Nigeria’s democratic architecture, once vaunted as a beacon of post-military restoration, now teeters under the suffocating weight of impunity and institutional desecration. The nation’s civic conscience is being strangled by the relentless entrenchment of power, where accountability has become an illusion, and justice, a mere ornamental relic.
From the corridors of executive might to the sanctuaries of legislative complicity, the culture of consequence has all but evaporated. Opposition voices are throttled through orchestrated repression, dissent is criminalised under the pretext of state security, and the judiciary — once revered as the sentinel of equity — is being annexed into a theatre of political servitude. This systemic corrosion does not merely imperil Nigeria’s democratic experiment; it desecrates its moral foundation.
The Resource Centre for Human Rights and Civic Education (CHRICED) has sounded a clarion call: Nigeria’s democracy stands eclipsed — not by external subjugation, but by the metastasis of internal rot. The capture of state institutions, the selective dispensation of justice, and the brazen politicisation of governance are no longer aberrations — they are now the entrenched architecture of rule.
Democracy cannot subsist alongside sanctified lawlessness. Where institutions capitulate to executive absolutism, and citizens recoil into apathetic resignation, despotism germinates, incrementally at first, then irreversibly. The covenant of 1999 — the promise of a republic governed by law, reason, and conscience — flickers perilously against a backdrop of unrepentant impunity.
To salvage Nigeria’s democratic destiny, there must be an unflinching renaissance of integrity: institutions must be emancipated, accountability restored, and civic audacity rekindled. Absent these, elections devolve into hollow rituals, parliaments into façades of legitimacy, and democracy itself into a carcass — embalmed by those who claim to revere it.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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