The ballot paper as a piece of paper

he good thing is that Kogi and Bayelsa states did not disappoint our expectations in their respective governorship elections on November 16. We expected violence and there was violence. We expected killings and there were killings. We expected Yahaya Bello to be re-elected and he was. We expected APC to add Bayelsa to the list of its conquered states and it did. We expected the full and unabashed display of the rigging apparatus –  vote buying, ballot snatching and the scaring of voters away from voting – and it came to pass.

Take a breath.

Had these things not come to pass, we would have been forced to return to the drawing board to rejig the architecture of our national politics. That architecture rests on certain fundamentals that add to our confusion in the nature of our party politics. It throws up such things as the abnormal is the normal; the strange is the familiar.

Let us examine the fundamentals that undergirded our party politics in the past and those that undergird our contemporary party politics. In the times before these, the political parties drove the electoral process. They understood their function in a democracy as serving the people. This being so, they, at least theoretically, put their best candidates on their ballot boxes.

More importantly, they appreciated the need to market themselves to the people to help them make rational choices in the competitive market place called elections. Their manifestoes were their marketing tools. Those manifestoes demonstrated their appreciation of the problems of the country and their articulated thoughts on the possible solutions to them. With these, each party sought to convince the people that it was the best placed to solve their problems.

The parties fully controlled the nature and the tradition of party politics. They asserted their authority over the individuals elected on their platforms in the legislative and the executive branches of government because the parties sent them forth into public offices to faithfully fulfil their promises to the people. The parties believed then that the performances of their men and women in public offices were the only guarantees for their continued relevance in governance, as in re-election. The parties had the power to remove those of its servants in public offices that disappointed the people and replace them with those who could do better. The watch word was service to the people.

That was the analogue age, the age we insist must rest in peace in the grave yard of the dust bin of history.

This is the digital age, the age we verily believe has edged us towards the full flowering of democracy. As you would expect, things have fundamentally changed in the fundamentals of our party politics. To start with, individuals elected on the platforms of the political parties now own them. At the national level, the president is the national leader of the party and the state governors hold the same position at the state level. If the servant transforms into master something must give. And what gives in this case is that the political parties no longer find it necessary to market themselves to the people. In the absence of manifestoes, they rely on financial muscle to bend the will of the people.

Note this fine irony. In the analogue age, we elected individuals into public offices on their assumed personal merits on the platforms of the various political parties. In the digital age, we elect political parties rather than individuals. Individuals put up as party candidates are the beneficiaries of the victory of the parties at the polls. This being so, you would expect the political parties to put up the best men and women forward in seeking the mandate of the people to govern them. And replace those of them who have remarkably succeeded in giving their parties a bad name and become a threat to their continued relevance in government. That would be the normal; something that belonged to the analogue age, I suppose.

Were the normal the normal in this digital age, which party in its right senses would have put its financial muscle and the federal might behind the re-election of Bello, a man who, in four years, has been consistently bad news for his party, APC, and the people of Kogi State? His performances were worse than those of any other state governor. He was, for four years, the lord unto himself. He tolerated no one and drove the dagger through the heart of our democracy. He treated the constitution as an irritant for which he had no patience.

But he enjoyed the protection of his party and the federal might. Governors try to do well in their first term in office to smoothen the path to their re-election but Bello did not have to give a thought to that because he knew that he enjoyed the full support of those who matter in the electoral process. He did his worst, not his best. Still, he was the party’s only man. And, as he expected, he was duly re-elected by the system rather than by the people.

Perhaps it is important to remind the party moguls in APC that as the ruling party, it bears full responsibilities for how our democracy shapes up in its classical definition as government of the people in the service of the people. APC, against its own better judgment, has chosen to be a rampaging elephant in the jungle of our national politics. In ensuring Bello’s re-election, it set a new low standard in elevating the abnormal to the giddy heights of the normal. Now, Bello is free to do even worse than he did before without caring a hoot about service to the people, decency in his conduct and the elementary observance of the constitution. A greater and nastier lord in our national politics it would be difficult to find.

It is easy to see what flows from this new tradition of party politics in which an individual is greater than the party, the state and the people. One, a public officer is no longer the servant of his party because he is now more important than the political party and the party does his bidding. Two, the right of a sitting governor to be re-elected is automatically guaranteed by his party; his performance or lack thereof is irrelevant. Three, the rights of the people to choose their leaders is, and will continue to be, severely abbreviated in this, with apology to the Eedress, jaga jaga democracy – our home-grown version of democracy in which the state and the people matter less, much less, than the interest of the rich and the powerful. But we must never forget that if we continue to treat the ballot paper as an irrelevance, our commitment to democracy would be a mere hollow ritual for which the rest of the world would only chuckle.