Today we are compelled by the hopelessness of the Nigerian situation to question what governance is and its essence. This is because governance has been the greatest culprit responsible for Nigeria’s crises of allegiance. What the essence of government is in Nigeria, has been subject to practical interpretations that seem to support the crises by successive Nigerian governments. This would naturally lead to questions as to what constitutes the essence of government.
The essence of government in human society has received treatment in magnificent treatises across time. Plato’s Republic spent its life constructing a rule by the best elements of the polis. Aristotelian Political philosophy was equally not left out of this. That was in Antiquity. St. Augustine followed the Platonic vision in his ‘Civitate Dei’, while Aquinas tried to baptise Aristotle all the way. That was the medieval current, which had other great proponents. Thomas Paine, Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Jefferson and other political theorists took up the gauntlet in the modern period trying to crunch out the most plausible explanation of the essence of government. We can submit with the benefit of hindsight that all their attempts all contributed to the broadening of modern horizons and frontiers of what constitutes good government and the reasons undergirding its necessity in human society. But be that as it may, The Hobbessian-Spinozian axis is a great candidate for our vote. Government originated in human need to preserve himself in being. Government was inspired by the need for security.
Governance is the ordinance of reason sculpted to facilitate man’s navigation of the minefields generously strewn on the highroads and backwoods of his social existence. It is an invention of the human congenital craving not to self-destruct. To this end, the ontology of governance resides in the human evolutionary blueprint. And any political hermeneutics that seeks this ontological origin must necessarily plumb the core of the human phenomenon; around that lean interface between the human instinct of self-preservation and the human deployment of rationality. Being almost the weakest of all beings in physical morphology and stature, nature compensated man with reason to facilitate survival. Instinct and reason both commanded self preservation as the principal law, which the human being must obey, or grow instantly extinct. Self preservation hardwired man for survival. This craving identified by Baruch de Spinoza as “Connatus Essendi” compels man to secure and preserve himself and his posterity in being. It commands man to consult every contrivance, convoke every resource, rally every skill, and deploy every endowment to ensure his subsistence in being.
This propensity drove man out of the narrow insularities of polarized solipsism native to the state of nature, where his life as fearfully articulated by Thomas Hobbes, is solitary, nasty, brutish, and short; to embrace his fellows in society. He then hewed society out of the crooked timbre of individual micro-universes, and shapes their tangents for social co-operation.
Left alone to his contrivances, man falls prey to the elements, or succumbs to the predators, which actively seek his annihilation. But when he conglomerates as society, he contrives a cohesive bond of relationships, meanings and significances, which protects him against his primordial foes, and underwrites his ascent to the heights of auto-transcendence. Evolutionary survival could be said to have baked into the core of his genetic blueprint a tendency towards gregariousness, which makes society possible.
To forestall a decline into the social jungle where anarchy presides, man invented governance, as the creator of social legitimacy and regulator of social conduct and relations. Anarchy ensures that the possibility of violent death lurks in every fissure and cranny of social interaction. This fact abides legendary articulation in the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.
In the Hobbessian construct, the fear of violent death led man into rethinking the presumptions that under gird his solipsistic existence. The necessary conclusion was that each individual need to sublease his rights and some responsibilities to the Leviathan, who should hold it in trust and exercise it on our behalf for the benefit of all and sundry. To this end, government became an invention of human desire not to self-destruct. Democracy as time has proved rose to become its most eminent progeny.
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