The Hard Part Begins Now

BY KAYODE KOMOLAFE

0805 500 1974

The chairman of the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC), Professor Mahmood Yakubu, reminded political parties again last Friday of the imperative of keeping strictly to the timetable for the 2023 elections.

Yakubu spoke at the venue of a training programme organised for officials of parties on the INEC Candidate Nomination Portal (ICNP). Nomination forms for presidential and National Assembly elections are expected to be loaded into the INEC portal between June 10 and June 17 while those of the governorship and state assembly elections should be submitted in the same electronic way between July 1 and July 15.

As an aside, INEC should be commended for the high level of digitalisation of its operations. This is a clear departure from the days when party secretariats and INEC offices were involved the laborious process of sorting out volumes of documents in the process of nomination of candidates.

The immediate implication of the completion of the nomination process is that the public would soon be relieved of news of internecine political wars within political parties on the nomination of candidates for various categories of elections especially the presidential election. Now that the major political parties have concluded the nominations of their candidates, it is time to confront the hard part of the process.

Political parties and their candidates should begin in earnest to focus on selling their programmes and policies that would help in resolving the present multi-dimensional crisis of Nigeria. Hitherto, differences of ideas, policies and programmes have hardly featured in the intra-party battles fought to secure tickets for the elections. This is, unfortunately, a measure of the maturity of liberal democracy in Nigeria. This is because even for the purpose of the primary elections aspirants seeking party tickets candidates ought to be distinguished by the policies and ideas for which they have great passions on the economy, polity and society. For instance, an aspirant ought to be known not just as a northerner or southerner; the aspirant ought to also be identified by his views on the role of the state in the economy or the approach to confront terrorism.

Doubtless, all the intra-party competitions have been about the identity of who is most suitable to do the job. The suitability has been largely based on geo-political calculations and other identity considerations. The next stage in the timetable should be the focus on what job the candidate will do and how to do it.

Besides, it is a good thing that INEC has made the timetable elastic enough for candidates to have time to articulate their strategies and policies in solving the problems of insecurity, poverty and obstacles to nation-building. Candidates have a relatively longer period (between nomination and election) than before to articulate policies and popularise their programmes. So, contrary to the narrow view of some politicians that the relatively longer period would make the process more expensive, the new timetable should also make the electoral activities to be issue-oriented. It may help in changing the political culture. Campaigns should be about selling programmes to the electorate to enable them make informed choices. Apart from the logistical costs of running the campaigns effectively, the candidates should not be paying for the votes. So the period is not only for more expenses to be made; it is also an opportunity for virile debates on options to confront the issues of underdevelopment.

Issue-based campaigns would be enhanced if the political parties have well defined strategies and programmes which distinguish one from the other. In fact, in the primary elections aspirants ought to be assessed on the basis of their comprehension of the programmes of their parties and their capacity and orientation to implement the programmes if they are elected into offices.

It would be a neater thing for delegates at the convention for a party’s primary election to decide on who should be the party’s candidate on the basis of policy instead of his religion and ethnicity . There is a vacuum in the political process because political parties are not playing their roles adequately as democratic institutions. The job of political parties is not only to compile and submit the names of candidates to INEC for elections. Articulation, popularisation and defence of policies are also duties of political parties. The political parties have their names on the ballot papers for the electorate to thumbprint. Therefore, the parties should not only own the votes, they should also own the programmes the candidate would implement if voted into office. The political culture of political parties abandoning their institutional responsibilities of promoting ideas and programmes is an ugly a feature of this dispensation. It has not always been like this in the nation’s political history. In the Second Republic, the secretariat of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) of President Shehu Shagari actively sold the party’s programme on green revolution, mass housing and qualitative education. The NPN even mobilised Nigerians towards the party’s programme of “ethical revolution.” The Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) of Chief Obafemi Awolowo sold its four-cardinal programmes of free education, free healthcare, full employment and integrated rural development. Those programmes were defended by the party at all levels before the public. The pro-poor policies of the People’s Redemption Party (PRP) were ideologically articulated by the party of the talakawa (the poor).

If parties don’t do more than serving as mere platforms to contest elections, the once- in- four- year exercise would be reduced to a hollow ritual of liberal democracy. It would be easier to hold those in power accountable if it is possible to confront them from time to time with promises not only made by them but also their political parties.

The articulation of policies should not only be for the presidential election. A lot of attention should be paid to the elections in the states because of the consequences for development. Most of the areas which are critical for development especially in the social sector are on the concurrent lists. State governments can legislate on them and execute policies in those areas. These include education, healthcare, housing, agriculture, mass transit, water supply, sanitation etc. It is the states that could more effectively implement policies to improve the condition of public education at the basic as well as the universal healthcare coverage. The programmes that ensure food security and protect the environment are better implemented by state governments. It is, therefore, improper that political parties present candidates for elections at the state level without articulating and popularising policies in these areas. State governments have a greater role in implementing poverty-alleviation policies. Development should be a national process in which the federal government takes the lead and states synchronise their policies with the federal strategy regardless of partisan differences. No matter the policy articulation a president makes nationally on education, for instance, if the states do not focus on basic public education the expected results would not be achieved. This is more so because the state governments have taken advantage of constitutional ambiguity on the place of the local government in the distorted federal structure to control the resources available at the lowest tier of government. If primary schools buildings are in a dilapidated condition and qualified teachers are not available to teach the pupils, the state and local governments should be held responsible. However, the federal government is often the target of criticisms for the scary phenomenon of 18 million children out of school. That would be a proper thing to do as a matter of national policy on universal primary education. But to solve the problem in real terms the state and local governments have to muster adequate capacity for policy execution.

Besides, the policy debates before the election in eight months from now could also help the process of forging an elite consensus on the concept of development. The lack of that necessary consensus is obvious in many respects. It manifests, in particular, in the ways governors define their priorities based on their concept of development. For instance, building an ultramodern conference centre and a governor’s lodge is prioritised over massive water schemes in a state in which more than 50% of the population neither has access to potable water and more than 70% has no water closets in their homes. There should be a consensus on what really constitutes the priority of development between establishing one institution for medical tourism in the state capital and having scores of local hospitals to provide universal healthcare coverage in the villages. The debates are necessary on all areas of development.

That is why the agendas of the various presidential and governorship candidates should be thoroughly examined before the elections.

Unlike what happened in the previous elections, campaigns should not be reduced to demonisation or canonisation of candidates. None of the candidates who will take part in the various elections is a demon or a saint. They are all human beings with their respective strengths and weaknesses. So instead of the virulent attacks on personalities or panegyric publicity for politicians, candidates should be assessed in relation to the programmes of their respective parties which they hope to implement.

The campaign should be a contest of ideas and not a rain of curses and insults.

Fellow columnist Olusegun Adeniyi last Thursday made this point eloquently on this page. Yes, citizens should be armed with their voters’ card. In addition, there should be sanity in the public sphere to discuss the programmes of the political parties and their candidates so that voters would know exactly the agenda for which they are voting during the election.

Every election is defined by the prevailing issues even as candidates make projections into the future of the country. This is more so when the country is bedevilled with the crises of insecurity, poverty and disunity. The 2023 elections will be a different in this respect. It is time the political parties and candidates put forward the ideas to confront these issues. And if you like, now is the hard part!