kind of turns out, right? So we have, at the moment we have two very strong parties in government. And, I would like to know from you, you know, like also may be looking at the American case where we have the Democrats and the Republicans and they concentrate actually a lot of power, right? So this is similar in Nigeria where two parties have a lot of power. And I was wondering how you think about these two parties and how much kind of, you know, a development that you think, oh yeah, we need a strong government with large parties or, you know, the alternative would be a more proportional system with smaller parties where the accountability mechanisms are somewhat different because as soon as you have no party in power that has a clear majority, right, you will have more of a criticizing of the parties of each other and and also more of accountability. But I’m not sure what’s your experience with these two large parties and how it affects politics. 

Myani Bukar: One, I think it boils down to what aspirations Nigeria as a country has and where we’re taking off from and how we self define. And I’ll explain quickly. when you look at the U.S., like you mentioned you see in principle and what it projects a society. And I’ll say very clearly what in principle and what it projects meaning there’s still some disparity between what happens on ground. I am presently in D.C. V. visiting a friend and all I’ve been doing most of the time, while running away from the cold outside, is following the news with the Derek Chauvin case. Now I call it the Derek Chauvin case because every time I’ve mentioned that deliberately twice this past week, a lot of times I mentioned that to friends who are not in the US and they said, what is that? As you know, I mean the Floyd case and as soon as I say Floyd, they’re like, oh yes, I’m like, oh I see George Floyd isn’t on trial or wasn’t on trial. Derek Chauvin was on trial. Why is it the George Floyd case? Why is the case named after the victim who was killed in front of the whole world? Because while America is at the heart of the discourse that’s been going on forever. I think for America is on principle, it says we are a liberal state predicated on ideals that people as individuals shoes. In reality, we find that people are not treated as individuals all the time. Some are treated as types of a subset of society. And such they are not given the chance to freely express themselves. So basically the individuality is taken away from them, which means there is a massive fixation and the way they are treated does not give room for any kind of space of nuance. So they are concluded on as a group, in America’s case as colored people, people of color. And they are treated differently as a result of that. And then there’s also a gender politics somewhere in there as well. So I mentioned that distinction because I think that there’s a, there is a space to ask a few interesting questions around what America projects as ideal, and if that’s really the case. So if I’m a person of color in America, the question I will be asking would be, are we really truly liberal and am I really, truly free to make a willful, a clear choice as to the party that best serves my interests considering the institutional arrangements, they don’t treat me as a person, but as a black person or as a person of color. And so when Americans of color, and this is a very subjective personal opinion, when Americans of color lean to the Democratic Party, I think it’s not necessarily because they think the Republican party is evil in and of itself and racist in it of itself. I think it’s more likely because they see within the Democratic Party far more spaces that they are treated with dignity in a manner that gives them a better opportunity or better fighting chance of being individuals, not just people of color. And it starts with the fact that because we have been negatively treated as a group, you have to address us as a group in unboxing this ill treatment before we can say let’s throw away these thoughts. And I picked that to Nigeria because I think we have a bit of a similar challenge in terms of those definitions. If indeed as a country, what we aim for is to be a truly liberal country, a democratic country where people as individuals freely choose how do they want to associate and what parties they want to build? That’s what we’re aiming for and that’s what we’re doing in reality then, frankly, I do not think that I can at the same time have any critique of the fact that two parties have emerged as the desired choices for people. Like if indeed, I can work my way back to the fact that we’ve got two major parties because Nigerians as individuals expressed this choice, that there was, I mean, when we got close to elections in 2019, I think we had close to even out over 100 political parties. About two months ago, I read in the paper study, INEC, Excuse me, INEC had just released that it only recognizes, I think, about 48 political parties in Nigeria because a bunch of those that were registered between 2018 and 