By SUNNY IKHIOYA
A DAY before the presidential election petition tribunal gave its judgement, there was a conference held to commemorate the 60th birthday of a popular figure in the political and civil rights space, the founding National Secretary of Alliance for Democracy, AD, and Fellow, Abuja School of Social and Political Thought, Professor Udenta Udenta.
Former governor of Ekiti State, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, was assigned the duty of giving the keynote address on this occasion, and he said many things. One of these was that the challenges facing the nation today cannot be solved “unless the country embraces proportional representation, where the spoils of elections are shared between contestants”.
Many people will be wondering whether Fayemi will come out publicly to make this kind of statement if he has been privileged to be included among the ministers presently serving. This is because that is our way; when things are going our way, we tend to suppress the truth, even if it is at the detriment of the survival of the nation. How can you say the protest that brought the nation to its knees in 2012 was all politics? And, because of that singular action and allied factors, the whole nation is suffering its consequences today.
Incidentally, what goes around comes around; the same people who staged the protests are now in government, trying to make Labour understand the need for the people to suffer more before we see light at the end of the tunnel. How I wish there were institutional punishment for those who have been motivated to mislead people in the past for their personal benefits. I think this is very important to put in check the very unpatriotic culture of our politicians. Alternatively, the people must be enlightened to take cognizance of such fellows and their selfish tendencies.
What Fayemi told the gathering on that day was a confession of sorts, likened to a parishioner confessing before the whole congregation. Apart from that little matter of politicians’ infidelity, the hypotheses that he is proposing appear to be in order. How can 37 per cent take over a hundred? That is part of the distortion in our electoral laws, and that is why we have so much noise and litigation over the outcome of the last elections.
Our laws are sometimes tailored to suit certain interests, and when the time for interpretation comes, imaginations start running wild. With regard to the last presidential election, no matter how hard the judges try to dispense justice, many people will still be dissatisfied because the banana peel for this has been planted right from the beginning. All other activities were only targeted towards specific results, some of which we are seeing now. So, how do we get our politicians and leaders to put personal interests aside and work towards the development and progress of the country? How can we bring Nigeria into the league of nation-states? This is important because the decisions that have brought us to this state were borne out of selfishness and dislike for the country by people that we have put there to run the country on our behalf.
In fact, the ultimate challenge is how to make Nigerians love Nigeria, the type we see when our athletes and other sportsmen are performing on the world stage. If not for hatred, why would a civil servant acquire so much money to embark on building a private university for himself? I am referring to a former director in the Accountant General’s office. We can also relate this to the shambolic manner in which the Mambilla power project is being handled. If we are made to love our country, we will all be conscious of our collective survival, and there will be shared prosperity. That is why we should forget about the messenger, in the person of Kayode Fayemi, and really take a critical view of the message he is passing across.
Should politicians protest for the common good of the people or because they want to take over the government? Should a 37 per cent victory be rewarded with a 100 per cent acquisition? These are the challenges that we are trying to address. It has been said that the foundation for the successful peace and development of any nation is justice and equity. We have also been made to understand that no empire lasts forever; if it is your turn to be on top, you must treat others well, so when your turn comes to be at the bottom, you will receive justice and fairness. And the only way to achieve this is to build institutions that will not be run by sentiments and parochialism. If we want to be fair to ourselves, we cannot assume that somebody who scored 37 per cent in an election should be declared the winner; the other parties will not see it as just.
That is why in some democracies, when we have a situation like this, a rerun is required that will make the winner score above 50 per cent before he is declared the winner, and this will continue through horse trading and other means until the required conditions for victory are fulfilled.
We have witnessed this in the Israeli elections several times, where strange bedfellows had to come together to reach a compromise so that the government could move on. At the end of such processes, everyone will agree that the man you have there is the right person to govern. Our society is still evolving, and in every society, laws are dynamic; they are tailored to evolving changes in culture and other influences. Our electoral laws should be amended to reflect these vital changes. The generations that we have now have grown to be people of free spirits; they want to see things explained properly to them; they want to know why. And if this is not made clear to them, they become rebellious. The days of manipulations and deceiving the masses are gradually fading away.
Social media has ensured that the people are informed 24 hours a day through different means. Some of us have also argued that politics should not be a zero-sum game the way we are practising it today, where only winners congregate to take all of the spoils with nothing for the others. When you win, you become the leader of all and are referred to as the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, not of a political party or ethnic group.
When you distribute dividends in a just and equitable manner, when you treat others the way you will treat yourself and your people, when you build institutions that will not run on the whims and caprices of man, you are enthroning justice and fairness. This will no doubt attract people to your policies and programmes. When they do this, they are sucked into the love of their country and its institutions. Our education curricula must reflect the correct history and culture that will inculcate the right attitude in our children, not cultures that promote brigandage and other negative behaviors. That is the challenge of government.
Ikhioya wrote via southsouthecho.com
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