Democracies Are Really Silly

Think about it. Are they not profoundly silly?

Churchill said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. And when you talk about how silly democracies tend to be, that’s the reply people give you. Oh, don’t you know, silly Elewa; democracies aren’t perfect, but they are better than the rest! Even Churchill said as much! Like one is supposed to fall on their face in adoration at the fact that Churchill, a democratically elected leader, believes democracies are the best thing since fried plantain.

I suspect Churchill only said that because he acquired his power via democratic means. Think of it. It’s like King Louis speaking about the monarchy. Is he likely to castigate the whole thing or say, like Churchill, that a monarchy is the worst form of government, except for all the others? If Louis said that, would anyone be moved to believe him? Off with his head, they’d probably say. But since common people today have been sold the tried and multiple proven lie that democracies give them freedom, they’ve come to believe it. Come now, let’s see for ourselves. How free does a democracy make you? What freedom are you afforded? Let’s see.

Nigeria is a democracy (apparently). People are free to cast their votes, voice their opinions, and do all manner of things that a democracy allows you to do. The underlying assumption here is that the democracy — the democratic means — and other attendant intangibles is the reason why Nigerians have this freedom, and nothing else.

But that is nothing but a psyops on both counts. Not only do Nigerians not have this mythical freedom, the freedoms they also have are not due to democratic structures, laws or other intangibles. The first is obvious. Every Nigerian democratic government has harshly cracked on dissent to a draconian extent. The EndSars protest ended in tens or perhaps hundreds of dead people thrown into the Lagoon if this article by Fisayo Soyombo, one of Nigeria’s foremost investigative journalists, is to be believed. Journalists regularly find themselves in DSS cells that are said to be 7 feet underground. And sometimes they aren’t even found. Who can tell where Dadiyata is? He has been disappeared for over five years, and there are almost no doubts that his disappearance was orchestrated by government forces. He is most likely dead already. Just last week, the Nigerian government arraigned a couple of teenagers under terrorism charges which would have earned them death sentences if they were found guilty. Thankfully, saner voices prevailed — due to political and elite horse-trading considerations — and the boys have now been released.

The only reason why dissent seems more obvious under Nigerian democracy is because the government is restrained by its own complete incompetence. The Nigerian government simply does not have the state capacity to punish dissent in a way that wouldn’t turn the country into a discussion point on the floors of every international organization in the galaxy. Every other fellow has an anon account on X the everything app, and every human right issue can quickly turn into a quick government legitimacy issue. No government wants that sort of attention.

So it allows dissent — and our precious freedoms — because it is helpless against it. If this is true, and it clearly is, it means that the government would roughly act in the same way even under military rule. Nigerians seem to have forgotten, but even under military rule, the military didn’t behave like a all-powerful monarchy. It had trials. They were for show, but they were still trials. And even the military refused to take responsibility for its more heinous misdeeds. Dele Giwa, for instance, was almost certainly killed by the government. But after his death, the same Government ordered an investigation into it. The CGS Rear Admiral Aikhomu and the Minister of Information Tony Momoh promised to “leave no stone unturned” in their investigation into the matter. Afterwards the assistant commissioner of police, Abubakar Tsav, was placed in charge of the investigation. The government took this matter so seriously, despite the fact that it theoretically had all the power and was the one who’d orchestrated the assassination of Giwa.

Our precious freedoms as Nigerians aren’t guaranteed by the courts or the government or whatever the Nigerian liberal — if you can believe there is such a thing as a Nigerian liberal — argument is these days. They are guaranteed first and foremost by the fact that we are not irritating enough to irritate the government, and secondly by the fact that the government has much bigger fish to fry. And lastly, they are guaranteed by the caliber of people who are in office. This isn’t just true in Nigeria, it is true everywhere else.