2019 did not meet the qualifications to remain. One of which is you have to have at least one person elected on your platform serving office somewhere. You have to have, and I’ve not read those rules in a while, so maybe I’m wrong, but I think another is you have to have a presence, you have to have an office in every local government in the over 700, like 774 local governments in Nigeria, not all of them have those. Some party may not have all this representation identified to run an election. So what we’ve seen is, close to an election, we see the registering of a lot of political parties. If you go back and look at any footage of when the chairman of the INEC announces the presidential party results, it takes forever because he goes through every party. So in that point of view, every time I watch that I’m reminded that there aren’t two political parties in Nigeria, no one has compelled Nigerians to only align themselves with two parties. There’s got to be other reasons. I can decide today to not belong to a political party or to change my allegiances from one to another. And as far as I know in Nigeria nothing stops me in principle. So that’s one side of it. And the argument for me from that point of view is I really don’t have any critic if two parties emerge as the predominant parties. Insofar as the basis for their emergence is individuals expressing their choice. But the other part of it, which is why I referred to the other part of America’s situation, is if what we find in reality is a country that even when it says it is liberal from that very traditional definition of people are free as individuals and there is equality of opportunity. If that is not the case, then it leads me to one of two conclusions. Either what we have is fraudulent in that we are saying wanting as an ideal and doing other things and in between that the gap in between a lot of people are suffering, or we are on a trajectory. And when we see we are a liberal economy or rather a liberal society, we are speaking in an aspirational term. We’re aware that we aren’t there yet, which I like to think that it’s where we’re as Nigeria. I think that we’re very clear in terms of very general and not sufficient in this is for what we want to be as a country, right, where we are now. So, and when we get into a conversation around, should we have, is it cool? Is it okay that we’ve got two basically over time, most of the time, two big parties and others smaller ones. Or should we look at the institutional arrangements and deliberately tweak them to ensure that we do not have two parties that dominate. I think that I am more concerned than excited about the process of the prospect of deliberately making sure you have more than two parties that are predominant. Because then it goes back to remember what I said earlier about what my dad showed up and started burning party posters, why he burned those party posters was the government said there is a ban on political activity. You guys can all start your political parties. And a bunch of his friends came together, started this party, went and had all their meetings, went through the process of registering this party, then they were told no, the government is prescribing parties for you. And so it’s a bit of a tricky situation in that if we want to be prescriptive in a proportional sense for parties, and we then begin to prescribe democracy and we fish bowling democracy from a political party point of view. And if we are, is it a real democracy or is it a construed democracy? I do not think that construed democracy are 100% evil. I think that there are far more instances that they are not necessary than that they are necessary. I think where you have them is because someone somewhere is in a hurry to have everything they want out of an ideal society in their lifetime. I think it’s even naive or just, you know, ignorant, or sort of infantilizing others. So I think it’s a bit of a tricky situation. It’s what is the basis why the bigger question is why you’ve got two parties emerging? And I don’t think it’s necessarily from what I’ve known. You’ve got you go, you come to Nigeria, almost those two parties emerging at some point. You go to the U.S. same thing, you go to the UK, every time there’s an election in any country, then you find out that there are more than two parties, like I have had conversations with folks when I’ve told them over and over again, guys there are more than two political parties in America and they say, hell no. Then you get to election, then you hear there’s a green party, there’s this party and what of that? So I think that for me that’s sort of where that discourse lies. And I wouldn’t be prescriptive of a solution as much as I would recommend an examination, and as such following that examination, then recommendations as to what can be done to help us along this path by way of clear institutional realignments without beginning to become a construed, and constructed and enforced democracy. I think that’s sort of somewhere that’s where it lies for me right now. 

