This column is styled “Plain Truth” and we have faithfully kept to the promise to speak the truth about our issues without making the human element our focal point even though we know the human element remains the pivotal platform on which other things revolve.
If we have not made commensurate progress equaling our dream and the resources available to us, it would not be for lack of talking and prescribing solutions. If anything, we have talked enough and laid out solutions which were never implemented. Each successive government transfers her narrow vision as national dreams and aspirations. The major consequence of this is that we end up destroying all that is good, leaving the country prostrated and castrated with the citizens not only emasculated but totally dislocated and disoriented, unable to determine what is good for them.
Of course, no sane person will blame the people. A hungry, disoriented person can hardly think right. His major concern is limited to survival and where the next meal will come from; he has been rendered so despondent to be able to think long term dreams. So, you don’t blame the people, you blame the leadership class, who ordinarily should be far better equipped than those they seek to lord over. Give the leadership class some credit – they have become more sophisticated, especially with widespread education but the challenge rests with seeing no reason to learn from history.
As Karl Marx noted, when people refuse to take in the lessons of history, it will repeat itself, first as tragedy and later as farce. Tragedy brings destruction and death to the human element and later tragedy begins to appear to humans as something normal, something that provides fun even when the threat of annihilation is embedded in the happenings. Abia State Governor, Dr Alex Otti, speaking during the Armed Forces Remembrance Day, January 15, said the Civil War we fought for three years and during which we lost about three million souls mainly of Eastern Nigeria origin was avoidable. But we fought it.
We created states to fight the war. The way it was done, did it show that the conflict offered us a lesson in building a strong united country? More than 60 years after the war, one man has formed a tribal cum religious army telling us he wants to fight insecurity alongside the country’s legal security services. Who created insurgency and terrorism and for what purposes? We have spent huge national resources on fighting those threats yet citizens don’t know the root cause. Government has not said this is what we got from the captured terrorists about their objectives and the sponsors behind their cause. We are fighting a fight that has no beginning and which nobody, including the government, knows when it will end.
Does such a situation show we learnt from history, our history and those of other countries? People want to capture the federal capital. The struggle is intense when we have a President of Southern extraction. What is the message? Now to the main issue for today’s discourse on post-election litigations and what lessons have been learnt. Nobody is talking about this angle. We see political players in their various groups clapping and cheering because suddenly the Supreme Court realized the boiling water in the pot was threatening to spill over and they decided on a course of action that seems more like, “let my people go.”
They technically or with style allowed the struggle for “partition” to end on account of each party keeping what it managed to gather whatever way. Contradictions threw up troubles and we were beginning to see that unravel gradually in Kano and Rivers State, Plateau, Kogi and a few other states, which would have received impetus to erupt. So the fire was quickly put off. It has left us with peace in the graveyard.
Now, let’s start from the beginning, the organization of the 2023 wasn’t good at all. So much was promised and infact spent on by the state but very little was given back in terms of qualitative gains.
Voter register remains an issue. Question of creating new voting points close to the polls remains a muddled up case till now. The criteria remain vague. Application of new measures didn’t come through. The biometric capture machine in many places was an issue, don’t mind the results returned in some places. Adhoc staff recruitment by the electoral umpire has become a monster. The process has undermined scholarship and integrity because of what university professors have made out of the process. If learned men of that cadre can’t be trusted to do an excellent job, wherein lies the hope for progressive change.
We know evil men recruit their kind but then just then. If gold could rust, what is the fate of Iron? We the citizens made so much trouble over “electronic transfer of results” from polling units to the central servers at the INEC in Abuja. The National Assembly drew controversy from trying to make it a law in line with the people’s desire. They gave a law and after that the electoral body recorded a “glitch” only with the Presidential Election. Hahahaha, this is after rumours speculating of the glitch had gone in advance of it. What a society! That is there with the court making nonsense of the law passed by the National Assembly with the verdict that the electoral umpire has the right as to what to do or not do.
Some of us are still at a loss why the courts should say choice of candidates is only the internal affairs of the political parties. We don’t think the position is right. If for instance a candidate hasn’t met some criteria, he should stand disqualified. What if the process of internal democracy is terrible, in fact it didn’t even take place at all? These should be serious matters deserving detailed attention and response. Then issue of violence like we saw in Lagos and Kogi. How do we address those?
There are others too.
Shouldn’t post election litigations be concluded before swearing winners into offices? Can’t we change our election sequence and make it down-up so the strength of each party can truly be ascertained? Swearing-in have tended to enable ruling parties to try to change the country to one party state. There is veiled bandwagon effect in the top to bottom sequence. Many of those who had cases in court had to kowtow to the President. Some we heard signed a collaborative pact. Hmmmmm. Politicians have kept calm as if they are not angry but they are. Next elections may be fought with venom. It is elementary lessons to teach here that trends determine behavior.