As Nigeria marks this year’s Democracy Day, Senate Leader Chief Victor Ndoma-Egba, SAN, has stated that the country has recorded commendable achievement since the return of democracy in 1999.
Senator Ndoma-Egba, while speaking with newsmen in Abuja, Wednesday said the country now enjoys the rule of law, right to speech as well as right to movement.
He added that a lot had been achieved without compromising any of the freedoms guaranteed by the nation’s constitution.
His words, “When we are doing an assessment on how the country has fared since 1999, I will like to categorize the assessment into tangibles and intangibles.
“The tangibles are those aspects people can construct with any of their senses, either with the sense of vision or the sense of touch, then the intangibles are of course those imperceptible things you cannot see or touch.
“Now for the intangibles, I think the most remarkable is that this is the longest episode of our democracy in our post independence history, we have had a number of episodes of democracy in our long years of military rule, 13 years unbroken is the longest that we have experienced and for me it is a major achievement and that we have achieved this long of episode without compromising any of the freedoms guaranteed in the constitution is again a major achievement.
“People speak freely; people move freely the rule of law largely is observed, so it is a major achievement. In respect of the tangibles, yes we could have done far better than we have done because people see democracy not just as an opportunity for expressing or enjoying those intangible benefits but also an opportunity for enjoying the tangibles, they want to see better roads, they want to see better schools, they want to see stable power, they want to see good healthcare and all of that in those areas in the areas of intangibles.
“ I think we could have done far better than we have done, but it is not something that we can redress in a day because if you take the decay in virtually all the sectors that I have mentioned, they are not decay that happened over night. Within the power sector for instance, you remember once upon a time in this country in 20 full years there was no single new investment in the power sector so when you have that kind of situation it is not the type of situation you think you can address with a magic bullet.
Continuing, he said, “So those are issues that will take time in addressing. Then we have of course had security challenges the worst of all being the one that we are experiencing now and my reaction to it is that what we are going through is a manifestation of certain fundamental contradictions in our polity that can be negotiated and I believe will be negotiated through the democratic process.
“In order words democracy offers us an opportunity to address those contradictions, but you know in many years of military rule, we didn’t have an opportunity to discuss them not to talk of negotiating them or resolving them, they were held under the jack pot but you know with the departure of the military and the return to democracy those contradictions have propped up and now they have been propped up we just have to face the reality and face them squarely by addressing them through either negotiations or dialogue,”’ he stated.
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