Ah, we spilt the milk

I am strolling down the boulevard of my memory. Please come with me and hear my story.

Sometime in 1959 in my last year in the NA Senior Primary School, Otobi, in what is now Otukpo local government area, I saw an aeroplane for the first time. It was a helicopter. We did not know the difference. The big bird landed unannounced on our manicured football field in the early evening of a date that refused to etch itself in my memory. 

We trooped out in excitement to see this wonder wrought by the hands of the Wrights brothers. A lone NA policeman guarded it. He would not let us anywhere close to it. But he could not deny us this: we had seen an aeroplane, not in the air but on the ground. It counted for something for us as pupils.

We were later told that the helicopter belonged to Chief Obafemi Awolowo, leader of the Action Group. He was in Benue province to solicit the support of the people to become our first post-independence prime minister. The United Middle Belt Congress led by Chief J.S. Tarka, was an affiliate of his party. Awolowo held a big political rally at Otukpo, seven miles from our school. His helicopter must have been packed in our school for safety reasons. I was not at the rally and did not know what he told or promised the Idoma people. But I am sure he must have wooed them with his record of achievements as premier of the Western Region. 

Awolowo drove to our school the next afternoon. When he alighted from his car, our headmaster, Mr J.O. Ugbabe, led the rest of the teachers to briefly receive him. Our cook, Miss Alache, insisted on shaking hands with him. She got her wish. I thought that Awolowo, like Sir Ahmad Bello, premier of the Northern Region, was a towering figure. He was not. He towered in intellect, not in physique. We waved to him and he waved back with a huge smile as he boarded the helicopter in continuation of his campaign.

We were told that the chief flew to every part of the country to campaign to win the people to his political cause. We did not know the details of his campaign promises at the time but I remember one of our teachers telling us that he had introduced free education in the Western Region and wanted to do the same for the whole country. 

Awolowo was a tireless campaigner. He stood out in the 1959 electioneering campaigns because he was the only one who employed the novelty of using a helicopter to reach some of the remotest areas of the country. I watched him campaign in 1979 and 1983. I was always impressed by the premium he placed on campaigns as a means of getting through to the electorate. He was always the first to throw his hat in the ring because he was always the most prepared intellectually and emotionally to offer himself for leadership. 

Those were the days of political excitement. We knew our politicians. We were in constant dialogue with them. And they excited us. Who can forget the late K.O. Mbadiwe, the great lexical inventor? Months of spirited campaigns by the politicians exposed us to their ideas and what they and their parties stood for. The titans are gone. We do not know our politicians any more. We only wake up one morning to hear that an unknown quantity had become our our state governor. Alas, our politics has undergone a sea change. 

I dredged up this part of my memory to show you what we have made of our elections and electioneering campaigns. What flows from this is the hobbling of our political development. We merely conduct elections without quite knowing who we are voting for. A systematic purification of the system by the generals has robbed us of the salt and pepper of democracy: electioneering campaigns and the promotion of individual capability for leadership. See why it is so easy for the party leaders to impose candidates for elective offices? See why unknown quantities are anointed as leaders?

Our current system was designed to fail us in our political development. Let me tell you why. INEC has released the election time-table for the 2019 general elections. According to it, we go to the polls twice – to elect the president and the members of the national assembly on February 16, 2019; we return to the polling booths to elect state governors and members of the state houses of assembly on March 2. We have less than one year to go in each case.  

But has anyone come up as a presidential or governorship aspirant? No. It is not entirely the fault of the politicians. Sections 132(2) and 178(2) of the constitution provide that an election to the office of the president and state governors respectively shall be held not earlier than 60 days and not later than 30 days to the expiration of their tenure in office. Add to that the provision of section 101(1) of the Electoral Act 2006 as amended. It provides that “for the purpose of this Act, the period of campaigning in public by every political party shall commence 90 days before polling day and end 24 hours prior to that day.”

I do not think this is good for our democracy. It is democratically negative. Politics was never meant to be played without politics. Nor are elections meant to be won without campaigns. Democracy derives its relevance, not entirely from the ballot box, but from the process that validates the verdict of the people at the polling booths. This should be the right time for the masquerades to come out to the village squares and show us their colours. That is what political competitions are all about. They give life to politics; they give life to democracy.

Makes you nostalgic about the past when the titans of our national politics made politics fun but not jocular; when we elected men we knew and trusted; when charlatans were not anointed as our state governors; when 419 men did not become our law-makers.

 Ah, yes. We have spilt the milk. Weep not, fellow country men.