Time & Perspective Quote by Ibrahim Babangida

There is a cold, transactional realism embedded in Babangida's phrasing: democracy here is not a moral calling, but a risk-management project built out of "sad experience". That opening clause functions like a shield. It invites assent by implying the speaker has learned hard lessons from national trauma, while quietly pre-empting questions about responsibility for that trauma. In a country where coups, aborted transitions, and political violence have repeatedly broken civic trust, "history" becomes both evidence and alibi.

The line "we require" does important political work. It suggests a collective mandate, as if the demand for democracy rises naturally from the people and the state together. But in the mouth of a military-era statesman, the plural can also read as managerial: the governing class defining what the nation needs, on its own timetable. "Nothing short of a foundation" is the language of engineering, not emancipation. It reframes democracy as architecture: stable only if experts pour the concrete first. That move can justify gradualism, extended "transition" programs, and controls in the name of preventing relapse into chaos.

"Lasting democracy" is the punchline and the hedge. It concedes that previous democratic moments were brittle, even illusory, without naming who made them so. The sentence sells restraint as virtue: slow, institution-first politics as the antidote to instability. In the Nigerian context associated with Babangida's own complicated legacy, that’s precisely why it works rhetorically and why it lands with suspicion. It promises permanence while keeping power’s terms off the page.