In November 1999, barely months after transitioning to democratic rule, new president Obasanjo had something that our guys may call a brain worm. The president learnt of an ambush of police officers in Odi, a small riverine community. Obasanjo insists that he sent another Corp of police officers to the area to arrest those who had ambushed and killed police officers, and the second contingent were ambushed and murdered as well. You may wonder why the President of such a large country would even get involved in something that should ordinarily be a police matter at the state level, but this is Nigeria. And in those days our president had a brain worm.

In response to these killings, the president felt he had no choice but to send the military in to stabilize the situation. And if you are fluent in Nigerianese, you’d know that this meant anything walking that even cast a bad eye on the military would be killed. In the end, the military invaded and hundreds — perhaps thousands — of men, women and children were murdered. The entire community was burnt down. It was so bad that when the senate president visited the community three months later, he still saw corps on the ground and he wept. Readers may correct me if I’m wrong, but not even the military government ever ordered a killing on such a scale. And all of that happened under our Dear Democracy — with a democratic government — with a democratic president — guided by democratic norms and whatever else makes up a democracy these days.

Obasanjo won a second term resoundingly. In those days even our people had a brain worm.

People, Not Systems

So, no, we do not have more freedoms under civilian rule than we had under military rule. The government is just not competent enough to deal with dissent in a comprehensive manner in a world where everyone has an anon profile on X the everything app. It is just not possible to control dissent effectively in such an environment even for competent people. Since the Nigerian government is staffed with people who are as competent as a leaky condom, the outcomes ate obvious.

But this doesn’t mean there aren’t serious temperamental differences between civilian governments and military governments. However, that difference isn’t due to the intangibles holding democracy aloft like the five pillars of Islam. It is instead due to differences in the sort of person who becomes a military leader and the sort of person who becomes a civilian leader.

A military leader often comes to power through a coup. In many cases it is bloody, and even when it isn’t the leader has to be ready in advance to murder or order to be murdered people who won’t budge. The sort of person who has the personality to put such a plan in motion is more likely than not to be extraordinarily blood thirsty when dealing with dissent. That is because this fellow knows that his life is also on the line, and he could be murdered at any point if dissent rises to a high enough crescendo. He is playing a game of Russian Roulette everyday, and he is quite determined not to lose. That is the reason why a veteran coup planner like Ibrahim Babangida would murder his close friend — and best man at his wedding — Vatsa because he was just accused of planning a coup. He could take no chances.

That is a recurring theme in Nigerian military political history. The more brutal and paranoid an officer is before acquiring power, the more brutal their reign ends up being. Sani Abacha had been an integral part in planning almost all successful Nigerian coups. And by integral, I mean he was in the thick of the actual shooting action. His reign was the most brutal because he had seen several coups and knew that he was in the fight for his life everyday. Fear and paranoia drove his brutality, not carelessness.

The same was true for Buhari and Babangida. But it wasn’t true for Gowon who, outside his role in the Nigerian civil war, was as ordinary as any regular thieving democratic leader we’ve ever had. And is it any wonder that the worst human rights abuses under civilian rule also came under military era leaders? Who is surprised that the Obasanjo led government committed the Odi massacre? Who is surprised that the Zaria massacre and the Lekki murders happened under Buhari? Did the spirit of the intangibles holding democracy up stop them?

The civilian leader is therefore completely different in temperament. He has to take a lot of verbal abuse from everyone, including the town idiot, if he wants to win. And what are the consequences of taking so much abuse? Nothing. If he can manage it, his opponent will take even much more abuse from other town idiots. Therefore, the civilian leader, even when we don’t consider the incompetence of the Nigerian government, has a much thicker skin for dissent on the balance. He can give more freedoms because of who he is, and the route he takes to power, not because we live in a so-called democratic system. People, not systems.

Rule of One

The promise of democracy is fundamentally silly. The assumption is that it gives power to the people, but I ask you; do you feel empowered? Do you feel like you have power over anything? Do you feel like you can change anything? The democratic machine tosses your one vote to you and tells you you can use it to change the world. But how many times have you actually changed the world with it? Is there a world where your vote would ever matter? Will your involvement or lack of it in any election ever matter?

