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By Olusola Aderinokun
When the clouds begin to gather, rain might be inevitable. But look at it this way, if you keep sending the wrong things into the sky, don’t be surprised if you get acid rain, with catastrophic consequences.
At no other time in the history of this nation has the country been this much on the edge, not even when the nation was at war. With so much insecurity, this can only be put down to the blatant ineptitude of government.
The onus is on the political parties to put up the right options so that Nigerians have a plethora of credible candidates to choose from. With the margin for error becoming ever so slim, can Nigerians afford another costly mistake in 2023?
We do not need to have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea in 2023, we need to have good choices.
The question is: what will qualify a candidate as appropriate, given the Nigerian situation at the moment? Remember, if we keep drawing from a pool of handicaps, the chances of picking something whole is almost non-existent. It could take a miracle to even get something close to average, not to talk of right.
Insecurity
If we thought leadership was virtually the difference between life and death in 2015, it has now practically become the daily reality of Nigerians, where the failure of a government led by a weak President could be the reason people die cheaply due to bandits invading a village, terrorists wiping out families or other people starving to death because they cannot afford to eat and their farms have become death traps. Imagine what will happen in 2023, if parties don’t field the right candidates.
Economy
Even looking away from the angle of insecurity and focusing on the state of the economy, more and more people are struggling, while some have almost been pushed to the point of suicide, just because the same salary they have always earned can no longer take care of their needs. Their usual income is not increasing, instead, it has become so weakened by the diminishing strength of the naira that, in reality, they are practically going backward. They now face numerous challenges just in the bid to get by.
Probably, if we had a President who understood the essence of a strong economy, he might be able to relate to the everyday challenges people are facing and the terrible impact it is beginning to have on the quality of life they live.
Youth
Do we need another old President? If you have someone in the same generation as you and he can tell how many more people within their age range/generation are merely wasting away due to a lack of opportunities or jobs, then they would easily understand that we might be sitting on a time bomb here.
The question on the lips of every Nigerian should be this: “Can we afford to get it wrong again?” The margin for error has become so slim that if we just choose to roll the dice or take a gamble again between “dumb and dumber” as we have often done in the past, it might just be the end of us a nation. What is the difference between six and half a dozen? More so, the consequences are now much weightier than they have ever been in our history.
If we are not careful, the Nigerian experiment could virtually go up in flames. We are nearly at breaking point and the centre does not look like it would hold anymore. From this point on, if we keep making the wrong choices, things could really fall apart. Just take a minute to think about that.
It is not cheap to call for a revolution but when hunger and hardship push people to that stage, it might be the point of no return. The other day, a man set himself on fire because the police seized his bus, which might just have been his only source of income, just because he had refused to give them a tip. Such has led to much worse situations in other countries, especially during the Arab Spring, but we seem to just take it as yet another thing in our complacent manner of handling issues like these.
What we need is a young, nimble and proactive President. To know what you want, you really might need to clearly define what you don’t want, in order to be able to properly achieve the aim. What is it that we want in a President? Who would make the ideal kind of candidate? What qualities must such a person possess? Empathy, pragmatism, a proactive sense of governance, a willingness to follow an approach tailored to fit our unique problems, not someone who just wants to adopt the foreign textbook approach.
The parties must realise their highly germane roles in all of these, especially because we practice a multi-party system of democracy. With independent candidacy being almost ineffective and, even in the strongest of democracies, it is almost near impossible to have an independent candidate with enough clout to pull off a major victory in an election as massively significant as a presidential one, the option is virtually out of the window.
In the midst of our many registered parties, there only seem to be two major parties, and even if a third force emerges, can they provide us with a pool of candidates that we can credibly choose from? If these parties understand what is at stake, even the least of them, referring to parties outside the mainstream, would strive to pick candidates who can do the job, such that in the event of an upset their horse in the race is one to achieve the aim of not just winning the election but being qualified enough to squarely take on the myriads of problems facing the Nigerian nation at the moment and those that will subsequently emerge.
Before it gets to the responsibility of the people to vote, the onus is on the political parties to ensure they give us the right material to work with. This is a clarion call to all political parties to ensure they field their best candidate: One who is young, nimble, in tune with today’s Nigeria and Nigerians. Someone who is physically, emotionally, and mentally fit to work for the progress of our dear nation.
•Aderinokun is a writer and socio-economic commentator who divides his time between Lagos and London
