SOCIAL CONTRACT IN JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU – IMPLICATIONS FOR NIGERIAN DEMOCRACY

SOCIAL CONTRACT IN JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU – IMPLICATIONS FOR NIGERIAN DEMOCRACY

1. 1. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

The democratisation process in Nigeria since independence has remained nascent in every republic; its practices and processes have remained new, strange and fresh, and in most cases have always ended up in confusion, frustration and chaos. What has continued to go wrong? Ray Ekpu succinctly captures the situation in his article the “End Justifies the Means,” when he said: “…the ingredient standing between Nigeria and greatness is leadership… As far as politics and leadership are concerned Nigeria is still a psychiatric case due in part to the haemorrhage inflicted on it by most of its leaders.”11 True to fact, Nigeria’s forty-five years of independence have seen various administrations, military and civilian, all of which can be described as having struggled to make Nigerians strangers in their own land.

 

Worse still, despite the huge financial resources claimed to have been expended on the overall administration of the country and the provision of amenities, the socio-economic and political situation in the country have deteriorated almost irredeemably.  While political office holders only scramble for public resources, infrastructures are completely neglected, inflation is galloping, civil servants and pensioners are owed their entitlements for several months, unemployment has almost reached unmanageable levels, and poverty remains a menace people must face.

 

It is on this backdrop that intelligent observers would agree that the first forty-five years of our independence have been, even as S.G Ikoku has put it “a monumental failure.”12 What we experience now is the rule of minority instead of the rule of majority, which is the true principle of democracy. Evidently, Nigeria is not practising any “true” democracy. At best what we have is “deceptive” democracy.  This essay proposes to tackle, some of these problems.

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