I often say that the best thing democracy can offer is that your vote would be counted. But it will never matter. Democracy makes you powerful in theory, and powerless in practical. Not only is your one vote not significant, people who don’t vote at all regularly exert even more power over electoral outcomes than actual voters. In the last American elections, Elon Musk moved mountains to get Trump elected. He moved mountains that your one vote could never hope to move, and in a sense he exerted more influence on the election outcomes than any one pleb with their one vote could ever do. And isn’t this the case everywhere else?

Democracy promises the lowly voter power over their future, but it doesn’t grant even that. Any good for nothing half wit can blow into town with a billion dollars and erase any impact any one voter — or thousands of one voters — may have. In the end, they are left with their penises in their hands wondering where it all went wrong.

But this isn’t totally democracies fault. It’s impossible to give everyone any meaningful political power. People have so many divergent interests that it would never actually work. However, democracies promise it anyway. Whose fault is that?

Rule of Law

In recent years, elections all over the world have taken on an existential hue. Each national election is a referendum on the country’s soul, and this is true even in the third world. In 2023, every Nigerian was reminded how this election would determine the state of Nigeria for the better part of their adult life. You will be 30 when this man’s term is done! Do you really want to spend your 20s hustling for fuel, and hustling for food, and trying to make ends meet? Is that the sort of life you want for your twenties? Why not vote for party B over party A and solve all the problems you are ever likely to face?

Every election is so important, and if the wrong party wins the world is literally done for. Despite this, the supporters of democracy and proud promoters of this hyperbolic nonsense never take themselves seriously. If Tinubu is truly the devil’s spawn and will most definitely ruin the life of 200 million people for the foreseeable future, why shouldn’t he be promptly murdered? The same goes for these hyperbolic narratives in the first world. If Donald Trump is Hitler part 2, why shouldn’t any serious patriot murder him? And if he is murdered, why shouldn’t he be accorded a national honor instead of being prosecuted? He should even be given a Nobel peace prize for saving so many people from death!

The argument from people who support democracy everywhere seems to be that Hitler, Mao, Genghis Khan and whatever the boogey man of liberalism is these days is legitimate if he gets the majority of the vote. See, lowly citizen, we have to respect the ballot if Hitler is elected by the majority. We wouldn’t want to truncate our Dear Democracy, would we? We may have elected Satan, but at least our Dear Democracy won today and the voice of the people was heard!

This means that democracies will support the extrajudicial murder of your family if enough people vote yes on that proposition. But hold on, don’t be so dishonest is the lying and stupid refrain; democracies don’t just run on the rule of the people, they also run on the rule of law! This means that the majority can’t just decide to do whatever it wants. There is a limiting principle, you see, and that principle is words written on a sheet of paper. The man you silly plebs elected isn’t the one who actually governs! The actual governor is a book called the constitution. This isn’t a Banana Republic where rulers can do as they like; we are guided and limited by a system of laws that describe intangibles such as checks and balances that hold this democracy up.

Checks and balances is indeed a poetic name given how it is entirely controlled, at least in my corner of this dunghill, by actual checks and bank balances. So when democracies toss your one singular vote to you, they don’t even pretend to give you the chance to elect a ruler who can do anything you want. Instead, you elect a person bound by the law. And who wouldn’t want that? We all love our constitutions, don’t we folks?

In many cases, constitutions are extraordinarily difficult to change. They become so difficult that even considering the process of changing it puts off everyone from the whole adventure. And that is a good thing, argues the idiot-democrat. Rule by present demagogues and stupid civilians? No, sah! Rule by dead demagogues and dead and stupid civilians? Yes, sah! The rule of law, if we are being honest, can more accurately be described as the rule of the dead. The good news for Nigerians is that our constitution is relatively young, and the framers (who are they? Can you tell me their names?) are not dead. But since we don’t know them, the rule of law to us might as well mean the rule of unknown nobodies, which is just marginally better than the rule of the dead and stupid. And who wouldn’t want that? We all love our constitutions, don’t we folks?

