Being Text of a Keynote Address Delivered by HE Dr Kayode Fayemi, CON, at the Conference on Redesigning Democracy Held at the University of Oxford on Thursday 20 October, 2022.

1. Alternative Politics, Political Alternatives, and Innovative
Social Change in Nigeria
Being Text of a Keynote Address Delivered by HE Dr Kayode Fayemi, CON, at the
Conference on Redesigning Democracy Held at the University of Oxford on Thursday
20 October, 2022.
Protocols
Let me first and foremost thank the organisers of this conference for the kind invitation
extended to me to be part of the proceedings. In effect, this will be my first substantive
engagement in the few days since I handed over the baton of leadership in Ekiti State
and the Nigeria Governors’ Forum. Although much more time is needed for me to
process the totality of my experience for the purpose of informing our collective
understanding of power and politics in contemporary Nigeria, and despite my urgent
personal need for a quality holiday, I welcomed your invitation as an early
opportunity to contribute to ongoing reflections about the need to rethink democracy
generally and, more specifically, our framing of alternatives in the administration of
public affairs in Nigeria and, indeed, around the world.
My point of departure is to suggest that while there is no doubt that alternatives are a
necessary, and even an inevitable component, of any living political system, it is
important that as scholars and practitioners, we strive also at all times to demystify
them from the excessive air of drama and circumstance in which they tend to be
wrapped in scholarly discourses. This is for the simple reason that alternatives exist
and are mobilised everyday and at all levels as part of our experiences of governance.
In other words, alternatives, understood generally as encompassing forward-looking
vision and practice that depart from a dominant but problematic and/or contested
norm, are an integral part of everyday politics - and, indeed, all spheres of human
endeavour.
Although they are fired by an admixture of vision, passion, and necessity, and, in
highly repressive political contexts, would require to be pursued with courage and
sacrifice, alternatives are also played out simultaneously at multiple levels - micro,
meso, and macro. Additionally, they are carried by different actors - big and small,
formal and informal, and domestic and external. Alternatives also manifest and are

2. played out in different spaces - local, national, and even global, and at various points
in times. They are the underlying drivers of the dialectics of political change. In their
intersection within a polity, they may translate into revolutionary moments of political
renewal that arrest our attention. However, in most instances, they are also pursued
“silently” with no less significant consequences for overall governance. Whether
expressed in macro-national revolutionary terms or carried out “silently” in various
localised spaces, alternatives are an embodiment of the agency of the people in all their
diversities.
In our highly justified desire for a radical transformation of politics and power in
Africa, including Nigeria, we very often set our sights almost exclusively at forms and
levels of engagement that capture mostly the dramatic and the revolutionary on a
grand national scale. This slanted approach to the mapping of change dynamics has
been reinforced in recent years by such dramatic events as the so-called Arab Spring
that swept through parts of North Africa and the Middle East, producing gripping
moments which were served to us directly in our homes by global television,
including the spectacular toppling of long-running political dictatorships and power
dynasties. I suggest that even at that, underlying these grand events are an array of
ordinarily anonymous or nondescript local forces, such as the neigbourhood
committees, professional associations, womens’ groups, and youth networks, that
were either already quietly immersed in or became converted to the quest for political
alternatives and alternative forms of politics.
If the quest for alternatives is integral to everyday life and everyday politics, rather
than only expressing or manifesting itself in dramatic moments of revolutionary
change, then it seems to me that the strategic approaches we take to governance and
the questions we ask must necessarily be different. This was a key consideration that
fired my interest in the 1990s as we Nigerians pondered the issue of how best to
overcome the prolonged scourge of military rule that had become a threat to national
cohesion and continuity, apart from its many other failings. For me personally, as a
civil society/social movement activist, that period was crunch time on how best to
carry forward a struggle that had successfully hobbled continued military rule and
opened up real prospects for a return to civilian rule and elected government.
Many of the Nigerians and students of Nigeria here will know that our country has a
rich history of social movements with an impressive record of resistance against
oppressive policies and rulership. However, there was always an historic challenge

