"Democracy" -,a coinage of two Greek words- ("demo",meaning ,"people" and "kratia", meaning, "power")means government through the people's representatives,elected into public offices to represent the overall interests of the electorates.
Also, the 16th President of the United States Of America- Abraham Lincoln, in his Gettysburg address,adumbrated further on the concept to denote,"government of the people,by the people,for the people".
The city-states of the ancient Greece empire (Thebes,Sparta,Athens and Corinth) were acephalous and sovereign political entities,that is,they were republics.Due to the trammelled population of the city-states,a direct democratic system was adopted.Direct democracy,to the Greeks implies that every adult Greek is constitutionally accorded the inalienable rights to participate in the processes of the day to day administration of the city-states.consequently,they usually converge in an arena to make consensus decisions on matters bordering on their city- states.Thus,every adult citizen was represented.However,as their,population increased due to high birth-rates and the inundating influxes of foreigners (the mettics), there was a conspicuous need to adopt a representative government by the people's elected public officials.
The question on whether the Nigerian democracy is a reality or myth can only be decided by examining the pre and post- colonial inchoate democracy of Nigeria.Prior to the advent of British imperialists on African soil and the consequent amalgamation of Southern and Northern protectorates and the Colony of Lagos in 1914,the pockets of Emirates,Towns,Empires,Chiefdoms and Kingdoms that were in existence in the South, the North and the West were sovereign political entities that were not subservient to alien domination.By means of superior firearms,British imperialists subjugated the locals and administered them through the Lord Lugard's "Indirect Rule"system- which is a system of political administration through the people's traditional systems.
The indirect rule system was greeted with an inundating success in the North,a partial success in the West and a monumental failure in the Following the liquidation of colonialism and Britain's recognition of Nigeria as a sovereign state on 1/10/1960,the nation first experimented with the Parliamentary or Westminster system of government with Sir Tafawa Balewa as Prime Minister and Nnamdi Azikiwe as ceremonial head of government in the first republic (1960-1966).
The Balewa/Azikiwe-led government was sacked by a military coup that truncated the first republic wherein the nation's first Prime Minister was assassinated as well as the cream of the society that made-up the first republic.The Col.Nzeogwu kaduna-led coup was perceived by Northerners to be an Igbo coup.This was so because no politician of Igbo extraction was assassinated. In his (Tafawa Balewa)stead,Col.J.T.U.Ironsi was installed as the nation's new military head of state.The loopsided coup of Jan.15,1966 and Ironsi's investiture soon birth a counter-coup by a crop of soldiers of Northern extraction in the Nigerian Military.This coup and counter-coup soon truncated the nation's embryonic democracy and further plunged the nation into a three-year warfare following Ojukwu's secessionist declaration for a sovereign state of Biafra.The war for the continued preservation of the Nigerian federalism cost the nation well over 2,000000 lives and the unquantifiable destruction of lives and properties.After the war,the nation struggled to develop at a snail-pace from one military dictatorship to another.
In modern times,a lot of vices have bedeviled the Nigerian democracy.They range from corruption, thuggery, vote-buying,ballot-box hijackings,killings, maiming, sycophancy,god-fatherism, ethnicity and ethnocracy,regionalism,nepotism,state/local government-joint account,lack of autonomy for local governments,inter alia-have all worked towards marring the Nigerian democracy especially when compared to democratic systems of other climes, especially those of First World Countries.In view of these,it leaves no one in doubt that the nation's democracy is a misnomer or pseudo democracy.