Watching this smooth British government handover, from the Prime Minister stepping down speech at Downing Street, to going to handover power to the king at Buckingham Palace, going through a few symbolic routines, reaffirms my belief that African political systems must be civilizational democracies, one in which cultural stakeholders are the engine and gatemen that the political stakeholders must pass through.
Politicians must be subjected to some civilizational values, and not unhinged civilizational almajiris parading as Eurocentric Universalists. Short term stakeholders must be fashioned by long term cultural and moral values. Most important, our short term professional politicians must have another August non-competitive body that can hold them accountable, otherwise absolute power will corrupt the system.
Even the US democracy that we copy is firmly attached to the Greco-Roman Western civilization, especially the British Monarchy that all US presidents have to visit. A river that forgets it’s source runs dry.
Our electoral system must be guaranteed and fashioned by our civilizational gatemen – our long term paramount cultural stakeholders for it to be truly representative. The Nigerian Traditional Council co-chaired by Ooni of Ife and Sultan of Sokoto should be the ones incharge of INEC and transition of power between politicians. Otherwise, our electoral bodies will never be independent and pro-people.
Our cultural identity and traditional politics must be constitutionalized along with Western ‘secular’ political system of politicians and civil servants, in order to continue and strengthen our moral and cultural values. European colonists need for centralization of power to exploit our human and natural resources led to the de-constitutionalized our traditional polities that were based on polycentrism. For example, though Ooni of Ife was the civilizational head, he had no direct control of other Obas and their kingdoms, as long as they keep to shared shares cultural and moral values.
The de-constitutionalization of our traditional polities led to the separate two publics across the Blackworld – one made up of neocolonists guards to protect the neocolonial economic and political systems and the other with our traditional institutions and knowledge banks that was de-constitutionalized, leading to continued coloniality of knowledge and power sources, being and economy.
Everywhere across the Blackworld, we have unfair, corrupt and sometimes violent unruly political systems, in which the politicians are the richest while the people are poor and ignorant. Using retired judges and academia to monitor INEC as suggested by some, will still culturally unhinge the political system since they belong to the neocolonial public that doesn’t reflect cultural identities.
We must depart from the political epistemicide that distracts us into 500 unwieldily tribal units and settle down with a manageable two civilizational political system – Original African and Afro-Arabic civilizations. Your civilization is your link to humanity as a whole, not your tribe. The shared genetic and cultural values of your family and clan makes you a tribe, the shared values of your tribe makes you a civilization, and the shared values of civilizations makes us human. Unfortunately, coloniality makes us want to link our tribes to global civilizations that conquered us.
Instead of 500 ethnicities and self centered politicians haphazardly negotiating with civilizational blocs, especially South and Middlebelt cultural custodians should unite along shared cultural and genetic values into civilizations to present a strong sociopolitical and economic bloc for a smooth share of power with the Afro-Arabic North civilization.