3. that faced the movement: How to convert resistance into power with which to push
the alternatives around which militants were mobilised. That same challenge was
posed in the lead-up to the birth of the Fourth Republic: A social movement that was
strong and organised enough to make a change in national governance impossible to
avoid but not powerful enough to impose its alternative as the viable path for the
country to follow. In part, this problem was reflective of the conception of change in
the ranks of the movement as a totalising process that needed to happen on a macro-
national and pan-Nigerian scale at the same time and all at once.
Let me quickly forestall a misunderstanding: Collective pan-Nigerian territorial
change of the kind that will overturn a history of socio-economic underdevelopment
and governance underperformance remains the historic duty of all those who seek the
rebirth of our country and continent in unity, justice, peace, progress, and security.
However, achieving this goal did not require an indefinite wait for the day when like-
minded actors across the Niger would be able to create the national movement and
momentum to translate opposition and resistance into national power. While the
search for such a national change process was going on, it made eminent sense to seek
to promote alternatives in various other sites where we could effectively already begin
to make a difference. And this is exactly what some like-minded people like me and
others decided to do in making the transition from civil society to political society.
As a frontline political party actor since 2005, a two-term governor, a two-term Chair
of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, and a Minister in the federal cabinet, I am able to
state without equivocation that at different levels, in various domains, and through
many mechanisms, it was possible - and valiant efforts were made - to promote
localised alternatives in the political process and governance system. That these were
localised did not make them any less necessary or significant; they impacted many
and also set a new tone and tenor for politics, governance, and the interpretation of
citizenship. Examples of such changes are many - and will be fully documented in due
course - but I note here, for now, that in Ekiti State, to use that specific example, we
were successful on several fronts in shifting the overall template of governance and
resetting aspects of public administration.
Some of the changes we effected include: a) The restoration of a merit-based system
of recruitment into the civil serve as we sought to rebuild state capacity and public
administration; b) A raft of interventions to empower women, blunt gender
discrimination, protect the girl child, and stem gender-based violence; c) the

4. introduction of core social policies as a first step towards a new state-society compact
- including a social security benefit system for the elderly; the institutionalisation of a
state development plan, a system of public sector performance evaluation, and the
curation of global good practices in the administration of public affairs; major
investments in the restoration of values and ethics in everyday governance; efforts at
restoring the civic culture in political competition; the adoption of a transition law
aimed at strengthening continuity in governance and development despite
administrative turnovers; the fostering of inter-generational engagements with a view
to cementing a system of orderly succession, leadership recruitment, and mentorship,
etc.
The initiatives taken were numerous and spanned various spheres of policy and
governance. Inevitably, some required experimentation, adaptation, and innovation.
Others were simply commonsensical or required us to learn from established good
practices. In some cases, we registered immediate results. In others, expected results
were slower in coming on account of ossified cultures that needed to be dissolved. Yet
others are still work in progress. In all cases, they allowed us, within specific domains,
sectors, and areas, as part of an overall strategy of change and progress, to
demonstrate the feasibility of political alternatives and to practice alternative politics.
Both endeavours were not without their challenges. Doing things, anything,
differently ruffles feathers, high and low.
Many a stakeholder may be more invested in instant results as opposed to medium-
to-long-term outcomes - remember the metaphor of “stomach infrastructure” as
against physical infrastructure development. After years of failed promises, a cross
section of the populace is steeped in cynicism about intentions. Assembling a team of
loyal fellow travellers ready for the long haul has its own challenges. The import of all
of the foregoing is that alternatives also have their own politics which must be played
right for the changes in form and substance that are envisaged to have a chance of
succeeding and making a difference. This fact immediately broaches upon the
question of the strategy for change management that is adopted in a context in which
the harvest is plentiful but the labourers are not only few, but even the ones available
are poorly equipped and motivated. The would-be change maker is, therefore, also
immediately confronted with critical issues of timing, phasing, and sequencing in the
quest to drive an agenda of alternatives in policy, politics, and praxis.

5. I suggest that one of the difficulties that would-be change makers have had to deal
with in the period since the birth of Nigeria's Fourth Republic centres, inter alia, on
the problem of timing, phasing, and sequencing. I argue also that the politics of
alternatives at any and every level requires alliance and coalition-building to
undergird change processes. Furthermore, it will be foolhardy to assume that a ready-
made and willing constituency for alternatives is in place in spite of the impression
often created on social media; when crunch time arrives and the demands of change
begun to be felt, the herd very often disperses amidst a crisis of expectations. Political
and civic education must, therefore, go hand-in-hand with policies and leadership so
that alternatives can find enduring anchorage in an organic constituency. For, even
under the best of circumstances, active citizenship will need to be mobilised on an
ongoing basis in order to sustain alternatives that negate established practices rooted
in cronyism, maladministration, and various abuses.
In contextualising alternatives, it would be remiss of me not to make a few remarks
on what is now being described as "alternative politics" or a "third force" in Nigeria's
contemporary electoral politics. The present context of electoral politics in Nigeria is
dominated by citizens who are, for many reasons, disillusioned with mainstream
political parties which they blame squarely for not delivering democracy dividends.
In that frustration, not a few, particularly in the younger age bracket, have embraced
Peter Obi who is the Presidential candidate of the Labour Party, a hitherto fringe party
established by the trade unions, as the candidate of "alternative politics." The extent
to which what is happening in the Labour Party can be described as alternative politics
is, of course, open to debate. In my own well-considered estimation, all things
considered, the Obi phenomenon and all that is happening in Labour Party are being
played out within the framework of an established national political status quo that is
primarily, if not solely, dedicated to competing for political power with others in the
field.
If alternative politics must be taken as a wholesale reform of our political system, and
we are interested in the codification of a system of alternative politics that is
consensual and developmental, then perhaps the argument to put forward, as a first
step, is that our electoral system may need to be re-engineered away from the current
majoritarian "winner takes all" model. Indeed, whichever political party wins the 2023
general elections, one can readily predict its going to be a close race. Imagining a race
in which the eventual winner scales through with a 50.5 percent of the vote just as we
recently witnessed in Kenya, it does not require a seer to predict that such an outcome

