Question for Jibrin Ibrahim

[Toyin Falola]

Jibrin:

Can you let me know why we should not spend billions of naira spent on these elections to create trade centers, recruit thousands of teachers from all over the world to teach millions of our young men and women skills that can create legitimacy mate jobs?

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[Moses Ochonu]

I’ve been asking this question about the unsustainable and financial cost of liberal democracy—the cost of periodic elections and the cost of maintaining and compensating elected and appointed officials at all levels—for more than a decade with no satisfactory answer.

The return on the investment has been abysmal. Since 1999, our spending on elections alone is in the trillions of Naira.

Take today’s election for instance. INEC got over N300 billion and delivered an election rife with thuggery, violent ballot snatching, voter intimidation, vote disruption, non-arrival or delayed arrival of materials and officials, wrong ballots, incomplete ballots, malfunctioning BVAS machines, inability to upload results from polling units onto the central result server, etc. 

These problems were reported with video evidence in multiple states, with the violence and voter suppression particularly rampant in Lagos, Kogi, and Rivers states.

If you ask what we have to show for this huge expense, whether this “democracy” is worth the price tag, and whether this money would not be better utilized on infrastructure and high-impact social services rather than on maintaining a liberal democratic experiment that has caused doom and gloom in the country and, for good measure, hasn’t delivered free and fair elections in which the popular will of the people prevails, they will say you’re advancing autocracy and dictatorship, that there is no alternative to this “democracy” and that Nigeria will eventually get it right.

I just hope that when Nigeria “gets it right” and the real democracy comes, the country will not have collapsed under the weight of the financial expense of this dysfunctional brand of  democracy.

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On Feb 25, 2023, at 1:28 PM, Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:



Jibrin:

Can you let me know why we should not spend billions of naira spent on these elections to create trade centers, recruit thousands of teachers from all over the world to teach millions of our young men and women skills that can create legitimacy mate jobs?

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[Jibrin Ibrahim]

My position has always been that there is a lot of intrinsic value in liberal democracy because of its support for freedoms. I belong to the generation that understood the fascist intentions and programmes of those who defend authoritarianism on the grounds that it could produce developmental results because my entire knowledge of African history is that they never produced development but deprived people of their freedoms and left a legacy of arbitrary rule combined with virtually no developmental results. The young academics on the campaign trail against democracy never read or understood Claude Ake's Social Science as Imperialism and the history of American social science Africanist studies from the 1950 to the 1970s. 

 Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/BB7EA72E-2350-419D-BC5C-75E427CDE16D%40gmail.com.

[Toyin Falola]

Jibrin:

We read the same books.

The routes to freedom are so many. One of them is to make sure that my stomach is not empty and our young men and women do not want to work in Western plantations where they derive their joy in abusing their people after expending their brain power, a replacement of the muscle power of the slavery plantation.

TF

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[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

You pose a simple question about the damage--yes damage--liberal democracy (exported to us with the doctrine of economic and political liberalization and made a condition for our economically beleaguered countries accessing their poisonous SAP loans)-- is doing to our countries and peoples and the resources it is depleting without delivering anything positive in return and you get a recycling of their talking points. 

You tell them that there are different democratic types and paths, that it's liberal democracy you're critiquing and not democracy as a generic practice or its other possible iterations, and that in fact Africa had varieties and iterations of democracy before the encounter with Europe and well before the so-called "democratization" and political liberalization of the 1990s and 2000s and they repeat the same pro-democracy rhetoric they've been using since the 1990s. 

And then they comically accuse you of not having read a book--a classic-- you teach and recommend to your graduate students. Na wa o.

These questions are not going away despite the diversionary and escapist tactics. We'll continue to pose them in the interest of our people. 

On Sun, Feb 26, 2023 at 3:58 PM Moses Ochonu <meoc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Right on cue and so predictable. No answers to the legitimate questions posed by Falola and I.

More grandstanding and presumptions about what colleagues have read or haven’t read, and even the distraction of throwing in the false, passé, dead end debate about democracy versus developmental dictatorship.

There’s even a gerontocratic jab to boot, as if age has anything to do with intellectual savvy.

With our African liberal democracy propagandists, it is the same go-to response every time. If you question the failures of liberal democracy (it has failed to deliver the promised freedoms and development and it is costing us an arm and a leg), they reduce the debate to a crude, simplistic, and ahistorical binary of democracy (singularized and monolithic) versus authoritarianism.

Meanwhile, even in the West, where the “pro-democracy” advocacy dollars come from, their beloved liberal democracy is in trouble and those providing the dollars to propagate it in our countries are either abandoning it or questioning its efficacy even in its point of origin: the West.

If you ask why we can’t craft our own kind of democracy—cheaper and more suitable to our own unique African experiences, challenges, and aspirations—it’s crickets. But let the pro-democracy windfall continue.

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 26, 2023, at 3:35 PM, Jibrin Ibrahim <jibrinib...@gmail.com> wrote:



To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAPWX8rVMB_rcP-7D5wm4-zvAcomwqtHt_HD3oga2VC4mSeUuyw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Moses Ochonu]

Right on cue and so predictable. No answers to the legitimate questions posed by Falola and I.

More grandstanding and presumptions about what colleagues have read or haven’t read, and even the distraction of throwing in the false, passé, dead end debate about democracy versus developmental dictatorship.

There’s even a gerontocratic jab to boot, as if age has anything to do with intellectual savvy.

With our African liberal democracy propagandists, it is the same go-to response every time. If you question the failures of liberal democracy (it has failed to deliver the promised freedoms and development and it is costing us an arm and a leg), they reduce the debate to a crude, simplistic, and ahistorical binary of democracy (singularized and monolithic) versus authoritarianism.

Meanwhile, even in the West, where the “pro-democracy” advocacy dollars come from, their beloved liberal democracy is in trouble and those providing the dollars to propagate it in our countries are either abandoning it or questioning its efficacy even in its point of origin: the West.

If you ask why we can’t craft our own kind of democracy—cheaper and more suitable to our own unique African experiences, challenges, and aspirations—it’s crickets. But let the pro-democracy windfall continue.

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 26, 2023, at 3:35 PM, Jibrin Ibrahim <jibrinib...@gmail.com> wrote:



To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAPWX8rVMB_rcP-7D5wm4-zvAcomwqtHt_HD3oga2VC4mSeUuyw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Jibrin Ibrahim]

Very many rads to freedom indeed, my concerns are about purported roads to freedom that take too many to dens of oppression and deprivation.

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/PH0PR06MB900498D24BF2A527DE703C6FF8AE9%40PH0PR06MB9004.namprd06.prod.outlook.com.

[Jibrin Ibrahim]

Moses, when you stop acting as a headmaster, we might have a conversation, but can you?

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

Senior Fellow

Centre for Democracy and Development, Abuja

Follow me on twitter @jibrinibrahim17

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAAHJfPpKM3Ga%3DhqGCMUU5qpy9uaTECCDfmxktv0U1LFqRyEzOw%40mail.gmail.com.

[Augustine Togonu-Bickersteth]

   Sir  we are going to spend  another multi billion naira on census.i think about  400 billion  naira  like you have said  it could be spent  on tradesmen  and taking 20 milion  out of school children to school  and off the streets

bearing in mind  data captured  over the years from other sources including  INEC , IRS, that is internal revenue service   and central bank and corporate  affairs commission  ,with mathematics and space technology  counting  the houses,   Nigeria should  be able to arrive  at accurate  figures for Nigeria "s population  without spending  another  multi billion amount  of naira.

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