Do Not Confuse Nigeria's Dictatorship For Democracy - Kukah

The Catholic Bishop of the Sokoto Diocese, Matthew Kukah, has said that Nigerians should not mistake "our current dictatorship" for "democracy."

He said this as a member of the panel at a town hall meeting on electoral reforms, organised by YIAGA Africa, a non-profit civic hub of change-makers committed to the promotion of democratic governance, human rights and civic engagement

He maintained that Nigeria was yet to adapt the system of democracy because there are still "systemic malfunctions" in the current form of governance.

Kukah also said that the difficulties the country faces in trying to transition into a democratic country can be seen in the "occasional malfunctioning of the system midway through the journey, manifested in the quarrelsome nature of the politics."

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He said, “We are mistaken in assuming that we have had a transition from dictatorship to democracy. We still haven’t. This is why we are showing all kinds of systemic malfunctioning,” he said.

“When we talk about political parties, we have assumptions. But the truth of the matter is that in our own case in Nigeria, we have the greed and the political interest.

“Clearly what we have in Nigeria, as we have seen with the occasional malfunctioning of the system midway through the journey, manifested in the quarrelsome nature of the politics and the way the judiciary has now come to undermine the wishes of the people, suggests very clearly that we have very serious issues with party discipline largely because what we call political parties in Nigeria are mere contraptions purely constructed to help to ferry the ambitions of people — a good number of who are really and truly ill-prepared for the discipline that politics and political party formations require.”

“The first is for us to pay attention to the future. That is why this conversation is very important; that a new generation of Nigerians with a different view about our country, with a different set of skills and discipline, must begin to see politics in a much more noble form,” he said.

“The second point is for the judiciary itself to begin to think more in focusing on compelling politics and politicians to fine-tune their articles of discipline internally.”