6. is unlikely to enhance stability of the polity, let alone allow the militants of alternatives
to thrive in our search for a national rebirth.
My sojourn in politics so far convinces me that any strategy for building sustainable
democracy in a plural and divided society such as Nigeria must place a premium on
electoral systems that will promote accommodation and inclusivity as a way of
ensuring that the fractures and frictions that obstruct national change-making are
blunted and dislodged. In the age of populism, elections help shape broader norms of
political behaviour and we are already witnessing centrifugal, inter-ethnic and inter
religious tensions as we move towards the 2023 elections. That is why as a first step,
since we are unlikely to see any change in electoral reform before the election, my own
view is that regardless of the outcome of the election, it would help if a national unity
government is the eventual product, one that is consensus-driven with a clearly
agreed agenda for broad-ranging reformation and transformation. This is especially
so if the outcome of the election is not overwhelmingly definitive.
This is why I see the debate about political alternatives and alternative politics a
superfluous one. Important as they are, the institutions of direct state power and
electoralism are just the tip of the iceberg in the democratisation complex. Indeed,
genuine democracy ought to rest on a much richer ecology of associational and
organisational life and should be nourished and reproduced through every-day
struggles of the citizens. But when we broadly define the everyday struggles as simply
the handiwork of 'civil society' as in the EndSARS or Occupy Nigeria movements, we
strip them bare of their spontaneity and deeper meaning and romanticise 'civil
society' as the rationally ordered, codified and all-knowing alternative to government
and overplay our abilities as activists to counter the inherent inequities of class and
markets. Even worse, we are presented or we present ourselves as antidotes to the ills
of democratisation, which is why single issue causes like EndSARS have been hugely
successful in form but exaggerated in their expectations and eventual outcomes. The
reason for this crisis of exaggerated expectation that activists suffer is not far-fetched.
The truth is that as long as we live in the post-Westphalian world of sovereign states,
we exaggerate the ability of the civil society to stand up to the power of the nation-
state or the mega corporations on its own steam.
This is why I am not sure that the solution to the current deficit that our democracy is
experiencing can be solved with posing activism as a counterpunch to politics. For
autonomous institutions to play a different role in mediating citizens' democratic

7. choices, their organic development must be combined in a more nuanced manner and
a more systematic way with the use of public and state power. The choice is therefore
simple: one can continue to snipe on the fringe and complain that government is not
listening to the yearnings of the people. Alternatively, one can stop agonising about
missed opportunities and organise in a manner that places citizens as drivers of
change in our quest to restore communitarian values and a future of hope and
possibilities for our people.
I have taken the pain of working us through the fact that the politics of alternatives
occur at various levels in part because it allows for a more precise assessment of
prospects for innovation and transformation in 2023 based on the lessons of
experience. Here, the two final points I would like to emphasise are as follows: First,
our primary challenge at this time is not so much that alternatives are absent. Far from
it. Since 1999, various alternatives have been tried out and continue to be
experimented. Even now, leading consociationalists see the current Nigerian
presidentialism as a good case study in electoral reform in managing conflict in
divided societies. The policies and politics of alternatives are, however, unevenly
spread over time and space. This fact partly explains the variegated geometry of
change which we are witnessing in the country.
The second point I would like to make is that for far too long, our political culture has
perpetuated the myth that strong and charismatic leaders - the Obi phenomenon - can
bring about change single-handedly - rather than convert the formal authority derived
from their electoral mandate into a process of democratic renewal. Based on my own
direct involvement and practical experience, on the field, innovative social change can
only occur with a leadership dedicated to motivating people to solve problems within
their own communities, rather than reinforcing the over-lordship of the state over its
citizens. The main challenge of political leadership in this context therefore is to
reconnect democratic choices with people's day-to-day experience and to extend
democratic principles to everyday situations in citizens' communities and
constituencies.
Considering where we are today in Nigeria, it is my proposition that the next big
challenge which history beckons on us all to respond to is how dispersed sites and
actors of the alternatives can be meaningfully united and forged into a national
movement of enduring change in which Nigerians across different geographies can
recognise themselves.

8. What my colleagues and I did in Ekiti under my overall stewardship had its place and
will continue to remain relevant. Similar efforts as we deployed in Ekiti have been
played out and are still ongoing in various states of the federation. These efforts would
need to be united as part of a broad leadership consensus for national rebirth. Doing
so will require its own politics and a visionary type of leadership that is able to rise
above faction and fraction to project a new national imagination.
I thank you all for your kind attention