By Ikechukwu Amaechi
The 2023 elections are still six months away but the polity is already heated up. Expectedly, governance at all levels has stopped and the resources of the Nigerian state have been cornered by those in the corridors of power, as of right, to prosecute the electoral battle.
That is what is called “structure” in local political parlance.
That also explains why the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, will remind
anyone that cares to listen that with 22 state governors, the 2023 presidential
election is already in the kitty.
What the chieftains of the party are saying is that having captured the resources of 22 states, they already have an enviable war chest for the battle.
The people are not factored into their calculations. They don’t
matter. The end, to them, justifies the means. It is all about state capture
and its odious legacy of systemic political corruption in which private
interests significantly influence a state’s decision-making processes to their
own advantage. As 2023 beckons, the ruling elite and their powerful businessmen
collaborators are busy plotting how to manipulate the process in a desperate
bid to influence the emerging rules of the game.
The politicians would like Nigerians to forget what matters most
in the 2023 elections, which is the existential threat they collectively face
if nothing fundamental is done to halt the nerve-racking drift to the Hobbesian
state of nature where a very few, albeit powerful, people are taking for
themselves all that they could, while life for the overwhelming majority
remains solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
So, in a desperate attempt to muddle the waters, dodgy
politicians are desperately trying to hang the 2023 elections on the
combustible pole of religion and ethnicity. But they are only doing so to
wheedle the politically unwary, knowing full well that many Nigerians, even
those who claim to be educated, are not politically savvy enough to appreciate
what the issues are.
The 2023 elections are a matter of life and death, a point
Professor Usman Yusuf, former chief executive officer of the National Health
Insurance Scheme, NHIS, brilliantly made in his article, “APC’s Muslim-Muslim
ticket: Neither for God nor country,” on Saturday, August 13.
“Let us be clear; all this political gymnastic around the
religion of the ruling party APC’s vice-presidential candidate for the 2023
general elections and the dust it has raised, is just to accommodate the
lifetime presidential ambition of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Don’t let anyone
tell you differently,” Yusuf, a Professor of Haematology-Oncology and Bone Marrow
Transplantation, wrote.
“At a time when the nation is facing the worst insecurity of our
lifetime and citizens are burdened by excruciating economic hardship, our
politicians seem oblivious to the mortal danger that Nigeria’s many challenges,
particularly insecurity, pose to our existence as a nation.
“The scramble for 2023 elections has already begun with
political bouncers all over the media platforms trading childish insults
instead of presenting credible ideas to the citizens on how to dig the country
out of the ditch the APC has put the nation in.
“Nigerians are a deeply religious people at least publicly but,
instead of using faith as a rallying point for good, our politicians use it to
divide the people for their selfish gains.
“Democracy offers plenty of opportunities for anyone not happy
with any political party the freedom to choose another. It will therefore be
irresponsible for any person or group of persons to express their grievances in
ways that will adversely affect the nation’s fragile democracy and tenuous
security.
“For fairness, equity and justice as is enjoined in all our
scriptures, our politics must reflect the nation’s rich ethnic and religious
diversity.
“APC’s Muslim-Muslim ticket is neither for God nor country,” he
concluded.
A chieftain of the APC, whose name I will keep out of the media
for obvious reasons, who read the article as soon as TheNiche published it
called to also acknowledge its profoundness.
Though a member of the ruling party, he strongly believes that
President Muhammadu Buhari has been a disaster in Aso Rock. Yet, he is
optimistic that Nigeria’s future is bright no matter who wins the 2023
elections, because according to him, none of the presidential candidates on
parade right now will be worse than Buhari.
“It can never be worse than this, no matter what happens,” he
enthused, but warned that Nigerians, particularly the media, are taking their
eyes off the ball by focusing on issues such as APC’s Muslim-Muslim ticket.
Rather than that, he said all eyes must be on the Independent
National Electoral Commission, INEC, and its political will to deliver free,
fair and credible polls that will reflect the wishes and preferences of the
people.
He is of the opinion that rather than dissipate energy on
extraneous issues such as Muslim-Muslim ticket, the media must hold the feet of
INEC’s chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, to the fire of pellucidity.
I agree. What matters most in 2023 is that the supreme will of
the people expressed through the ballot box is sacrosanct and inviolable. If
INEC holds its end of the electoral stick firmly, it is then the responsibility
of the politicians to sell themselves and their manifestoes to the electorate.
At 18 years of age, the average Nigerian electorate has come of
age. If after the devastating insecurity, hunger, poverty and the hopelessness
that has been the lot of almost all Nigerians in the last seven years of the
Buhari presidency, the electorate still prefer the APC and its presidential
candidate, Asiwaju Tinubu, to other candidates, so be it.
That will align perfectly well with conservative French thinker,
Joseph de Maistre’s famous and prescient quote that: “In a democracy, the
people end up with the government and leaders they deserve.”
That is the most fundamental nature of democracy. As Leon
Wieseltier, the American critic and magazine editor, once noted: “A democratic
society, an open society places an extraordinary responsibility on ordinary men
and women because we are governed by what we think.”
Thoughtlessness in democratic actions amounts, literally, to
delinquency. That is what it will take for any Nigerian to conclude that what
APC has done with power in the last seven years does not matter in their choice
of who succeeds Buhari in 2023.
*Amaechi is the publisher of TheNiche
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