I do not think that Nigerians understand what is happening as politicians, particularly those occupying elective offices, defect from one political party to another. It is called transactional politics. It is buying and selling. Period. Do Nigerians know that they are the commodities on sale? I very much doubt that they have thought about things from that perspective.
I once heard of a Pastor who sold his church (church building and members) to another church. The members came to church one Sunday morning to find the sign board of a different church on the entrance of their church building. When they peeped inside they saw a different pastor urging them to come in and welcoming them as his new members.
That’s the way politicians sell their followers and put the money in their pockets in the form of positions, contracts and protection from prosecution by the EFCC for their customary looting of the Treasury.
Transactional politics happens because the people do not often understand that they have made themselves commodities. The people become commodities out of blind support for a politician. Most of the time, the support stems from the compulsive feeling of belonging with a person of one’s own ethnic or religious group. There is also Stockholm Syndrome. If a politician can maneuver his way into power, he can use the instruments to amass wealth and patronage over a period of time. The people begin to associate him with those things and respond to him accordingly. They begin to think of their lives as being wound around the politician. The people are content to believe that they are inferior to the politician and dependent upon him for their material and emotional well being.
To sustain patronage and wealth, the politician must remain in power or close to power. This is where elections come in. The politician must either win elections or align with those who do. However, it is not at all easy to be greedy, self seeking and incompetent as a leader and yet continue to win elections freely and fairly in an open competition where the politician has to campaign in competition with others. There therefore has to be a strategy of winning elections. The strategy in Nigeria is principally two – appeal to ethnic and religious kinship and outrightly rig elections and impose yourself on the people.
The politician appeals to kinship by presenting people of other ethnic or religious groups as the enemies of his own people. He shrieks and creates panic and a siege mentality in the people. It is either that Fulanis are planning to overrun communities of his people or subjugate them or Igbos have a grand plan to dominate them in their own land. The gullible people soon fall into a we-against-them sort of war with persons that they otherwise live peaceably with and rally behind an otherwise incompetent candidate in order not to lose face from losing that war.
The next part of the strategy is to outrightly rig the election using assumed ethnic or religious popularity as cover. Populations are mixed, and try as hard as the politician will, there will always be a section of the population that will see through him and his antics and will reject him at the polls. This section can be very large when it comes into combination with other sections of the population that are not bugged down with any kinship relationship with the politician. A free and transparent election would therefore prove the fall of the politician. He has to prevent that from happening at all costs. The election must be turned into a criminal enterprise.
The politician mobilizes election officials and law enforcement to displace the votes of the people and replace them with fake results. Heavy investment is now made to get the courts to give the appearance of legality to the criminality.
The politician is able to succeed because the people do not realize how powerful they are. They are not constitutionally obliged to accept as elected any person that they did not vote for. They are not constitutionally obligated to accept the verdict of the courts purporting to legitimize a robbery of their votes. The meaning of democracy is that the people are sovereign and power flows from them. Section 14 (2)(a) of the Constitution affirms it. It is not in the place of the courts to select leaders for the people, either by overruling the votes of the people or purporting to legitimize electoral fraud. The courts get away with it only because the people allow them to.
The proper response of the people to any announcement of a person that the people rejected at the polls as winner of an election or any verdict of the court legitimizing electoral fraud is to occupy the streets peacefully and stay there until there is a reversal. It is not a revolt against the courts. It is in fact the only thing that can boost the power and confidence of the courts. If the courts are weak, it is because the people are weak. The courts have no guns or cutlasses to enforce their judgments and decrees. They rely on the people to stand by them and defend them when politicians defy their judgments and orders. The people taking a stand against judgments that do not serve the interest of justice but rather the interests of politicians successfully will act as a tonic for the courts to be bold in delivering justice for the people, not minding whose ox is gored, knowing that the people will stand by them.
The Nigerian people have so far been shooting themselves on the foot by not standing up for the judiciary against oppression from the executive. When Buhari sent DSS operatives to invade the homes of judges, including Justices of the Supreme Court, Nigerians did nothing. Worse, many applauded it. The same thing happened when he removed the CJN through unlawful means, having regard to the Constitution and established principle of the Supreme Court. To complete the horror, the collaborators with Buhari in that evil are now in power. The members of the judiciary have since learnt to save their own skin, having been abandoned by the people when it mattered the most.
The way to restore the confidence of the judiciary is for the people to take a bold step not to accept any verdict of the courts seeking to legitimize the robbery of their votes. Believe me when I say that it is the only thing left. We cannot continue to berate INEC. We must think of situations like that of Plateau State where the Court of Appeal robbed the people of all their legislators who they elected under the platform of the PDP and imposed upon them, those they rejected at the polls. Even the Supreme Court was horrified but felt powerless because the Court of Appeal is the final court on such matters. If the people of Plateau State had poured out into the streets peacefully and remained there, the Court of Appeal Justices would have been considering the best route to flee. We can say the same thing of what is going on in Rivers State. If the people took over the streets peacefully and refused to go home, their Governor would be back on seat now.
It comes back to this one question. For how long are Nigerians willing to remain commodities traded by politicians and their collaborators in INEC and the judiciary?
Published by Chuks Nwachuku
