Matthew Kukah, Catholic bishop of Sokoto diocese, says
Nigeria has not transitioned fully from military rule to democracy.
Speaking on Tuesday as a panellist during a citizens’
townhall on electoral reforms, a programme organised by YIAGA Africa, Kukah
said Nigeria’s military background has continued to affect effective governance
in the democratic dispensation.
According to him, there is a need for reorganisation within
political parties in order to promote service to the people instead of selfish
interests.
“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.”
He called for consistency in maintaining the governance
structure, and also proffered two measures to address challenges affecting the
country’s political process.
“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.”
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