Nigeria’s former President Olusegun Obasanjo has called for an interrogation of the Western liberal democracy being practised in the country and a review of same where necessary to reflect African peculiarities. He suggested that the new system could be called Afrodemocracy pending when a better word or description for it emerges.

The former President made this suggestion in Nigeria: Past and Future, one of the two new books unveiled to mark his 88th birthday last week, saying it would help to address some of the challenges facing the country.

“If the West, from where the liberal democracy started, should complain about it not working well for them, we should be wise enough at this stage to interrogate, carry out introspection, internal analysis and realise that Western liberal democracy is not working for us and is not delivering apart from the shortcomings of the operators,” Obasanjo said.

“We should seek democracy within African history, culture, attributes and characteristics, one that will take necessary African factors into consideration. Until we can get a better word or description for it, let us call it Afrodemocracy.

“It is from Afrodemocracy that we will draw up an African people’s constitution for any African that chooses to go the way of Afrodemocracy, which will avoid most, to all, the faults we have found in Western liberal democracy,” he suggested.

In the book, the former President painted the portrait and characters of chief executives at both the federal and state levels.

He described the N15.6trn Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway project of the President Bola Tinubu administration as wasteful and corrupt, even as he slammed the administration for spending N21bn on a new official residence for Vice President Kashim Shettima, calling it a misplaced priority and conduit designed to embezzle public funds.

“Typical examples of waste, corruption and misplaced priority are the murky Lagos-Calabar Coastal Road on which the President had turned deaf ears to protests and the new Vice-President’s official residence built at a cost of N21bn in the time of economic hardship to showcase the administration hitting the ground running and to show the importance of the office of the Vice-President. What small minds!” he said.

The 700km Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway, Minister of Works David Umahi had revealed, would cost N4.93bn per kilometre, stating that the contract was awarded on a counterpart-funding basis and not a Public-Private Partnership. About N1.06trn has been released for the pilot phase, or 6 per cent of the project, which begins at Eko Atlantic and is expected to terminate at the Lekki Deep Sea Port.

Apart from questioning the urgency of the project, many prominent Nigerians, including the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2023 election, Atiku Abubakar, had also asked why the Federal Government would award the contract to Hitech Construction Company owned by Gilbert Chagoury, believed to be Tinubu’s long-time business partner and friend, without competitive bidding. But the Tinubu administration had paid no heed to the concerns.

On Tinubu’s two years in office, Obasanjo said it looked like the game of short-changing the over 230 million Nigerians would continue because “Everything is said to be transactional and the slogan is ‘It is my turn to chop.'”

Obasanjo further said the majority of those who have had the opportunity to hold leadership positions in the country as governors, presidents, ministers, commissioners, and even as local government chairmen are ill-prepared, satanic, self-centred and are all out to corruptly enrich themselves while the nation continues to wallow in abject poverty and condemnable underdevelopment.

Many clamouring to be governors or lead the country in one form or the other, he said, are only interested in using their offices to enrich themselves and their cronies and then leave the country worse than they met it.

He pointed out that most office-seekers in the country would go as far as obtaining loans of billions of naira believing that paying back from the public funds after being elected won’t be a problem.

“How do you explain the situation of a chief executive, a governor, whose business was owing the banks billions of naira and millions of dollars before becoming a governor and within two years of becoming governor, without his company doing any business, he paid all that his businesses owed the banks?” Obasanjo queried.

“You are left to guess where the money came from. Having got away with that in the first term, he consigned to himself almost half of the state resources in the second term. He was a typical example of the goings-on at that level almost universally in the country with only a few exceptions.

“State resources are captured and appropriated to themselves with a pittance to staff and associates to close the mouths of those that could blow the whistle or raise alarm against them while in office and when they are out of office.

“The ones that are criminally ridiculous are the chief executives that deceive, lie and try to cover up on the realities and truth of action and inaction on contract awards, agreements, treaties, borrowings and forward sales of national assets. Such chief executives are unfit for the job they find themselves in,” he said.