Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Question for Jibrin Ibrahim

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 <jibrinibrahim891@gmail.com> wrote:



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

On Sat, 25 Feb 2023 at 21:57, Moses Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:

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.

Sent from my iPhone

On Feb 25, 2023, at 1:28 PM, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@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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