You don’t come across the word ‘Leviathan’ everyday. It’s not a word you hear on the streets. Yet it describes the fundamental elements of societal organization. The Cambridge English  Dictionary defines ‘Leviathan’ as ‘something and someone that is extremely large and powerful’. Simply put, Leviathan is the opposite of fragmented and weak. The concept of Leviathan was made popular by Thomas Hobbes, in a book of the same title published in 1651.

In the 1651 book, Thomas Hobbes opined that nation states and governments emerge out of a desire by individuals in the state of nature to coalesce into stronger and bigger units for the purpose of eliminating conflicts between individuals in the course of exercise of individual natural rights. Whereas in the state of nature every person has a natural right to do anything one thinks necessary for preserving one’s own life, and life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, the sovereign that emerges after the adoption of the social contract has as its purpose the reigning-in of the natural desire of man to be evil, chaotic, and violent’.

Leviathan is a concept of voluntary surrender of individual liberties to a sovereign through a social contract on the premise that the sovereign guarantees collective security and general good of the governed. ‘Social contract, in political philosophy, is an actual or hypothetical compact, or agreement, between the ruled and their rulers, defining the rights and duties of each’. The underlying principle of this social contract is the guarantee of security and protection of the general good of the people. Other social contract theorists like John Locke and Jean Jack Rousseau expanded the social contract theory. They stated that ‘when the government fails to secure the natural rights (Locke) or satisfy the “general will” (Rousseau), citizens can withdraw their obligation to obey, or change the leadership through elections or other means.

The concept of Leviathan is premised on two major principles:

1. That the people voluntarily surrender their natural power to a sovereign through a social contract
2. And that the sovereign guarantees the Security and welfare of the governed. These underlying principles are the hallmarks of democracy.

The main question to ask as citizens of Nigeria at this point in time is if Nigeria truly qualifies as a sovereign given the underlying principles of Leviathan. Whatever we think is the outcome of this first question will ultimately lead to the nagging question facing all of us as Nigerians. The question of available options where the sovereign fails in the performance of its duties.

30^th November 2020