Follow Us on Google
All over the world campaign season is considered to be a silly season, a season when partisan politicians say what they don’t believe, and promise what they can’t do. It is a season for sweetening words with saccharine, the season for public deception. Some Nigerian politicians have upped the ante already by asking their supporters to make violence a tool for electioneering. Senator Francis Fadahunsi of Osun State commanded his APC followers to kill Accord Party supporters before the Osun State Governorship elections last month. Many people are in the grave now as a product of such reckless remarks by reckless politicians but the security agents chose to look the other way. Some politicians are already digging for dirt in their opponent’s toilets. They are not really interested in what can improve our well-being but they think that dirt is the tool that can help them to win the election. But that is not strange because that is the culture in many countries. Some of them are spilling a lot of lies in the public space because many people have come to accept that that is the way to succeed in politics. George Washington, America’s iconic leader, once said to his father, “How can I get to be President if I never tell a lie?” Bob Hope, also said sometime ago that “the cheapest way to have your family tree traced is to go into politics.” I suspect that most Nigerian politicians belong to the Politics School of Lie-telling. It did not begin today.
In the First Republic we had politicians who piled tons of sand and gravel on a neglected road during the campaign giving people the impression that the road was about to be tarred. After the election they went back and removed the sand and gravel and the road remained the way it was: untarred. For the people who enjoyed the explosive burst of hope that a freshly minted road was coming to their backyard, it was a big disappointment. They did not know that lies are the lifebuoy of politics. That is why all politicians, no exception, engage in the pageant of promises, fulfillable and unfulfillable. And that is because they want power and power according to Henry Kissinger who is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Part of the bad campaign culture is to prevent people from campaigning in your territory. Peter Obi, presidential candidate of the NDC went to Benue State for some humanitarian purpose but some thugs blocked the road and prevented him from getting to his destination. The issue is not whether the thugs were hired or not to do the dirty job. No, that is not the issue. The issue is that in Nigeria there is, or ought to be, freedom of movement. Our 1999 Constitution says so. No one, politician or non politician, should be treated as a persona non grata in any part of Nigeria. It is not only leaders who have to imbibe that message. All citizens must accept, too, that that is the way to build a united country.
In another territory, another variant of what should not happen happened recently. The Governor of Ebonyi State, Mr Francis Nwifuru, told the 13 Chairmen of the Local Governments this: “Any Chairman who fails to win his Council will be removed from office and replaced with a Councillor. I want this information to be on the headlines of newspapers because, as politicians, we would not speak in secret.” What he is asking the Council Chairmen to do is to ensure that his party APC wins the election by hook or crook. That is unacceptable. That is illegal. That will not contribute to free, fair and credible election. That will not improve our democratic culture. That will not bring stability or sanity to our country. In any case, what power does he have to remove an elected local government chairman? None. The Supreme Court had already decided that our Local Governments are autonomous eventhough the Governors are doing everything to put them in their back pockets. The Governor knows that if he removes a local government chairman the man may swallow the bitter pill without kicking. Or that if he chooses to go to court the case may go on for 20 years or more. By that time the legal action would have become an act in futility.
As a way of getting votes the politicians are going to use various campaign strategies. They will use billboards, posters, advocacy on social media, adverts on radio, television, newspapers and magazines. These are all legitimate tools for campaigns. But what is not legitimate is the propagation of lies, using false facts and false statistics, false anecdotes, insults, character assassination and unprintable innuendos. These are already happening and appropriate authorities must step in now and call the errant politicians to order. They will also come to campaign avenues with bales of wrappers, bags of rice and garri and beans, and bags of naira. That has been the vogue since the First Republic. That is, if you ask me, a little bit of the people’s money getting back to the people. That is what makes the campaign venues to be filled to the rafters. It is not whether the party or the candidate is popular in the territory of the campaign. The truth, the bitter truth, is that the people are going there for the wrappers and naira because they know that after the elections they will hardly see the campaigners again in such settings. They go there during the campaign to say whatever they want to say because if you believe Seun Hughes “a politician is a person who has nothing to say but says it anyway.” That may be a very cynical way of looking at a politician but many of them in Nigeria and some other countries have practised their trade in a manner that many people hesitate to believe or trust them.
Some of them might think that the best way to impress us is to make wildly seductive promises, promises that are sweeter than sugar but are lacking in implementability. They might even use facts and figures that they think might not be in our possession but let them not forget that, today, there are several fact-finding platforms for verifying anything, almost anything, under the sun. of course, they do realize that the bulk of the voters are not literate. And many of those who are literate are not interested in seeking to know the veracity or otherwise of what a politician has said. They prefer to pay attention to their lives since they believe that not much can truly come out of what a politician says at a campaign venue.
But we all owe ourselves the duty of contributing to the building of a better and safer country than what we have today. That is why we must query every promise, every proposal, every programme put forward by our partisan politicians. It is not enough for them to tell us that they will give us a better country, a safer country, a healthier country, a prosperous country, a pauperless country etc. We must ask them the important question. How? It is how that will tell us whether to believe them or not. We must not simply fall for sugar-coated promises that lack implementability credentials. We must also situate the future by looking at their past. What have they done before now to warrant our surrendering our future to them? Did they perform magic in their previous assignments for us to believe that they have the magic wand to perform magic again in the office they are seeking? I have said in my previous columns that INEC does not need to register too many parties because that is a way of confusing voters and also wasting our scarce resources. Now INEC has cleared 18 persons to contest for the presidency of Nigeria. Most of them are simply attention seekers who have done nothing to warrant their aspiration to the headship of the biggest black nation in the world. They will only be able to insert in their curriculum vitae that they were presidential candidates in 2017. That might be diamond for them but it devalues our democracy. But, then this our silly season, so anything silly can happen.
