VOICE OF COURAGE: Selected speeches of Obafemi Awolowo (Vol 2)

Continued from last week

A developing country has a yawning gulf of extreme poverty to bridge and cross before it can start on the long and arduous journey which leads to the delectable goal of a per capita income equal to one-quarter of the per capita income in the United States. This is a formidable task which calls for bold and meticulous planning and fearless execution. But, as we all know, capitalism as a spouse has never taken affectionately to a planning husband.

At any rate, in order to ensure peace, stability and permanent integration among its units, a developing country must declare, in its constitution, economic and social objectives which are bold, inspiring, and variegated, and which are telescoped into a shorter period of time than any developed country will care to attempt.

All that we have said, thus far, under this head would appear to savour too much of real-politic. We are certainly not forgetful of the teaching that ‘man does not live by bread alone’, which is the same as saying that the non-material aspect of the aims and objects of a state is equally important.

If we may repeat the analogy, which we have made before, in  another form, we will assert that no partnership, or human association of any kind whatsoever, will last for long if the officers in charge are in the habit of invading and trampling on the rights of other members and subjecting them to indignity or inhuman treatment.

Every member of any human association has rights, intangible though they are, which are sacred and inalienable, and which must be protected against any invasion, at all costs. In a state: such rights are termed fundamental human rights. In order to discharge one of its primary functions of maintaining internal order and security, and to ensure its own solidarity and survival, every state must recognise, and guarantee to all its citizens, the fundamental rights of man.

In some developed countries, these rights are recognised as a result of immemorial customs, and the Courts scrupulously enforce them as such. .

Experience, however, has shown that in developing countries, those•rights must be fully set out and entrenched in a written constitution, if they are to have any chance at all of due recognition and enforcement. But experience has also shown that, where, in any country whether developed or developing, these rights have not been duly recognised, protected and enforced, people have resorted to self-redress, leading to large-scale violence, bloodshed, and killing.

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It is, therefore, of exceeding importance that in a developing country, fundamental human rights should be entrenched in the constitution, and provisions for their inviolable protection and impartial enforcement should also be clearly set out and entrenched.

4. FORM OF GOVERNMENT: Mankind, in its long and tedious progression since the beginning of recorded history, has tried various forms of government such as theocracy, gerontocracy, autocracy, oligarchy, tyranny, ochlocracy, democracy, etc. From all available historical evidence, however it is clear that the best of them all is democracy. This proposition is substantiated by the fact that even those who practise autocracy, tyranny, or oligarchy, are so conscious of the inferiority of this form of government that they give it the label of democracy, in order to pass it off, to their fellow-citizens and foreign observers, as the ideal.

The inherent characteristic of democracy, which distinguishes it from any other form of government, is that it posits the ultimate principle that political power or sovereignty belongs to the entire people of a state rather than to the few or the one, and that it is the entire people of the state who are entitled to exercise this power for their own benefit.

No country in the world, from antiquity to the present day, has attained to this ideal of direct democracy. The Greek city-state of antiquity, because of its small size, went very close to attaining the ideal. In nine of the Swiss cantons, direct democracy is practised to the extent only that a referendum is mandatory for all legislation.

The advent of nation-states and multi nation-states has made it much more difficult to practise anything resembling the democracy of the Swiss cantons or that of ancient Greece.

But in its efforts towards the attainment of the ideal, mankind has evolved a representative or indirect democracy. In this form of democracy the adult members of the state periodically elect some persons from among themselves who are charged with responsibility for the making and execution of laws for the state, and for its general day-to-day administration.

To be continued