Towards the end of 2018, I decided to run for the presidency of our great country, a post for which I am indubitably more qualified than many of the contestants ( see Muo for President; Business Day, 26/9/18 and 2/10/18). However, looking at what has happened in the past one month- the bizarre, the bad the ugly and the very ugly, I am glad I threw in the towel even before the race began. I would have lost everything, including my sanity. You see, when the irrepressible Fela described Nigerian democracy a demonstration of craze and said of all those involved dem all crazy, people thought that he was the crazy one. A review of political practices and attitudes in Nigerian from 1999 to 2019 shows that the demons have actually gone crazy and we all know what to expect from a mixture of demonism and craziness
I was two years old when Nigerian became independent in 1960 but thanks to the ability to read and write and a natural spirit of enquiry, I now know a lot about what happened. We had politicians, who, though they were not saints, had some vision of the future, took politicking as a serious business, uttered several quotable quotes and were committed to the Nigerian dream. Along the line, the political crises in the West occurred( a primitive version of what is happening now), the soldiers came calling, initially to deal with the ten per-centers and install Awolowo asthe Prime Minister, then a counter coup, which was totally northern, a police action which lasted 3 years and then the Gowon era and the failed 3Rs. The soldiers, who had tested the forbidden fruit, continued with the political relay race until, Shagari and NPN came on board. That era of political flamboyance was cut short by the soldiers who eventually handed over to one of them, a soldier turned civilian, a militician, the one and only OBJ. OBJ started saying and doing the right things but before long, he enthroned the do-or-die political model and became infested spirit of third term. It didn’t work out for him and he wanted to rule by proxy by imposing Yar’Adua on the country. UMYA offered servant-leadership, publicly declared his assets, admitted that he was the beneficiary of a flawed electoral process and went to work to clean up the system. It is not easy to assess his tenure because everything was overshadowed by the politics of ill-health, cabalism and death. He was survived by GoodLuck, the Niger-deltan who went to school without shoes and whom either did not know how to deploy the powers he had ( Nigeria has the most powerful presidents in the world) or was determined to do politicking differently or was determined to make history. And in 2015, the APC, an amalgam of desperate and disparate politicians cut short the proposed 60 year reign of the PDP, accusing Jonathan of cluelessness among other things. The APC promised CHANGE and offered everything, including turning the desert into a riverine area. But they did not tell us the cost of these changes and some of us were so carried away with their smooth stories that we did not interrogate their proposals.
In 2019, the APC-appointed INEC conducted an election that has so far lasted one month. Everything that could conceivably go wrong with elections has gone wrong with this election. Inconclusiveness and supplementary elections became the key features; elections and collation of results were canceled, suspended and/or, postponed. Over-voting was observed; violence was commonplace; INEC officials were kidnapped or coerced to announce results and the soldiers became the new face of democracy in Nigeria. People who were anxious to vote in the national election abandoned the polling booths in the subsequent elections because he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day. For now, the tribunals and their shareholders, the lawyers, have taken over. We experienced bipartisan democracy in places like IMO and Ogun states, where the governors belonged to two parties . We also had democracy by remote control in a place like rivers where APC contested every inch of the way even when they were not in the ballot. Of course, the president had told the world that APC won Osun State through remote control!
People have complained against the various aspects of the elections and some of these complains were coloured by political, ethnic or religious considerations. Some rational and pro-National issues have also been raised, especially how the 2019 election has been the worst in recent time, how the monies spent were wasted because the votes did not count and the voters were not allowed to have a say. CSOs who always poke their noses into what does not concern them complained that the 2019 election was a step back from that of 2015, with one of them, HURIWA accusing INEC of committing more crimes than Evans, the billionaire kidnapper. Our philosopher, Douglas Anele certified democracy dead andwent on to conduct a coroner’s inquest while Ango Abdulahi saw the election as monumental failure. Members of the APC and their supporters are not complaining, except in places like Zamfara and Rivers, though their jubilation has been subdued.
However, I have examined the 2019 elections and the practice of democracy especially since 1999, with the eyes of an elder and I strongly believe that our democracy has matured, with its principles and practices. That is the good news. However the bad news is that anybody who expects that the principles of Nigerian democracy will be similar to what obtains elsewhere will surely be in for a rude shock!( To be continued)
Other matters: Why money leads us!
As a banker in those old good days, I used to go on ‘specie’ (cash collection from one branch of the bank to another)from Enugu to all over the former Eastern Nigeria and even beyond. Then, it was normal to cordon off the road from say, Enugu to PH, and no vehicle was allowed to overtake the specie-convoy. That was about 35 years ago. Today, with the cashless policy, online banking and bullet-proof cash movement vehicles, I thought that the era has gone. You can imagine my shock when on 8/2/19, we were forced to join a money-movement motorcade as a bullion van and its security details blocked the road and prevented people from overtaking along the express way from Sagamu to Ijebuode. It took us about 1 hour to cover a distance that ordinarily took around 15 minutes. Of course it is normal for people to be chased off the road by soldiers escorting bullion vans. So, the money is more important that the people who own the money? But this is not a local affair and that is why Kathleen D. Vohs of the University of Minnesota recently wrote an article titled: why money leads us! He argued that it was money that made us the humans we are today, for better for worse. He performed an experiment in which a group performed an assignment that involved money and the other performed assignments that did not involve money and found that those that dealt with money share, help and emphatise less than those who did not deal with money. In another experiment, he found out that once people are reminded of money, they become less kind, less helpful, and less generous with each other. In effect, money is the boss and whenever you see cash on the go, better find your level.
Ik Muo, P.hD; Department of Business Administration, OOU, Ago-Iwoye
