Dr. Obiageli Ezekwesili, a former minister and presidential candidate, has said Nigeria is stagnated because old politicians exercise a political monopoly over the country.
To address this anomaly, she said that Nigeria must dismantle what she calls a “monopoly democracy” before the country can make progress.
Ezekwesili, who spoke on Monday in Lagos at a #FixPolitics conference organised by the Robert Bosch Academy, also said the political monopoly is more dangerous than any economic monopoly, even as she promised to train 3,000 youths.
“When you look at the degree of participation in a democracy, it will tell you whether such democracy is participatory or a monopoly. A monopoly democracy is more dangerous than an economic democracy. To have a monopoly in how the system functions is to retard the system,” the former minister stated.
She also blamed the challenges facing the country on how the various ethnic nationalities with nothing in common were merged together in what she called a “patchwork.”
“In Europe, statehood is about people with similar language coming together. In Africa, it was the Berlin Conference that marked out the territories. In Nigeria, administrative convenience propelled the colonial authority to bring the people together. It was a patchwork.
“Nigeria emerged made up of people who had nothing in common. There was no common identifying point of reference beyond the colonial power’s administrative convenience,” she argued.
She said Nigeria could have overcome the challenges of the forced amalgamation of the Northern Protectorate and Southern Protectorate in 1914 if the right things were done at independence in 1960.
She blamed the immediate post-independence leaders for not renegotiating the terms of Nigeria’s existence when they took power.
“In gaining independence, there was something that needed to happen that did not happen. There needed to be a dialogue between these people that were brought together by the colonialist, the external force. That did not happen. The fact that we failed to hold a dialogue on how to live together constituted a gap. These failures and gaps continue to hunt us till this day.”
Ezekwesili added that the failure of the ethnic nationalities that make up Nigeria to hold a dialogue on their own terms how they wish to coexist has prevented Nigeria from transiting from a country to a nation.
