Chief Promoter of the Alternative, Otunba Segun Showunmi, has submitted that liberal democratic model “is struggling to deliver the developmental outcomes that once justified its global prestige.”
In an article titled ’Can Authoritarianism Build Faster’, Showunmi argued that the democratic promise of freedom and accountability is “increasingly undermined” by “institutional fatigue.”
“Democracies today are louder but less effective. They produce elections, but not direction; expression, but not execution,” the public affairs analyst said.
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According to him, authoritarian nations are developing faster than democracies, arguing that concentrated authority, when competently applied, delivers results with a speed and precision that liberal systems often fail to achieve.
He examined what he called the “efficiency paradox” — the ability of non-democratic systems to achieve large-scale development despite global preference for democracy.
The chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) questioned why centralised states such as China, Singapore, and South Korea during their developmental years could mobilise resources, plan long-term, and implement large projects effectively, while many democratic governments remained trapped in cycles of debate and delay.
“The question is not moral but empirical. Concentrated authority, when competent and strategically deployed, has proven capable of generating growth at a speed liberal democracies can rarely match,” he said.
He noted that China’s rapid economic transformation, which lifted over 800 million people out of poverty within four decades, demonstrates the potential of a coordinated governance model. He compared this with the gridlock and short-termism that often characterised democratic institutions.
According to him, the world must begin to assess governments not by ideology but by performance and their ability to improve lives, reduce poverty, and expand opportunity.
Showunmi clarified that his position was not an endorsement of authoritarianism but a call for democracy to evolve into a more decisive, performance-oriented model.
“These are not rejections of democracy, but recalibrations of it. If democracies cannot deliver tangible prosperity, they risk ceding both moral and practical ground to systems they have long dismissed as inferior,” he warned.
He concluded that while democracy remains a noble aspiration, it must prove its worth in the modern age by combining freedom with efficiency and direction with delivery.