Stephan Kyburz: Okay. I don’t see, you know, like democracies as constructed in the way you see like we need more than two parties in the sense, but obviously the electoral rules, they determine in the end, kind of what party landscape you end up with. And as we know, the first-past-the-post system or a single seat district plurality rule, as both the US and Nigeria have, and the United Kingdom as well for that matter, favours bigger parties, right? It tries to, this I think is more of a construct, it tries to build majorities in parliament versus a proportional system that tries to represent all the different groups in a political landscape with their fair share. And that’s why for me, that discussion is so important, because if you have a more proportional system, it’s much easier for smaller parties to compete and for parties actually to gain seats in parliament, right? And I think that discussion is really important to have, and obviously, it’s not, you know, like in some countries, you might have a feeling that you need a strong, you want like strong majoritarian parties. But so far research has shown that a more proportional system better reflects preferences in society. And I was just wondering whether you think that preferences and voters, you know, if they only have the choices of two main parties, they, you know, they have no incentive to vote for a small party because their vote is kind of wasted, in a sense, right? So they have an incentive to vote for the big parties. 

Myani Bukar: I think that you’re spot on in terms of the need. And looking at that, what I would say to that is that when, I guess it’s a question of how disproportionality emerges. If the proportionality emerges from a point of view of a logic that says there are, let’s say for the sake of argument, there are 48 parties. Each party is very articulate and very clear as to what it stands for, what its ideology is, what its version of good governance and strengthened social contract is. And it presents that, you know, like a popular term, you know, the free marketplace of ideas and people are free to choose. And if what then happens in that marketplace is by sheer quality, through emerge having besetted the rests, then proportionality is the reason you ended up with two. And I wouldn’t have a problem with that If however you already have two large parties that have an unfair advantage and drown out the voices of other parties and the platform has already been tweaked in their favor, then indeed that is in itself not democratic. And you should examine that and I think that in the case of what you’re reasoning, I think what I hear you say is the question is around it’s the latter, which is not the ideal. And two things come to my mind if that’s the case. One is it’s a question of money and funding. If it’s very expensive to run a party, it is ridiculous, I do not remember right now how much it costs in Nigeria to go and simply pay to buy the form that says I want to run for president. Well I think the last one was like 100 million, 10 million. It’s a ridiculously high amount. So it’s for me those if by proportionality we mean, these kind of rules that make the entry point near impossible or parties that do not have the heft of these bigger parties, then you’ve got to do something about it. And I really think in the case of Nigeria, we have to do something about it. It shouldn’t be ridiculously expensive to simply go and take a ticket that says I’m expressing my interest to be a president. Because then now the question becomes, if I have to spend, like I think that that is what sets the state for state capture. If I got good ideas and I’m broke and it makes from the very beginning the whole enterprise of election, just simple investment. Because I need to get funders and I need to get political venture capitalists and they need to recoup the investment with interests and if I do that, well, and I am absolutely without leverage, what I am is too much for the bunch of people who are funding me either using money. And money isn’t, I must say the only currency here, there’s so many other currencies that are as important as money. But whatever the currency may be, if parties have an unfair advantage that the state can do something to totally dissipate and it’s not done, then I totally agree with you. We should do something about it. And in Nigeria’s case, yes. So the question of how parties are funded, the democracy within parties, we’ve got such parties that are trying to run for office and be to get democracy moving forward that are very undemocratically run. And what then happens is someone throws a lot of money on the table and they have a party, so the democracy within the party in itself also. Then third, I think it goes back to what I mentioned earlier, which is, if we dissipate power such that people vote for what is most important for the material existence at a point, what then happens, or what then ought to happen in principle, is we would see what is far more of a collage of party participation. As you go from like down from the ground up, and it would be far more of a pyramid. What we have now in Nigeria is like a reverse pyramid. If you just want to look at the numbers, the least amount of people cumulatively, if you put together who show up for elections at local governments, the most amount of people cumulatively are somewhere between the states’ governors, or the presidential, why? Because there’s a consolidation of power, and Nigerian citizens believe, not without basis, that the person whose decision affects their existence the most is the president, then the governor. And it’s just common sense, people would show up and inconvenience themselves to cast their votes for the institution that they believe would affect their lives the most. So if you got reform, one around funding, around the internal democracy of parties, then you reverse you, review the constitution and dissipate political power and stop concentrating it at the federal and states, and move it to local government. Folks will be far more concerned with who is running for a counselor that makes it possible for the streets of my house to be tarred, or they’re to be better security for the streets to be lit. So that miscreants don’t hide there and rob me, for primary health care centres to work, for the marketplace to work well, or for federal routes to local economy and farmers to bring in their produce before they perish from their farms to the local markets where people will buy and consume and then move forward. Like people would be far more invested in who becomes the counselor and the local government chairman. And if you do that, having done the other two where the entry point for parties is not concentrated with power, the entry point is also democratic. But you will then have for me is a more proportional, the more democratic emergence of this proportionality of representation through parties. So in the long run, it might not necessarily matter, it might not be reflected at the presidential. You might almost always end up at the presidential just simply based on economies of scale with like right now we have a presidency and the ruling party that is a product of the merger. So there’s a big question around do we have two parties or three parties contending? Because the APC is a merger of two other parties, right? And I think that may not necessarily always change, and I think that that should not be where we should concentrate our attention on, because economies of scale makes it that when you get to that place, you would want to come together, find basis to have strengthened numbers. So you may not necessarily have 70 candidates running for president, but everyone with their fair chance in order to see this is more representative of people’s views and proportional. That may not be the case. You might end up still having two candidates representing not necessarily two parties, but two platforms. Which would be the product of the merger of so many parties. But as you go down, you would have the space where I would want to be able to fly a party that has no interest outside of my local government. So you’ve got, for example, a measure that says, in order to register a party, I must have an office everywhere. I have no interest outside my local government. I want to run a party for the exclusive point of running things in my local government. And so we could have 36 local governments and 36 parties and we need to making it to the center. So if we go about it, that, and I think the last thing to mention in that sense for me around questions of the proportionality and the representation is I get very wary and a bit sensitive every time I get to a conversation that looks at people’s interests and some proportionality. Because identity politics around ethnicity and those “natural enclaves”, ethnicity and religion have played such a massive negative role in Nigeria’s politics that I so far really like how our conversation has been going. Because we’ve really been talking about proportionality from a point of view of parties that are artificial, brought together for a reason in order to bring about good governance for people. But there’s always that space has for a very long time in Nigeria being captured by these other definitions of interesting groups, which is ethnicity and religion. So for me, I guess the only caveat I’ll bring to that is while undertaking these things, I believe that I think might help to be sure that we do not let that again get captured by these other boxes because they’re natural boxes and the thing with natural boxes is that they don’t need much rhetoric. If someone walks up to me and says, I am starting a party for northern Nigerians by northern Nigerians and I am a northern Nigerian. My natural reject reaction is to say, well, this guy’s a northern Nigerian like me, he already knows what my issues are. So yeah, this is a natural feature for me. So to make sure that our conversation about these proportionality in parties does not get captured by these other indices, which in Nigeria has become very toxic currency for negotiating political power. That would be my only caveat. 

