I remember the first election campaign that meant anything to me. It was the 1993 elections. After the Buhari and IBB years, between 1985 and 1993, there was genuine hope of a return to democracy. There was a colourful campaign by MKO Abiola, whose flamboyance marched the steed—the Social Democratic Party logo—often embroidered unto his babban riga. Apart from the popular support he had enjoyed beforehand, no thanks to his philanthropy across religious divides, it was with showiness and panache that Abiola dusted his rival, the dour, steady and calm Bashir Tofa of the NRC.
Abiola once had a plane fly over Jos that time, spewing confetti of his manifesto on the city. At first, when the shower began to fall, I think most people thought it was money pouring out of the plane. Adults and children ran along the trail of this plane and gathered the pamphlets in their hands. Adults collected them as they fell and read them. Some kept them, some helped them onto the ground they were destined for. A good number of these pamphlets ended up in the gutters, on the streets, stuck in the trees fluttering as the breeze blew.
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A few days later, Tofa’s people flew their own plane over the city, smaller, noisier, dumped their confetti and zoomed off.
In retrospect, I suppose both Abiola and Tofa should have been held culpable for littering, no?
But there was something about that campaign, about the excitement and I think how involved people were in that process.
Times have changed and I suppose that things would naturally change. Campaign politics these days lacks the verve and colour and enthusiasm of those days. But most crucially, I think they lack the substance.
Today, elections seem to be more about the politicians and far less about the people. I mean, it has always been about the politicians but they at least pretend to care about the people or what they think. Now godfathers anoint candidates and command people to vote for them, sometimes in exchange for soap and salt, other times in exchange for nothing. And these candidates end up with allegiance to their benefactors or to their desperate desire for power. In both instances, the people do not figure in the equation.
The candidates today talking about real national issues and how to address them with any kind of commitment and ideas are doing so on Twitter, to the few million Nigerians who have access to those spaces, to those who can afford android phones, data and who have found a way to charge their phones despite the power outages that every politician has promised to address. They do so from the pedestal of small parties that will struggle to win a single state.
A vast majority often mouth the populism that people like to hear but are more concerned with negotiating the tribal arithmetic that would give them access to power. They devote so much energy to this that they have none left to address the issues they rode to power on.
And in this, how are Nigerians complicit? These last two weeks, Nigerians have joked and laughed about delegates. Memes have been created and published, editorial cartoons drawn and circulated, and standup comedians are scripting jokes from the fiasco we have seen play out at party conventions. Candidates are voted, not on the promise of what they hope to offer the country, but on how much they are doling out to delegates. Some sour losers, candidates, who paid money and still lost to those who paid more, have publicly demanded the return of their money. I swear, it looked like drama scripted by a half-brilliant, half-idiotic writer. There was even a video of a candidate’s campaign official collecting the money from delegates who have been threatened and harassed into surrendering their loot. And newspapers made a splash of former VP Namadi Sambo’s son demanding his money back.
The immediate impact of this politicking has been the rise in the dollar exchange rate. This has consequently meant a rise in commodity prices because Nigeria is a country that imports, even the fuel that we are blessed with in abundance. What this means is that the poor Nigerians living below the poverty line are bearing the brunt of this, inadvertently bankrolling the people who will loot their resources.
But the bigger picture is that Nigeria, as dishevelled as she is, is being traded like a 10 kobo back-alley floozy. For crimes like this, should people not be arrested? Instead, the system sentences them to years in public office with free access to public funds.
Do Nigerians care? I think after 2015 and what has followed since the fight has been beaten out of many Nigerians. It is perhaps why the Accountant General’s N80 billion loot has barely registered in the Richter Scale of Nigerian scandals. And despite the promise of a bigger scandal involving an even bigger sum, did Nigerians react? These did not generate even the kind of reaction we witnessed when then Central Bank Governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi declared that N20 billion was missing from the federation’s account. A few short years later, we have reached the point where missing N80 billion hardly stirs outrage, where the government pardoned convicted looters Joshua Dariye and Jolly Nyame, whose theft, according to sources in the villa, was deemed “not significant” and therefore worthy of a state pardon. In light of a recent expose, the two former governors’ combined loot of three billion naira does peter into insignificance. The looters sort of have a point there.
Considering the security and economic challenges facing the country, it is disturbing to see that the commercialisation of political interests and concerns will take precedence over national interests. It is no surprise that the president signed an amended electoral law that in effect gave political parties the leeway to shut out popular participation in party politics. The reason was simple and was argued at the time: delegate elections guarantee only one thing—the corruption of the electioneering process.
Nostalgia is often overrated. The 1993 elections campaign is not without its shortcomings and corruption. The sincerity of the candidates in that election will never now be known following the election’s annulment but the sincerity of Nigerians could not be questioned. For the first time, this country of a thousand tongues calling God by different names united and almost unanimously voted for a Muslim candidate with a Muslim running mate, ignoring tribe and other divisive factors. I feel like, as a country, we missed a chance to move beyond tribal, regional and religious politics and where has that led us?
To today’s politics in which the focus of the campaigns has been not who is going to tackle this hydra-headed insecurity, not who is going to address the abominable economic slump, but which part of the country should the president come from.
In the end, I think it comes down to one certainty: Nigerians are tired. Tired of hoping, of dreaming, of fighting, in their little ways, for a country that in return has given very little back, a country stolen from them by the people they entrusted to win her back for them. Even the politics is a tired, tiring affair, worn, jaded, insipid, and mind you we are only 23 years in, leaving one wondering what then will inspire hope the way those 1993 elections did?
Is there anything worse than seeing children tire of their mothers the way Nigerians have tired of their country?
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