Op-Ed

INTERPRETER: Democracy, Insecurity, Good Governance And Economic Prosperity

ByOnline Editor

PublishedDecember 12, 2025

The title chosen by a body central to defense and extension of democracy is very apt; and it mirrors the situation we are in today. The issues pertaining to democracy, insecurity, good governance and economic prosperity are interwoven; and if there is no good synergy, democracy might begin to wane.

The mismanagement of internal security, leading to the destabilisation of an already fragile economy, proposes an existential threat to national cohesion.

Nigeria’s fourth stab at establishing and enduring democracy is, to be very candid, fragile. The very driving ethos of the Constitution, midwifed in 1999 under opaque conditions, are questionable. The Constitution is, in my opinion, hardly suitable for the development of a multi-ethnic society, which Nigeria is.

Indeed, the mindset of those who midwifed the Constitution is Bonapartist. It reflects the way in which Napoleon Bonaparte centralised the state in France in order to end a revolution that had become chaotic. The issue has to be which revolution were framers of the 1999 Constitution trying to bring to an end?

In view of what Nigeria had gone through previously, in the twists and turns following independence in 1960, it could have been more sensible to have re-adopted the Littleton Constitution. The Littleton Constitution would have been more efficacious because it was based on internal self-help.

The very pro-federal, long-serving Prime Minister of Canada, John Diefenbaker, is often quoted as succinctly describing Federalism as an operating system in which “you kill what you eat.

The Littleton Constitution led to real development because it met Dienfenbaker’s description. Had we continued with it, we would not be in this quagmire.

Let us look at our deteriorating internal security crisis. So far, the response, over a fifteen-year period, reflects the mindset of the over-centralized state. If the internal security apparatus had been channelled through the federating units, the response would have been far more effective.

Besides, we are attempting to fight an asymmetrical warfare with a centralized mindset and strategy. This is ridiculous — for gorilla warfare is basically localized and it’s fluid.

By not devolving the internal security crisis mechanism, we could not develop the intelligence systems. Had we done that, we would have used our rural outposts, and our local governments for intelligence gathering, crisis containment and forward planning.

So, it is utterly absurd that we are still quibbling over state policing, when it is obvious that that should have been done decades ago, before the insurgency manifested itself.

In contrast, Nigeria’s former colonial power, the United Kingdom (UK), even within a unitary state, has evolved a decentralised policing system.

The United Kingdom, for example, has fifty-three policing boards, and there is no Inspector General of Police. This means that the volt policing boards are very effective. If we have the volt power like they did in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, containing insurgency would have been far more effective.

A developed policing force would have had a better intelligence gathering mechanism to fight the insurgents. They would have known the terrain, and most crucially, they would have been used to develop the special forces Nigeria so desperately needs.

So, what Nigeria should be looking at is not just increasing the number of personnel of the police and the military, but also interweaving the states with the development of special forces: like the United States Navy Seals and the British Special Air Services. It is only this kind of framework that can eventually crush the insurgents.

If we do not do this, we continue to labour in vain, and the terrorists will continue to run rings around us. A hapless nation will continue to empower them by dishing out humongous sums for ransom.

Ransom has also now become a very veritable tool for the insurgents to build up their capital base. Every ransom paid is now used to reinvest in the war.

The sooner we realize this, evolve internal security, and develop special forces, the better for all of us.

In addition, the country must now realize that there is a military industrial complex at play, feeding fat on the war. The way to contain this is to have greater parliamentary oversight and to institute, like the American state, a performance planning budgeting system, as John F. Kennedy did, when he became president in 1960.

Besides, not doing a cost-effectiveness of every military spending is fatal.

The war has become a big business, and we cannot contain it unless we develop a new budgeting system; and stop using the smokescreen of security not to discuss the military budget.

INSECURITY ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

The economic prospects of the Republic of Nigeria have taken a terrible battering because of the amount of economic dislocation caused by the worsening insecurity situation, terrorism and banditry. One key element is that the country is now having continuously increasing budget allocations to fight the insurgency. There is an opportunity cost to this in a country already suffering from a glaring infrastructure deficit. Money that should go into the physical and social infrastructure is now going at an alarming rate to defence. It’s bound to increase, partly because we are fighting the wrong kind of warfare and mostly to because a military industrial complex has arisen around the effort against insurgency, and there isn’t parliamentary oversight over the expenditure.

We are also sending the wrong signals to potential investors, not just at home but also abroad. An investor doing a risk analysis of investment in Nigeria now has to look at the cost of securing the enterprise. This puts us at a competitive disadvantage. If the investor is considering other locations, particularly in West Africa, it means that insurance premiums for enterprises and plants set up in Nigeria will perhaps even be doubled what it ought to be.

The economic cost of the insurgency must not be underestimated in a country that needs to create millions of new jobs every year at infinitum to cope with the demographic bulge of a very young population.

It also has an effect on democracy. A democracy must be based on an increasing the amount of people in the middle class. The middle class has the biggest stake in a democracy, and the bigger the middle class, the more it is expanding, the more the durability as well as the sustainability of a democracy.

We ignore this at our own peril. The fact of the matter is that the current economic situation is detrimental in many ways.

One: the purchasing power of the middle class is diminishing, and it is even becoming debatable as to whether they are still a middle class; and as to how you actually permute what the middle class represents in Nigeria today.

A good example is the falling numbers of people in private schools and private universities. This is a key indicator because the middle class traditionally spends a bulk of money on ensuring a very good education for their children and wards, in order to protect and enhance generational upward mobility and preserve generational wealth.

Since this is diminishing, it poses a problem. It means essentially that those who have a vested stake in the preservation of democracy, which is traditionally the middle class, are now at risk.

It therefore means that democracy itself is imperiled. We must continuously build up a middle class as the veritable buffer for the defence of democracy because much of civil society itself will come out of the middle class, especially in a country like Nigeria.

The trade unions today, unlike in an earlier time in the days of Michael Imoudu and Wahab Goodluck, have become not the vibrant pro-people trade unions that we once knew, but have gravitated to be more like an aristocracy of labour. This explains their inability to protect the working class; and to shield the dispossessed. That is why Nigeria has not developed even a rudimentary social safety nets like we have seen in other countries with more vibrant and proactive trade unions, such as the Republic of South Africa, Brazil, Malaysia, and so forth.

The present insecurity is a direct threat to democracy, and we must never underestimate this threat.

We must now look at how to contain and then defeat the insurgents because if we do not do so, the democracy of this country could head for a crash — God forbid!

The opinions expressed in this publication are solely those of the author. It does not represent the editorial position or opinion of OSUN DEFENDER.