Stephan Kyburz: Cool. Yeah, that’s very interesting. And thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts. And I think we basically agree that, you know, on the one side, the local governance would be great if that level of government could be strengthened and on the other side, a dynamic political landscape where parties can enter, especially at the local level as well, where new parties can be formed around issues, around issues and not around ethnicity or religion. That would be kind of a desirable avenue to go down where you know the power is essentially not captured but is contestable. So cool, let’s wrap up the discussion here. And one last question I would like to hear from you is do you have any books that you have recently read or that you’d like to recommend? Just very briefly. 

Myani Bukar: I’m glad that you said books now because when you sent me “a book”, I’m like jeez I have more than one. I wanted to say okay I’m gonna be selfish and share more. So three books, two books and a long article come to my mind. The first book is called “Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria: The Rise and Fall of the Second Republic” by Richard Joseph. Richard Joseph, I believe, is a professor in Stanford (correct: Northwestern), I’m not very sure. One of those which he wrote in 1987, updated again much more recently. The second is an article that was written in 1975, “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement” by um Professor Peter P. Ekeh, who sadly passed on last year. The third is the book “Citizen and Subject” by Mahmood Mamdani, who is I think in Columbia [Columbia University]. And those would be three books I would recommend to read and I recommend them for the reason I started with from the very beginning, which is that for me, if you really want to examine the matters of rules of engagement, the matters of group interests and power negotiating and elite or whatever bargaining, and where the power lies in a country, in Nigeria and who is holding it, these books, this literature for me is the best place to start to really understand why we are, how we are right now. And the best way to not keep looking for one silver bullet that we think will solve all the problems. Because we’re pretty much caught up in a reinforcing cycle where factors every time we keep our eyes on a political and economic factor makes the political solution useless every time we turn to the economic, a social factor makes the economic effort useless. But those three, right together, I think provides a sort of a prism that is at best like a bit of concentric circles or Wenn-diagram, maybe three circles, and how the circle that keeps recycling itself and is understanding those principles as captured. And they’re all related by these three seminal writers and just some of the best minds I think that ever exercised themselves, looking at Nigeria, and can help. And I certainly have found them very, very useful and I kept going back to them over and over again. Thanks.

Stephan Kyburz: Cool. Thanks a lot for sharing those recommendations. I don’t know them, so I’ll happily have a look at them and read them for sure. And yeah, so let’s end here and I thank you very much Myani for all your thoughts, it was very interesting to hear your perspective and hopefully we could have a second episode maybe, you know, discussing some of the questions in some more detail, or I would be very happy to have you on the podcast again anyway. Thank you. 

Myani Bukar: Thanks a lot. It’s been, also for me, a great privilege and I look forward to coming back any day any time, and just thanks for an opportunity to also listen and learn and gain a lot more perspective. Thanks.