“Truth crushed to earth shall rise again;/ The eternal years of God are hers./ But error, wounded, writhes with pain./ And dies amongst his worshippers” – Willian Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) From the historical perspective, and going by the dictates of democracy, as expressly stated by the Greek tribes that had founded the city-states, after doing away with monarchy by 700 BC, where one person ruled and subsequently aristocracy at about 500BC, it is a “government of the people, by the people and for the people”.
Democratic governance is therefore, meant to serve the overall interests of the vast majority of the people and not the favoured few as it had played out with aristocracy. But pitched against the current democratic variant, as has been practised in an unbroken form in Nigeria, over the past 25 years, since 1999 the leadership spectrum is overtly skewed in favour of the set of self-serving, flamboyantly rich and serially-recycled politicians whose stock-in-trade is personalizing power. At the receiving end are the long-marginalized people, in a king-slave matrix that breeds hatred from both sides of the great socio-economic divide.
Indeed, the huge pay packages of Nigeria’s current ruling class and disconnect from the mass misery reminds us, not about what the ethics of democratic governance entails but a reharsh of aristocracy. Some groups of concerned citizens have therefore, taken up the noble and patriotic challenge of bridging the ever- widening gap betw.
