Why Exactly Do We Practise The US Presidential System of Government?

I had an Afro-American colleague back in the day when I lived in the US.

One day at work he was asking me about Nigeria, and somehow the discussion got to the political system we practise.

I told him we practise the US Presidential System of government.

He looked at me in shock and said ''You do what....?''

The guy was utterly disgusted.

''What the hell is wrong with you Africans? When will you grow some dignity and balls and stand on your own damn feet? You had working empires and kingdoms before the white man got there. Why the hell do y'all need to copy their system of government? Why can't you devise yours? And you wonder why there's corruption and nothing works there? Get the fck outta here, you dumbass motherfckers!!!''

That was when it occurred to me that we had come to see our foreign dependency syndrome as 'normal'.

But the outside world sees it as very strange and abnormal.

They see it as a sign of weakness, and a declaration of intellectual deficiency and surrender.

The British colonialists did a real job on us. They seriously messed up our way of thinking.

They even had our judges and lawyers wearing their imported blonde wigs till today, and we see nothing wrong with it!!

Thank goodness I didn't reveal that to my Afro-American pal. He would have chased me out of the room!

How can it be that a nation of 200 million Africans cannot (or rather refuses to) sit down and devise a workable, homegrown political system?

Why the hell does it feel the need to travel thousands of miles across the ocean to see how white foreigners govern themselves - a totally different culture - and then copy it wholesale to implement in Nigeria, a totally different culture?

And then when, naturally, the system fails to work in your country the way it works in the country you copied it from, you start to attack your 'leaders', attack yourselves, hate other ethnic groups, and even attack your race, for being 'useless'.

WHO WILL SAVE US FROM THIS BLINDNESS?

Hmmmmm I've nothing to say

The American Founding Fathers who sat down to devise their system of govt and constitution... they did it based on ancient inherited European governance systems, based on European culture and heritage.

So how can you in Africa stand up and say ''I'm going to America to copy their system of government to implement here in Nigeria!'

What the hell is wrong with us??

If we were looking for outside inspiration (for whatever reason), all we should have done is said ''Oh..Ok, so the US founding fathers sat down and developed a system derived from their European culture and heritage. Fine! Great! Now let us devise OUR system based on OUR African culture and heritage.''

Simple! That's all we needed to do, and most of the problems we have today, we would not have them.

I mean, it's almost as if someone put us in a trance or under a spell of some kind, such that something that is so blindingly obvious to everyone else, including my AA pal, seems so... invisible to us.

Kai.

kai!!! early morning tea

U remembered what happened to one of our Africa leaders Col Ghadafi of Libya rt? The West will come n knock at your door that u must practice their system n failure to do that u are gone.

shugabasbn:
U remembered what happened to one of our Africa leaders Col Ghadafi of Libya rt? The West will come n knock at your door that u must practice their system n failure to do that u are gone.

Not sure I accept this reason at all. The western pushback would be there of course, but we could have done more after independence to re-instate our African governance protocols, updated to meet the modern dispensation.

I think the real way the British impacted us was mentally, through their (mis)education system, such that we ourselves lost the knowledge of, and belief in the efficacy of our pre-colonial administrative systems.

But you only need to read a good history book to learn that we had proper sophisticated systems of governance that included powerful checks and balances, and multiple checks on the authority of leaders. These features were common in ALL our respective systems of governance from north to south and west to east in the precolonial era. So including them in a home grown constitution would have been very easy and workable.

Instead, we completely ignored all that rich history, and took off to America to copy their system verbatim to use here.

And we wonder why we are having problems?