Eddy Odivwri
This is election season. Not quite. The national election proper is about eight full months away. But the fever has already seized us. It is not for nothing. Not only has governance been suspended, the smell of the dollar is all over the place. And that is our bane. In a few days, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) will have its own presidential primary contest. Twenty four men have been screened for the contest.
The rival Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had its presidential primary last weekend. It eloquently bespoke of what is to come: that the “digital politics” of today is defined only by cash. No wonder the likes of Peter Obi who would not dole out cash so mindlessly (even though he has it), had to quit.
The collection of nomination form alone from the two leading parties was a matter of financial heavy weather. While the PDP charged N40 million, the APC charged a whooping N100 million, thus raising the bar of the contest beyond the reach of ordinary good men. In an economy strewn with hardship and a punitive economic climate, the demand of such a huge registration fee for a mere political aspiration speaks volumes of how pretentious we are in mouthing our determination to have a better country.
How much honesty can we truly expect from a man or woman who doles out N100 million to buy nomination form, while dealing with the public treasury?
Last weekend, we all witnessed dollar rain. It was heavy. PDP party delegates suddenly became like prized princes and princesses who must be courted with bags and bales of hard currency. This weekend, the rain might even be heavier as the APC files out for its presidential primary contest.
It is bad enough that the fate of the future of over 200 million people is being determined by less than four thousand people, which questions democracy as a majoritarian rule, yet, it is even worse that the rational reasoning of these less than 4,000 persons is being circumscribed by the oodles of dollars. At the sight of dollars, the reasoning capacity of the delegates is no longer assured. And that seems the only currency that is considered a legal tender in the electoral market.
Sam Ohuabunwa, one of the PDP presidential aspirants (he scored just one vote) put it succinctly.
When asked if he was embarrassed with his just one vote, he said, not many people will remember their surname when dollars are on the table. True!
So, that is where the delegates have become like Esau. The story was told in the Bible of how Esau, an elder of a twin, had returned from the field one day very famished. He saw his idle younger brother (Jacob) preparing a pot of porridge. Esau could not endure his hunger. He asked for food from Jacob, who saw his brother’s situation as an opportunity for “transactional politics”. He demanded for his brother’s birthright if he must give him the porridge. Foolishly, Esau reasoned: of what use is birthright in the face of this pang of hunger? He staked it without a second thought, and ate the porridge. And so, Jacob became the elder and till today, the contention between Esau and Jacob has continued to haunt humanity.
In the same vein, our political class, represented by these so-called delegates is staking our future on the table, in exchange for wads and bales of dollars (some of which are now being said are fake), forgetting that he who quenches his/her hunger today will sooner or later get hungry again. How can these delegates be so short-sighted as to sacrifice our future because of the momentary allure of dollars?
In my Delta State, I saw a video of how a delegate, on returning from the ‘Delegates’ Voyage’, quickly bought a car to celebrate the ‘harvest’. In the face of dollar, the reasoning faculty of delegates is compromised. They end up electing the wrong aspirants and the consequence is that they will battle poverty, lack, hardship under-development, insecurity, ignorance and all such ill warts of governance for another four years or even eight years, long after the temporary sweetness of the porridge (dollars) has turned sour. And another set of delegates will come, make the same mistakes, and the cycle continues. Who will redeem us from this scourge?
It has become such a lucrative venture to be a delegate. A tik-tok joke had captured it quaintly when a little boy was asked what he would like to become in the future, and he quickly declared that he would want to be a Delegate.
But inherent in this Delegates’ misdemeanour is the big issue of character, integrity and honesty, all rolled into one. How can it be explained that delegates will openly collect dollars from each and every of all the aspirants, whereas they know they will vote for just one person?
It was alleged that the son of the former Vice president, Namadi Sambo, Mustapha, who contested and lost his bid to be a member of the House of Representatives, had engaged the services of Vigilante and hunters to recover the N100 million he spent on delegates, after he scored only two votes. First, how did such a “small boy” get the N100 million he spent on bribing delegates?
Again, a social media post, in describing the source of the huge monies being spent by politicians captured it so well: that the huge monies are the money of the people, stolen from the people and now being used to buy the people. The delegates know most of the monies are stolen from public treasury, so they argue that what they get is just their own little portion from the irrecoverable loot. A vicious circle of sorts.
If they (delegates) deal so dishonestly with the aspirants like that, how and why will they expect that the aspirants, when they eventually win, will deal honestly and rightly with them? They would be deemed to have had their due, and thus should not expect the elected persons to be responsible to them anymore.
Rightly or wrongly, politicians who spend hundreds of millions of Naira or even dollars buying nomination forms, more millions to bribe delegates and even much more millions to campaign, see their efforts as investments for which there must be a bounteous return. Therefore, such politicians are not expected to be exactly saintly in dealing with the treasury when they get into office. The implication is that good and devoted governance will take flight. And the people will suffer, because a few delegates, yesterday, had cadged away the fortunes of the people.
