“Today, we have democracy, which is the government of a small number of people, by a small number of people over a large number of people, who are deprived of what they need to have in life,” former President Olusegun Obasanjo declared at a colloquium in Abuja.

It was an event to mark the 60th birthday of PDP stalwart and former Governor Emeka Ihedioha.

“That is not democracy that will endure,” stated Mr Obasanjo as he trashed the reign of democracy under the All Progressives Congress, specifically aiming his blows at President Bola Tinubu’s “corrupt” mode of democratic rule.

The former president himself had been accused of corrupt enterprise during his two terms in office.

Referencing Mr Tinubu’s infamous power grab principle, the former military head of state, who was during his tenure as a democratically elected president was repeatedly accused of seeking a third term in office by hook or crook, but he denied the allegation, said, “It is, I am because I can grab. What sort of democracy brings you and you grab everything and then illegally, corruptly and you say, go to court? When you know that even in the court, you cannot get justice.”

Mr Tinubu, then-presidential candidate of the APC, had in 2022 given a charge to some top party operatives in London, stating, “Political power is not going to be served in a restaurant. They don’t serve it a la carte. At all costs, fight for it, grab it and run with it.”

Mr Obasanjo added, “It’s not that democracy is failing, democracy is dying and if we are going to make democracy not to die, we have to look at democracy in the context and in the contentof Africa. I hope that we will get to that stage so that democracy, which will deliver, will be the democracy that we will have in Africa.”

The former president espoused that democracy is meant to be a system of government “that delivers and delivers to all the people, not just a section of the people, not just a few.”

“But what do we have today?

“I believe since we’ve gone past the Greek democracy, which brought everybody to the square and everybody has a say in the decision making, which affected everybody, democracy has now become representative democracy and representative democracy has not taken care of everybody,” Mr Obasanjo noted.