Nigerian elections would happen in February 2019. As I write, there is still doubt about how the elections would go. The electioneering campaigns seem not to have truly taken off satisfactorily. What we still have are banters and mudslinging that have been part and parcel of the history of elections in the Nigeria since independence.
We are not seeing concrete campaigns by candidates for all political parties. Unlike in other democracies, we have candidates abdicating the responsibility of engaging with the voters by saying what they can do if elected. Rather we have a deafening silence by all of the candidates because there is always a way to thwart the system or so it seems.
In the past elections there have been cases of rigging which, of course, starts from the primary elections. The monetisation of the process makes it easy for moneybags to usurp the process. Individuals who under strictly free and fair elections would never emerge as candidates end up flying the flags of most political parties with the connivance of the party leadership.
Each community knows the capacity of every individual for leadership. When politicians therefore throw up individuals without electoral value, the plan to subvert the system to access victory is initiated. The candidates having emerged out of a rape of democracy never get it right because their emergence mocks democracy.
However, because the country has week systems, ‘powerful’ individuals connive across various institutions to go to the general elections thinking of how to achieve victory by any and all means. Money, violence and all sorts of criminality are often employed to see that such unsalable candidates succeed.
As the election approaches, the political players are not addressing all the warped strategies to electoral victory confessed to by the former Deputy Senate President, Ibrahim Mantu, who told the world how he participated over a period of twenty years in rigging elections for his party by inducing the electoral staff, the security agencies and possibly thugs with money for them to assist his political party win elections. By all means, twenty years is a long time. The same man has been having a front row seat at most of his party’s political gatherings. He ought to have been treated as a pariah amongst other politicians if his confession was an individual crime. However, he is a metaphor for most Nigerian politicians.
And so a Mantu still strut the electoral turf with all the bravado of a party chieftain because he is a kindred spirit. No political party has the moral authority to cast the first damning stone. They might not want him to play the biblical Samson on their political lives.
Politicians without electoral value are the reason Nigerian elections are flawed and the country has the most litigious post-election cases in world democracy. Even as we go into the 2019 elections, nothing has changed. The politicians are not ready to market their vision and mission because they are non-existent. This is because the parties have no ideological focus or convictions.
The political class in Nigeria have ridden rough shod of the people through political brigandage election after election in what the former military Head of State then later a civilian President, Olusegun Obasanjo, termed do-or-die elections. He had the courage to articulate such a vile term but in truth most politicians in Nigeria go into elections with that same mindset.
Most candidates for elections in 2019 from States to Federal levels are often in the race for themselves and see politics as investments that ought to yield profit. However, in a funny contradictory note, they do not invest much but always reap huge profits.
A dysfunctional system guarantees them free pass because the people seem too docile to challenge them as the mandate givers who are perennially shortchanged through dubious means.
It is heartbreaking for those who fashioned the democratic system of government to realise how politicians in Nigeria abuse the system. The people as the mandate givers seem to have lost their voice as they surreptitiously allow the politicians to usurp their mandate through other vile means.
Given that in the last few years politicians have given the people a new political lexicon, ‘vote-buying’ in a more comprehensive manner than ever before, the 2019 elections might present to the world a more flawed election than had earlier happened in the country’s history. Now that vote buying has been raised to an art form by the major political parties, our question is, will votes count in 2019?
Last Line: Leah Sharibu and other abducted girls and women are still in captivity.
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