This caption of an Op-Ed piece in a national newspaper a day after the results of the Edo State Governorship Election were officially released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) caught my fancy: “Edo Governorship Election: No Winners, No-Losers.” Reading through, I soon grasped the salient points the author was making. Albeit, my final assessment was that he belongs to that special breed of people the Holy Book describes as ‘peacemakers’ who shall ultimately inherit the kingdom of heaven. Meanwhile, the kingdom of Nigeria, with her component states, is not only up for grabs here and now, but equally suffers violence, and the violent will take it by force, if we continue along our present electoral trajectory.
Those who say the poll did not produce winners and losers contend that the accompanying hullabaloo simply amounts to much ado about nothing. The election was not about manifestoes or performance. They equally contend that both major candidates are simply cut from the same cloth. One was a governorship candidate of the All Progressives Party (APC) in the same election held four years back but morphed into the candidate of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) in this year’s contest. The other was the PDP candidate four years ago and became the beautiful bride of the APC this time around.
The people who depicted the erstwhile APC candidate as a bogey-man and blunder four years back, and even took him to court for being an academic cheat, started hailing him as the best performing governor in the universe. On the other hand, those who saw the same man back then as the best gift God bequeathed to the Edo electorate suddenly turned around to confirm that he is actually an academic cheat and a very sorry specimen of the human race! The reverse is also true of the erstwhile PDP candidate. As is always the case with our genre of do-or-die elections, truth and morality immediately became hostages. Perhaps, it is best to accept the postulation of English poet and satirist Samuel Butler to the effect that “There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should (rather) pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas.”
The election was not even about sloganeering. Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu coined what he considered a creative and catchy slogan – SIMPLE – but was shocked to his bone marrow that majority of the voters in the state rejected it for being too simplistic, preferring something more esoteric and complicated. On the other hand, Governor Godwin Obaseki came out with the mantra of MEGA. At another time and place such a miscue would have been sufficient to make him lose woefully, considering that in promising to ‘Make Edo Great Again’ – a parody of the highly successful 2016 slogan of Donald Trump – he forgot that, unlike then-candidate Trump, he has been in power for four years and if he is only now trying to make his state great again then he has no business remaining in office for another term. But the voters did not give a hoot about the governor’s past performance, not even when Ize-Iyamu and the APC tried to make it a major issue in the election.
Which should not also be surprising to any keen observer of Edo State politics. Recall that when then Governor Lucky Igbinedion was adjudged to have performed so abysmally as to threaten his second term ambition, his father, Chief Gabriel Igbinedion of the defunct Okada Air fame, publicly canvassed the argument that a student who fails a promotion examination is obligated to repeat the class; and the kind-hearted voters of Edo State obliged him by making his son repeat the class in Government House for another four years!
Pick any national newspaper or listen to any group discussion, and the topic would invariably centre on how an underdog politician ‘demystified’ and ‘liquidated’ one or more godfathers. It grieves me that those who ought to know better are the ones taking special delight in mealy-mouthing such inanities when they ought to be focusing on how electoral outcomes would enhance the livelihood of the citizenry. What purpose then are elections really intended to serve? To resolve megalomaniacal ego battles? To reward those who served meritoriously and sack those who failed to meet expectations?
The great irony is that APC and PDP are really two sides of the same coin! Except for a few that can be counted on the fingers, mention one high profile APC chieftain who was not a former big shot of the PDP. And we know of course that should the PDP regain power at the centre, most of today’s APC top shots would re-defect. That being the case, why are we – especially the intelligentsia – fixated on a misguided attempt to cap one of both political parties with the halo of sainthood, to the extent that a win by PDP is raucously celebrated and a win by APC is attended by jeers and wild allegations of election rigging?
Should we not rather be focusing our energies on seeing how genuinely differentiated parties with clear-cut ideologies and principles can emerge in the quest to deepen our democratic mores and practice? “The ignorance of (just) one voter in a democracy,” lamented 35th US President John F. Kennedy, “impairs the security of all.” It goes without saying that unless and until a critical mass of the population is ready to forego primordial sentiments as well as ethnic, religious and partisan biases, they will continue to constitute a developmental quagmire, binding Nigerians in a revolving cycle of contriving meaningless motions without achieving any real movement.
On my way back to Abuja the morning after the election, I was intrigued to hear most of the fellows I encountered gloating that “Edo is not Lagos.” According to them, Obaseki won largely because voters in Edo State were irritated at the alleged meddlesomeness of former Lagos State Governor Bola Ahmed Tinubu in the polls and were hell-bent on giving him his comeuppance as an unwelcome political godfather. The point must, however, be made that godfatherism is by itself not a loathsome concept.
Truth be told, I can easily point to eminent politicians who, like Tinubu, made tremendous positive impact in their spheres of influence as mentors and godfathers: Nnamdi Azikiwe in the East, Ahmadu Bello in the North, Obafemi Awolowo in the West, Aminu Kano in Kano, Joseph Tarka in Tiv Land, Olusola Saraki and his son, Bukola, in Kwara before the fall of the latter and James Ibori in Delta State, among many others.
Lagos is clearly the envy of every other state in Nigeria, and this was achieved by the astuteness of its leaders. If you take VAT out of the equation, Lagos is not even among the top 20 beneficiaries of the monthly allocations from the federation account! As a matter of fact, if every state was like Lagos, Nigeria would have since elbowed her way into the highly exclusive club of the most developed countries in the world known as the G-20.
Okoye is a Public Affairs Analyst Abuja, 08054103468
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