Back to the Issues

KAYODE KOMOLAFE

0805 500 1974

In the electoral time-table, 150 days have been scheduled for political parties and their candidates to campaign across the country.

One of the reasons given by the Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) for this unusually long period of campaigns is that candidates would need time to go round the country to sell their manifestoes and explain their programmes to voters. In the process, the candidates would also learn about the Nigerian condition as the campaign trains move to various places.

Although some politicians are said to be unhappy about the long period of campaigns as they accuse INEC chairman Professor Mahmood Yakubu of making them to spend more money on electioneering. In the financial arithmetic of politicians, the longer the period of campaigns, the more their expenses.

However, the 150 days of campaigns have been justified by proponents of issue-based campaigns. It is reasoned that the relatively long period would enable political parties and the public at large to discuss the issues of the elections thoroughly so that on the day of election an informed decision would be made by the voter.

If morning shows the day, the last few days of the campaigns have not given any hope of an issue-based 2023 politics. Not much of the issues is being discussed. Nothing on the horizon holds the promise of qualitatively different campaigns. It might be argued that most of that parties are yet to formally unveil their manifestoes. But the trend of undue manipulation of the politics of identity should worry those genuinely concerned about the outcome of the process. Increasingly, politicians, publicists, pundits and other public intellectuals are focussing more on religious, ethnic and regional labels at the expense of the reality of the condition of the people. The public sphere is saturated with prejudicial exchanges and hate-laden opinions on religion and ethnicity among partisans of political parties.

Politicians seem to have shifted their focus away from insecurity, mass poverty and environmental disasters to religion, ethnicity and geo-political calculations. It is, of course, more mentally tasking to discuss the economic policy options of a candidate than to rain insults and abuses on the region and ethnic origins of the candidate.

For instance, amidst the prolonged ASUU strike a candidate came up with a highly retrogressive proposition on how to solve the problem of inadequate funding of public universities. Hardly was there any response from the camps of his opponents. But a political tirade on an alleged regional political interest made by the same candidate has dominated electioneering for days. This is a symptom of the neglect of material issues while the people’s attention is diverted with the gross manipulation of religion and regionalism.

Therefore, genuine democratic voices should not be tired of telling politicians to go back to the issues of the election. Politicians should be selling their policy options to solve the numerous problems. The public should be alert to the ploy by some elements to cynically manipulate the fault lines in the most dangerous manner.

For clarity, the threat to national integration is an issue. National unity is a big issue in electoral terms. The issues of the defective Nigerian federalism abound. The lack of seriousness of purpose about restructuring is a cause of many political problems. But the approach should not be by manipulation of these issues for electoral advantage. Rather political parties and their candidates should be challenged on their agendas for national unity based on social justice and equity.

Nation-building anywhere is a work in progress, as they say. This point was eloquently summed up by a former governor of Ekiti State, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, last December at a summit on national unity in Abuja. The scholar-politician who remarkably completed his second-term in office as governor on Sunday put the matter like this:

“Unity is never given ab initio or permanently; it requires to be nurtured and worked at constantly and on an on-going basis. And it is for this reason that governments and citizens alike cannot afford to take unity for granted or imagine that it is offered on a platter or acquired as an automatic given.

“One of the imports of my observation that leaders and citizens have a duty to invest in and grow unity as a full time vocation is that those of our compatriots who, out of a modestly understandable frustration, often say that the Amalgamation of 1914 was a “mistake”, will do well to keep in mind that most countries in the world today are indeed the products of an involuntary and/or compelled mergers of peoples who, once brought together under the same roof had to work to forge bonds of unity among themselves. The important point which we must always remember is that unity anywhere and everywhere is an outcome that is generated out of initial conditions that are not by any means perfect. There is, therefore, no bypassing the hard work that leaders and governments must put in to build, sustain, and renew unity. And it is that hard work that we must call upon ourselves to undertake, doing so in faith and hope, with patience and patriotism, and an abiding commitment to the common history and humanity we share.

