The ushering in of the new year has hastened the countdown for Nigeria as it hobbles towards the biggest event that ever happens in respective African countries: elections. In terms of the high expectations that precede it and even its ability to momentarily remind people fragmented of their shared identity, elections in Africa are equivalent to the World Cup. Elections gulp as much as the Olympics (and similarly, many of the facilities you purchase for that event are hardly ever useful afterward). They make grown men (and women) sort themselves into partisan camps and engage in emotional arguments about who is the GOAT. In Africa where hardly much else happens due to our constricted economies, elections are about the only large-scale excitement we can afford.
Elections cannot but be integral to African social and political life. It is through elections we sort out who has power and who can be sacrificed in the quest for even more power. Elections determine which of our tribes has more political relevance and which religion is dominant. Since we hardly get credible statistical figures to enlighten us on the demographics of our own country, election results provide a way of walking back to the answer. Through periodic elections, civic, political, and social actors get reshuffled so that some lucky ones can end up closer to power than they did just a day before the election. The closer you get to power, the better your access to resources, and higher up goes your social relevance. You can hardly blame the people who throw their spirits, souls, and bodies into elections. African elections, particularly presidential ones, are the ultimate determinant of destiny. It is why we fight with every weapon of our warfare to win them.
No other activities consume African resources more than elections. From the money we barely have to our psychic energies and the overdrawing on the capacities of our weak institutions, we pay so much for this aspect of democracy rituals. The one activity that makes time stand still in Africa is elections. The idea of time in this part of the world is beyond the calendar or even seasons; the nature of our democracy configures time to be the space between two elections. Everything our leaders do by way of governance is either about preparing for the next election or undoing a previous election they have lost. Life itself is made to stop just for the sake of elections.
Elections are also, ironically, the least transforming of all our activities, which is why I wonder about the fate of the country after this coming general elections. Every election is unique and definitive in its own way, but this one produced third parties. Unlike previous times, they pose a threat to the formidability of the two main parties and heighten the stakes. Some hasty analysts thought the “Obidient Movement” would dissipate as soon as the ‘real’ electioneering started. But, as it turned out, those social observers both underestimated the resentment accrued against the present administration’s incompetence and announced their own unmooring from gritty reality. Those snorty dismissals have turned out to be shortsighted. The old electoral maps are being redrawn and making politicians trade horses crazily. By the time the elections come and go, they would have battered away the future in their desperate bid to win. Since there is hardly ever post-election accounting of finances, who knows what we would have lost and how much we would be invoiced to pay for what we did not join them to break?
When you consider the ongoing haggling and solicitations for the coming elections, you also wonder if there will be anything left for the country when they are done. Consider, for instance, those called ‘the G5’ and the efforts being wasted on seducing them to pimp their constituents for a presidential candidate in the next election. Mind you, ‘the G5’ is a term being bandied around to ascribe grave functional importance to what is essentially a bunch of overfed, overindulged, and underperforming politicians taking advantage of the dysfunctionality of Nigeria’s democratic system. Yet, the attitude towards these people by those wooing them goes a long way to clarify why our political system is still not ready to hold people accountable for their tenure in office. No matter what those governors have done or failed to do can be overlooked, no thanks to their current relevance. By putting themselves in positions where they are being solicited by desperate politicians who need to win the election, these five are also freeing themselves from the accountability that should ideally follow their stewardship.
It is unfortunate how the structure of the democracy we run allows our politicians perhaps the highest opportunity for a masterful display of cunning and calculations. They build the skills to manipulate and outwit in the game of power, but they have yet to find it necessary to learn how to transfer the same skill set into actual governance. Getting power is where all the efforts stop for them. When elections are over, they hardly settle into governance. They continue jostling to maintain their space in politics by delegitimising their opponents. That is why much of what we call ‘democracy’ in many African countries barely transcends the basics. Some have even taken it as a given that what we see presently is all there is meant to be because every electoral cycle, such people confuse the broader gains of democracy for ‘credible’ elections. They say things like, even though this administrator has failed in every area, he can still seal his legacy by giving us “credible elections.” Such crude reduction of all the possibilities that democracy affords a people into the single component of elections is a drawback.
If there is going to be a resolution to the impasse of governance in our society, it will have to come from the people being governed. They are the ones who will have to break the logjam because there is little indication that our leaders are ready to provide any other experience outside obtaining power for its own sake. Our politicians are stuck to the old ways and will hardly risk their chances of winning the next election by trying something new. I have never quite believed that Nigeria must witness a complete ethical reformation before we begin to transform our lives, but one must also be realistic enough to accept that this routine of administrative failures will continue until we break the pattern of limited expectations.
This year makes it 23 years since Nigeria got on the path of an unbroken cycle of civil rule. We have been afforded some freedom, but we are still living well below our potential. Our freedom from mediocrity will take forgoing the usual sentiments of tribe and religion and willing ourselves to make better electoral choices at all levels. Our leaders do not think we have the mental and moral capacity to make choices outside the dictates of instinct. When one of politicians’ aides went on television last year to mouth off on live television, one of the revealing things he said was that Nigerians are too poor to care about the nature of choices before them. That mindset not only explains why they need people to be poor, but it also confirmed my thoughts that the coming election will boil down to a contest between those too impoverished to make sensible choices and those who will affirm they are sentient and thinking beings.
