Former President Olusegun Obasanjo recently made headlines again with his advocacy for an Afrocentric fine-tuning of Nigeria’s democracy. His comments come as more leaders debate the workability and efficacy of Nigeria’s current democratic system.

Speaking at the 60th birthday celebration and colloquium of former Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives and ex-Imo State governor, Emeka Ihedioha, Obasanjo argued that democracy in Africa is failing because it does not reflect the continent’s culture. He criticised the current system, describing it as one that allows people to grab everything illegally and corruptly while telling others to go to court, where justice is often unattainable.

“When we talk about democracy, we should remember that in Africa, before colonial rule, we had a form of government that attended to the needs of our people. And whatever you call it, to me, it is democracy. Because what is democracy about? The American president, Abraham Lincoln, defined it as the government of the people, by the people, for the people.

“Democracy is meant to be a system of government that delivers for all the people; not just a section or a few. But what do we have today?” he asked.

At the same event, former Anambra State governor and 2023 presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi, was even more blunt, declaring that Nigeria’s democracy has completely collapsed due to the actions of its current leaders.

For those who have been following Obasanjo’s public discourse in recent times, his chastisement of Nigeria’s democratic practice—and, by extension, that of Africa—would come as little surprise. For months, he has been advocating for an Afrocentric democracy. In November 2023, while speaking in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, at a high-level consultation on “Rethinking Western Liberal Democracy for Africa”, the former president outlined his reasons for pushing for a departure from Western liberal democracy. He argued that African countries have no business operating a system of government in which they had no hand in its “definition and design.”

However, unlike Obasanjo, we at Daily Trust believe that democracy itself is not the problem in Nigeria. Rather, the issue lies with the way it has been bastardised in practice, preventing it from delivering the promised dividends to the masses.

At the same time, we agree with former President Obasanjo that countries worldwide have had to modify democracy to align with their realities, adapting their nuances to reflect their unique cultural and societal structures. China and Japan serve as clear examples of how democracy can be tailored to suit local contexts, ensuring it works for the people.

Fundamentally, we believe that the crux of any governance system should be accountability—a core tenet of African culture, along with integrity, commitment, honesty, transparency, and credibility. These values define African societies, from Nigeria to Lesotho, Congo to Rwanda, and Morocco to Cameroon. This should be the essence of Afrocentric democracy because if these principles are upheld, democracy will work for all.

We are of the strong opinion that the argument that democracy is inherently un-African and responsible for the region’s underdevelopment does not hold water. Democracy has evolved globally based on each country’s realities. However, what remains sacrosanct is that improvements are driven by consensus; not mere grandstanding. Nigeria needs to build a consensus on how to integrate African cultural values into governance to make democracy work for everyone. The fault lines are evident, and fixing them should be the priority; not the National Assembly’s misguided attempt to revert Nigeria to a parliamentary system, forgetting that if the system had effectively met the country’s needs, it would not have been abandoned in the first place.

What Nigeria truly needs is a governance system that meets the people’s needs and lifts the majority out of poverty. China, with its unique brand of governance, transformed itself from one of the world’s poorest nations to the second wealthiest. Between 1980 and 2020, China lifted about 800 million people—roughly three-quarters of the world’s poor—out of extreme poverty in just one generation.

As one commentator put it, “A core factor in the attainment of China’s unprecedented poverty reduction programme was the fact of good governance, borne of a committed leadership, which enabled both the strategy for economic growth and the effective targeting of policies and programmes to bear sustained results.”

This is what Nigeria should aim for.