I am sure you must have noticed that the election season in our country is heralded by the explosion of posters and bill boards put out by the redoubtable men and women who want to devote their lives to serving the people – and that is us. Splendid. These posters and bill boards are the first salvo of arrows fired from the quivers in the power struggle. The creative artists are laughing to the banks now, I know. Lucky men.
The posters and bill board explode on the nation in two important segments of the electoral process. The first period is from zero politicking to the party primaries. This is the period that aspirants in all the political parties emerge in unbelievably large numbers. The second segment begins when the electoral umpire blows the whistle for the campaigns to begin to the end of the elections. We have fewer candidates in this period but the poster and bill board war is fiercer at this point than in the first segment of the process because the wheat has been winnowed and only the big masquerades are allowed in the market square.
True confession. I love and admire the posters and the bill boards that adorn our towns and cities. I admire the creative men and women behind them. I love seeing the pictures of men and women who peer at me from the posters and bill boards, daring me to forget their beautiful faces when the time comes for us, the people, to choose the next set of our political leaders.
Still, I find something funny about the place of posters and bill boards in our electoral process. They are a disservice to the electorate. They deprive them of the right to know the people who want their votes. This is part of the deficit in our democracy. If democracy is a government of the people instituted by the people, then the rights of the people to know those who want to serve them must not be abridged by default with posters and bill boards. A rational choice of leaders cannot, however you look at it, be made from posters and bill boards.
Our electoral process permits aspirants and candidates to promote and sell themselves to the electorate with each candidate directly wooing them. In the times before the posters and the bill boards were discovered as authentic weapons of the elective power war, candidates for elections, hugged both the limelight and the people. They campaigned in person and thus gave the people the chance to know them and assess them and, all things being equal, make rational choices from among those asking for their support with their ballot papers.
In the First Republic the politicians brought politics down to the level of the people. The late Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe often rode in a railway passenger coach from the Eastern Region to the Northern Region. He deliberately chose to meet the people at all the railway stations along the route from Enugu to Kaduna. As a primary school pupil, I saw him at Otobi railway station in 1959. He was a sight to behold. He was calm, dignified with a winning smile. His humility in riding in a railway couch, I am sure, touched the people who crowded the railway stations to see and hear the great Zik.
The late Chief Obafemi Awolowo was perhaps the most determined of our first republic politicians. He was a campaigner creature and sold himself to the person as a man capable of leading the country and making a difference in their lives. He toured the nooks and crannies of the country in a helicopter during the 1959 general elections. His helicopter was the first aeroplane I saw when it was parked in our school at Otobi when he went to campaign in Idoma land. He campaigned from the air as well as from the ground at rallies. His helicopter was a creative electioneering campaign that none has equalled since 1959.
The late Sir Ahmadu Bello was no less dramatic in marketing himself and his party to the people. He toured the Northern Region and wooed the people at huge rallies. Zik, Awo and Bello competed to see who the authentic man of the people was. The people saw them and heard them. They felt close to them. Each mined the image he created among the people.
Politics then was fun, not war. Politicians marketed themselves to the people as their authentic champions who sought their votes to make life better for them. They told them what they believed was wrong and how, if given the consent of the people, they intended to put things right. Those were the good old days. Are they gone, and gone, for ever?
My answer is, sadly, yes. The times are different and politics is now played differently in our country. That is not good news for us. In the new politics of money and vote-buying before and during the elections, our politicians distance themselves from the people they seek to rule. They throw money at them and believe that those crumbs from the masters’ tables are sufficient to smoothen their paths to power. Because of money, we no longer see or hear these political warriors. Because of money, we only see them on posers and bill boards. These creative new media tell us nothing about who they are. What they stand for and what they can do for us as a nation and as a people. It is tragic if people do not relate to their politicians at the point they seek their votes. If we do not see them or hear them, how the heck are we supposed to determine their suitability for the office they seek?
In saying this, I might sound like a shrill voice in the political wilderness but it must be said. Our politicians must come down from the posters and bill boards. Beautiful they may be but they are dumb media of mass communications. An election is a meeting point between the potential rulers and the ruled. If politicians rely on the money influence and distance themselves from the people, democracy is in tragic a deficit. Posters and bill boards cannot and must never be accepted as substitutes for direct personal marketing by our politicians. Money has corrupted everything and now denies us our constitutional right, all things being equal, to rationally choose those we believe are the genuine champions of the people’s causes. By their posters and bill boards, we know them not at all.
I so believe.
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