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The Order/Other of Political Culture: Reflections on Nigeria's Fourth Democratic Experiment

Political commentators are quick to comment on Nigeria’s capacities for survival. They are puzzled by how the barely cohesive country manages to stumble from one crisis to another without leading to dismemberment or the irreversible slide into genocidal conflict. This article reflects on Nigeria’s fourth democratic experiment (1999–) and on the numerous and often disorienting paradoxes, contradictions and conundrums that arise within an archetypal postcolonial setting. It also attempts to depict the kinds of social disorder that neoliberal policies bring to the fore in a milieu where the private– public distinction is still blurred by the unresolved tensions between the colonial and the postcolonial, between the modern and the premodern, between vestiges of feudalism and late capitalism, and finally between residual militarism and unsystematic demilitarisation. In addition, we have to note that as a result of the problematic private–public axis, multiple bases of political power drawing their various impetuses from colonial and modern orientations and from religious structures of authority and an obscure secularism in turn give rise to often violent syncretisms not only in everyday life but also at the very core of centralised political power. Constitutional processes can only be made meaningful if and when political agency, subjectivities, practices and institutions are construed as emerging from a multiplicity of variables (colonial, postcolonial, secular, religious and neoliberal). This complex scenario throws into disarray state-imposed strictures of governance (democracy from above) and affords a site of struggle for an enfeebled civil society to articulate its counter-discourse against state-imposed political processes (Ekeh 1975; Mamdani 1996).