What makes up this law, and how does it rule in practice? Well, we have the legislature who passes and amends these laws. These guys are voted by the lowly citizen, but Nigerians hardly care about what laws they pass. They are not even judged on what laws they pass. They could introduce whatever laws they like and still win re-election as long as they build ten more boreholes and erect twenty more street lights somewhere. But writing and passing the law does not matter as much as interpreting the law. The judges of our Supreme Court can, in theory, see red and call it black. They could read unknown meanings into the law, and sometimes even strike it down all together as unconstitutional. And who votes for these very sacred priests of the court? Nobody. Not even the lowly citizen has a vote. The are hired and promoted via nothing but bureaucratic and political considerations. And they are the ones who actually determine what the law is. Chief Justice John Marshall famously stated:

"It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."

And who can forget old Oliver Wendell James Jnr who said:

“The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law.”

In the final analysis, democracies, whose entire logic is to give power to the people, end up giving it to unelected bureaucrats. And who wouldn’t want that? We all love our constitutions, don’t we folks?

So fear not, lowly citizen. If your countrymen vote to murder you in your bed, the rule of law will fight for you; given the the judges who interpret the law don’t also want to murder you in your bed. If they do, well, tough luck. This is a democracy after all. What can we really do? You could say that will never happen. But isn't that approximately what happened to the people of Odi? Not a single Nigerian politician has ever been held responsible for that massacre. No, not one.

But this is a misleading way of thinking about this. The truth is lovers of our Dear Democracy are all liars and idiots. If ever came a situation where the democratic vote was against their real interests, they would be the first to paint on a lovely moustache and get a nice 1930s side-parted undercut.

Popularity Contests

Sometimes the truth of a matter doesn’t need two thousand years of stupid philosophizing to get to. Aristotle, in the dawn of the rational man, remarked that democracies are the worst form of government. Why, old dead man Aristo? The answer is simple; they tend to empower foolish and popular demagogues. The founders of the United States, well read men that they were, tried to hedge against that by proclaiming that only intelligent and rational men could vote. They couldn’t find a good enough proxy for that, so they retired, as everyone does, to checks and balances; can your checks and your bank balance sustain a landed property? If so, yes, come one come all to the polling booth. Believe it or not, Nigerian democracy started on similar footing, and perhaps we may not have elected Tinubu if that remained the case. Or maybe we would have elected him even harder, you never really know with my countrymen. Today any maladjusted freak who manages to attain the near-impossible-to-attain sacred age of 18 can acquire the same one vote as any supremely learned man, and our Dear Democracy is all the fairer for it. Isn’t that how it goes? One man one vote is more accurately stated as one-idiot-same-vote-as-you, sucker!

No matter how we look at it, democracies are really a popularity contest. I can count on one hand, if I had no fingers, how many leaders actually do what they promise when they are elected. Nigerians know this all too well, and it has gotten to a point that only the worst suckers to walk the country believe anything anyone says during campaign season. Even our politicians know this all too well, that is why most of them wait till they are elected to even decide what to do and who to appoint. So if what politicians say they will do during elections don’t count, what counts?

Image. Perception. Public relations. Vibes. I remember in 2007, the vibes for Funsho Willams were extraordinary. Everyone loved him. But not one person could tell you what Funsho Williams would do as governor. However, everyone could tell you what Funsho Williams was; he was a good man. And you cannot kill goodness.

Here’s the deal. People think they are good. And as such, they think their politics is good. And if you don’t have their politics, you are not good. So it doesn’t matter whether a fellow is a drug dealer, or a rapist, or a killer, or a conman, or whatever it is; they will vote for him as long as he agrees with their politics and the vibes are good. They will make every excuse in the world to defend their choice, and nothing will ever matter. I cannot imagine a dumber way to choose who should steer the ship of the nation.

