I took a train trip from San Francisco to Palo Alto, the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, last week. Palo Alto is home to Stanford University, easily one of the leading universities on America’s west coast. It is also a very beautiful city, the stomping ground of billionaire businessmen who made their pile powering what is now known world-wide as the Information Technology revolution.

It was a pleasant train journey. It was a warm spring afternoon. The sun was out, bathing the streets in a golden hue. The railway line to Palo Alto passes through California’s Bay Area, a cluster of cities and towns on the edge of the stunningly beautiful San Francisco Bay. The Bay Area is famous for its progressive politics, enlightened and engaged citizenry, and billionaire businessmen noted for spending great piles of cash on worthy causes to make our common earth a better and kinder place.

As the train chugged comfortingly along, I became lost in reverie. Looking out of the window as town after town passed by, I saw ordinary women and men going about the daily, humdrum business of living: shopkeepers tending their wares, auto mechanics fiddling underneath cars with spanners and screw-drivers, ice-cream vendors meandering their pleasantly-coloured vans through somnolent, sun-dappled streets.

It was an idyllic scene, straight out of a picture book. The faces I saw on the streets were at ease, content. There was a sense of purpose here; a sense of order. Everything was in their proper place. It was then that it struck me that this was so because the citizens of the Bay Area are truly citizens; that is, they enjoy that most precious of human endowments – liberty.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the distinguished French political philosopher and writer, visited the United States in 1831 and made the perceptive point that the one remarkable feature of social life in that vast country was that its citizens had this compulsive habit of congregating in civic and communal associations to address their social and political problems.

The French philosopher had the insight that democracy was healthy and robust in America because her citizens were actively engaged in the daily governing of their lives by participating in town hall meetings, jury duty, social clubs, churches, self-help groups, and economic cooperatives. Tocqueville was to document his observations in his book Democracy In America, a powerful meditation on the civic well-springs of American democracy which remains a classic to this day.

The prosperity and contentment I saw in the streets of the cities and towns as my train made its leisurely way through the Bay Area to Palo Alto is the fruit of the civic spirit that the French thinker wrote about. Engaged citizens are free citizens. They are free because they are engaged in the daily business of making the social, political and economic decisions that touch their lives. Their forefathers took the words that Thomas Jefferson wrote on that august day American democracy was born seriously: That all men are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

I am not saying that America is heaven on earth. No. The country has its fair share of social problems. And this fact was brought home to me in all its immediacy when I arrived in the main campus of Stanford University in central Palo Alto that afternoon. Palestinian students were out on the streets in their numbers, holding a rally to mark the anniversary of the Nakba, the catastrophe they say befell them with the establishment of the State of Israel on their land. 

It happened that this was also the same week that Jewish-American students on the campus were marking the founding of modern Israel. Tension has been rising between both groups since the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001, and following on its heels, the American invasion of Iraq. But it is a comment on the strength of civic life in the Bay Area that the tension between Jews and Arabs here has not spilled into bloody brawls and nasty name-calling. Dialogue is on-going. There has not been a shortage of people of goodwill and commonsense on both sides working to orchestrate a politics of consensus and mutual empathy.

There is also the troubling rise of the religious hard right in American politics, preaching exclusion and intolerance of other views and life practices; the parlous condition of ethnic minority youth; the growing gap between the very rich and the struggling poor; and the convergence of a hard-headed military-industrial complex and the resurgent neo-conservative political elite that is now threatening the basic axioms of democratic politics in the country.

But it must also be said these powerful exclusionary forces are meeting their match in the civic culture that is still very much alive and well on the American street. This civic spirit has deep roots; it is also organic and thus is able to adapt and transform into new self-sustaining forms even as the country itself is transforming socially and economically.

Stanford University is the living embodiment of this civic spirit. Founded by Leland Stanford, a public-spirited California politician and businessman in 1891, the university went on to sire the thinkers and inventors who made Silicon Valley possible. And Silicon Valley is today the very font of America’s prosperity.  The moral here is clear: a robust civic culture nourishes democracy, which is another word for liberty. And liberty is the indispensable yeast with which prosperity is baked.

I was much gladdened when the US Ambassador gave a press conference last week and affirmed that his government would work with Nigerians within the provisions of the law to combat the scourge of corruption in high places in our country. But this column is asking for more. Corrupt politicians and civil servants do not drop from the sky. When the institutions and processes established to ensure transparency, accountability, and participatory government are corrupted, corrupt and self-seeking political actors invariably emerge and seize the reins of power.

You can sanction a thousand Governor Joshua Dariyes and deny them American visas. But as long as the political institutions that brought them to power in the first place are allowed to continue to rig elections and deny ordinary Nigerians real civic and political participation, corruption will still walk on sturdy legs in our country.

Mr. Ambassador, ordinary Nigerians will face a new round of elections in 2007. They are desirous that that event come to pass, and that those who harbour the desire in the secret places of their hearts to perpetuate themselves in office be told by the American government that the new Bush Doctrine of ‘Universal Democracy’ has no place for their narrow ambition.

Nigerians are also asking that the US government make it known to political actors that she would view with disfavour any attempt to rig the 2007 polls and foist on Nigerians yet another autocratic and self-serving band of politicians,’ the way General Babangida and his confederates foisted Olusegun Obasanjo on them in 1999.