In the same way that unity is not an automatic given that can be taken for granted, so also is disunity not a fatalistic inevitability into which we are locked in perpetuity. No people are condemned to a life of permanent and perpetual disunity. Imperfections and failings in any union manifest themselves in various forms and shapes. Differences and disagreements exist alongside cleavages and contradictions. We must learn as a people to accept that these are hard facts and features of any polity. Properly handled, they may be turned into important drivers of a socio-political dynamic that propels countries forward in their march of progress. Mismanaged and compounded, they may fester and become threats to stability and togetherness. Disunity of the kind that goes behind difference and divergence and which threatens violent collapse is, therefore, a mark of failings in governance, not the inevitable fate to which a people are condemned.

“In going to some length to dispel popular misconceptions about unity and disunity, I do not by any means wish to deny or downplay the fact that as a country, we in Nigeria are faced with some of the most severe tests of our nationhood since the end of the civil war of 1967 to 1970. Rather, what I seek to convey, drawing on global comparative experiences, is to remind us that the choice of striving to build and sustain a united country belongs entirely to us. We can either opt to exercise that choice or forfeit it. All things considered.”

The foregoing intervention that Fayemi made as a governor remains profound in terms of the elucidation it provides in solving the problem of threats to national unity.

The perspective of Fayemi could be distinguished from the spreading of prejudice in which ethnic and religious labels are put on everything under the sun. In the process the attention of the people is hugely diverted from the issues impinging directly on their material existence. It would appear that politicians and their intellectual agents in the public sphere seek to chloroform the consciousness of the people about the source of their suffering in this unjust system.

While a lot energy and time and are devoted to discussing the geo-political origins and faiths of the candidates, floods have created a state of emergency in at least 27 states of the 36 states of Nigeria. Yet environment is not yet a prominent issue in the campaigns. There is hardly any informed debate on climate change in Nigeria.

To be sure, floods (like hunger, ignorance and disease) do not recognise the binary division of Nigeria into Christian and Muslim communities or the geo-political North and South. Homes are submerged in Bayelsa state of the south-south geopolitical zone; a good part of Kogi state in the north central is ravaged by floods and parts of Jigawa state in the northwest have been devastated by floods.

The humanitarian crisis and threats to food security generated by the environmental disaster do not respect geo-political or religious boundaries. About 600 lives have been lost. More than 2.5 million persons have been displaced. No fewer than 90, 000 homes have been damaged.

Bayelsa state has the least population of 1, 704, 515, according to the 2006 census. About 700, 000 persons of this population have been displaced from the 300 communities, which have been flooded and submerged. In fact, residents of the state are in a desperate situation.

A professor’s post to an alumni WhatsApp group of the University of Calabar illustrates the profound human dimension of the present condition in Bayelsa. The alumnus posted the photograph of his flooded home in Bayelsa state to the platform and other members expressed words of sympathy. The professor responded to fellow Malabites (as UNICAL’s alumni addressed one another) as follows:

“Thanks.

“But this is a small matter compared to my present worry.

“I have two children attending Unical. One had since graduated. I don’t know if the last two will also follow in the footsteps of their elder sisters, who say they are following in the footsteps of their father.

“Senior Malabites, my girls told me school has resumed. I asked them:

‘How will you go to Calabar? With a chopper?’

“Dear Colleagues, I want to state that the resumption of school at this point in time has not taken into consideration the accessibility of Calabar from other parts of the country.

“For now, Bayelsa and Ahoada West Local Government Area of Rivers State are completely cut off from other parts of the country. I cannot talk of the Calabar-Itu Road. Many Bayelsans that came into the country have been stranded in Port Harcourt or Warri for many days because the East -West Road is cut off on the Delta and Rivers sides. Also, one cannot travel the Ughelli-Asaba Road because it is submerged totally at several points. In Yenagoa, power supply has been cut off for days for fear of electrocutions.

So, what happens to my children and others like them? Did the Senate consider this natural disaster before coming out with a timetable?

“I feel pained.”

The desperate situations in most states of Nigeria call for a declaration of a national emergency.

Is it not, therefore, strange that environment is not major issue in a country experiencing this emergency?

Instead, a casual observer would think that religious, regional and ethnic differences are the only issues in Nigeria.

Yet, the material issues of the campaigns are not to be invented. The stark reality of the issues is, of course, there on the streets and in poor homes The issues are the problems faced by the voters in their daily struggles of their lives – insecurity, poverty, joblessness, energy crisis, poor state public education, lack of universal healthcare delivery, homelessness etc.

These and more issues should be the focus of the campaigns.