Who then are we? We include every citizen of Nigeria that has had the privilege of being literate and capable of understanding the present and future danger that existentially threatens the country. The present conditions in Nigeria are alarming enough to compel urgent collective action that can democratically rebalance powers in our Politics and move our democracy quickly toward a Competitive Democracy in which the electorate can match the politicians in power and influence to determine the common good of the country and people. A deliberate and strategic response is required to achieve such a political transformation. The menu of actions required are structural and systemic at three levels: one, the Demand Side, two, the Supply Side and three, the Political Environment. The success of such a #FixPolitics or #InnovatePolitics agenda in Nigeria can easily provide an adaptable template for similar structural political change in other African countries; and may be even the rest of the world.
During our Work Study Group RoundTable on 22 October 2019 in Berlin at the Robert Bosch Academy, we discussed a baseline presentation on the outlines of a vision that can help fix Nigeria’s broken politics. The objective is to end the impediment that bad politics poses to Good Governance in Nigeria and other countries in Africa. #FixPolitics is a democratic pathway designed and executed as a *Big Push* for structural political change by a Citizens’ Collective. It represents a new way of thinking and engaging the existing political order by citizens acting in a collaborative and systemic way to produce sustained change that guarantees democratic progress and individual wellbeing of the majority. What our countries need is a positive kind of political disruption; that is, “a way of thinking that produces an unconventional strategy, leaving competitors scrambling to catch up. A way of thinking that turns consumer (citizens’) expectations upside down and takes an industry (a country) into its next generation”.
At the October 2019 meeting, guided by the adoption of economics types of market as a theoretical framework for understanding and fixing Nigeria’s politics the participants discussed and signed up to any of three components of actions that can structurally redesign politics and its outcomes and further asked each participant to select their preference.