So what happens when the majority of people in any given population are stupid? They will fall for stupid vibes, align with stupid politics, make stupid people popular, and elect idiots. Just as Aristotle argued. So the dumber a population, the dumber the leaders they elect, and the dumber their outcomes. It may seem fascistic (and indeed it is), but the worst thing you can do for dumb people is to give them the power to outsource their political decisions to a plurality of stupidity. It is akin to giving not one but a 100 million toddlers the choice of dinner. They will vote chocolate ice cream cake candy for dinner every night forever. The idiot supporters of democracies believe that we should stand and applaud as they do this. At least they have the power to choose. They are killing themselves, but at least they are choosing what methods to do the killing with! Isn’t that a little bit silly?

People, Not Systems II

So if democracies are so silly, why do they work so well in other places? The answer isn’t that democracies work better, it is that the people are different and have better goals, better attitudes, better skills, and better interests. They just do better things, and would do so with or without democracy. America, the poster boy for democracy, isn’t prosperous and rich because of democracy. It is prosperous and rich because of Americans. The same goes for Europe and every other prosperous democratic nations.

Now, don’t get me wrong; there is a degree of freedom required for human societies to flourish. That is why Koreans are fundamentally the same people, but have radically different outcomes. But I am just not convinced that democracy, that is the lie of the one-man-one-vote, is necessary for creating those freedoms. China is infinitely more prosperous than Nigeria, and in theory the Chinese have even fewer freedoms than Nigerians. But that is just in theory. They are free from poverty, free from having to queue for fuel every third month or so, free from dying from easily curable diseases, and free from Officer Taiwo. Unfortunately, this means they can’t login to Facebook and Twitter as easily as Nigerians. But which freedoms would you rather have? Is the Nigerian society truly freer than the Chinese society?

The evidence for this case; that the people, not the system, is the most determinant factor in the ceiling of civilization that any society reaches, is abundant. Even within the same population, different peoples in the same system can contribute to immensely different outcomes. The American democratic transfer of power went on without a hitch for hundreds of years before Donald J Trump. If he’d had his way, and everyone else around him was of a similar insane persuasion, he would have remained in the white house and denied the election results like a proper third world politician. But since everyone else wasn’t a spiritual third-worlder, Trump lost and went back home.

One of the most remarkable things any statesman has ever done in the history of politics is what George Washington did when he refused a third term as president. And he did it when he could have easily won. He said he wasn’t going to get America from under the boots of a monarchy and then crown himself king. So he left the arena and retired to his farm. Would a fellow like Donald Trump have ever done that? No, he wouldn’t. Would ANY third world politician have done that? No. The system wasn’t what created term limits for America. In fact, term limits were not codified in the constitution until over a hundred years later. The people created it, despite what the system said. If outcomes can be radically different in the same system because of different individuals, how much more the difference when the people involved are totally different? Wouldn’t the gap in outcomes just grow wider?

Who Is Democracy Good For?

Well, democracies must be working for somebody, right? We wouldn’t just bugger on with it if it were not working for somebody, right? Yes, it is working just as intended. It is working for democratic rulers.

Let us revisit my explanation of the differences between a democratic leader and a military leader. The democratic leader can expect not to be killed before he leaves power. He is not under the scepter of a bloody death at the hands of red-eyed revolutionaries. And who would even support such revolutionaries? We all love our Dear Democracy, don’t we? He can attain power with no serious threats to his life, and leave it with very little serious threats to his life.

This is hardly the case for military leaders. They have to look over their shoulders and carefully tend to their loyalty networks. If not, they may just wake up to find a lovely AK47 shoved in their faces by other soldiers or revolutionaries. Who wants that kind of life?

Democracies work best for democratic leaders and people who plan on acquiring power democratically. I hate to sound like the lobotomized leftist academic who screams and writes “it is just the empire and elites man” all day. But sometimes, it really is just that. Since democratic leaders power academics and prestige institutions through generous checks and balances, they reinforce our eternal and never ending love for our Dear Democracy. At some point, you’ve got to stop and point out; this all seems a little silly, doesn’t it?

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