Nigeria has experimented the western type of party politics and representatives democracy that are built on electoral frauds, massive official corruption, mismanagement of state funds and human personalities. Politics to an average Nigerian politician, an elected public official or a political appointee is never an avenue for any public service where they can truly or honestly serve Nigerians or their own nation, but an easy avenue that meets their daily means of livelihoods and that allow them to easily loot our treasury with their political, family and business cronies.
The whole democracy and the party politics in Nigeria in the last 14 years of the 4th democratic political experiment lacked political ideologies, sound economic agendas, social programs and the enduring democratic institutions. The ruling party, the PDP was a brain child of the then political group that was known in Nigeria at that time as the G-34 and it is now symbolized, controlled and synonymous by Olusegun Obasanjo, President Jonathan Goodluck and the octogenarian Anenih. The largest opposition party, the ACN is today the private property of Bola Tinubu, the CPC is all about the political ambition of Muhammadu Buhari and the same political patterns are found in all the other smaller political parties.
This political experimentation has never given the 160 million ordinary Nigerians the real political dividends of a true democracy. Over 80% of Nigerians today and under the 14th year of this democratic experimentation are now extremely poor to the point of living on $1 to $2 a day budget. About 30% of the national budget is used as monthly salaries and allowances for the 17,500 public elected officials at all levels and in the federal civil service also. The country today has to continue to borrow high interest loans from the international financial agencies to stay alive.
Nigeria is worse today than in 1999 before the coming of this democratic governance. Poverty continues to growth, unemployment is its record-level high, millions earn poverty wages, the public education has failed many millions already and the health care facilities are not adequate for more millions. Nigeria cannot provide the basic social services for her citizens, we still operate with the outdated national infrastructures plus the lawlessness and the rule of brutalities of the highest levels dominating the land.
Today, under this pseudo-democracy, Nigerians are more divided than in 1999 as reflected in the worst presidential election of 2011. Ethnic identities or loyalties, religious affiliations and geopolitical origins are more pronounced, more celebrated and highly visible amongst Nigerians today than the so called Nigerian national citizenship. Nigeria in 2013 is now showing all the advanced signs and the political symptoms of a failing state in the making. The immediate convening of the much needed and the much avoided National Sovereign Conference of all the 450 ethnic nationalities and the religious groups is the best practical approach and the most realistic political solution or the answer to the Nigeria's huge and highly divisive national crises in 2013.
In conclusion, all the 450 ethnic nationalities and the 2 major religious groups (Christianity and Islam) in Nigeria must all have direct inputs into the best practical way they all want to live together and with each other through a constitutional framework that they were denied in the 1914 amalgamation of the Northern and the Southern protectorates together to form a new political experiment that was named as Nigeria by the British colonial power that has refused to work.
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