That our votes may count (2)

 by Alade Fawole
YES, the July 14 Edo State governorship polls truly emblematized the critical relevance of the electorate in our democratic process. For a fact, the electorate has not been vaporized; they still exist and can be active in the democratic process. I am not among those who would gloat that this has brought an end to god-fatherism in politics, for it has not. It may seem so for now in Edo state but it won’t be for long, and it is definitely not going to be so in the rest of the country. In any case, god-fatherism in the real sense is not what it has come to symbolize in the Nigerian context. A little on that below. Now that the voting is over and the winner has finally emerged then real governance must begin and the peoples’ votes must begin to count. The voters must now begin to make their government work to provide the real dividends of democracy. If they fail to exercise the requisite vigilance, then they risk their democracy being reduced to nothing more than the mere ritual of queuing up to vote and then going back to sleep until the next election cycle four years from now. Since they have not allowed the legendary godfathers of Edo politics to vaporize them this time around, they have sent strong signals to all politicians that they want to control their own political destiny. It is now up to them to make the government responsible and accountable to them. That is an edge they must not allow to slip from their grip again. All governments generally are capable of and do relish behaving lawlessly but democratic governments tend to perform better not because of any genetic predisposition on the part of democrats but only because the electorate holds them accountable to their electoral promises and wouldn’t hesitate to vote them out next election cycle. What this implies is that democracy thrives, deepens, yields dividends only to the extent to which the people are willing to make it. Democracy is too important to be left to the whims of so-called democrats alone. Active involvement of the people in the process of governance is a critical factor. America’s democracy is mature and envied today not because of its operators as much as because of the vigilance of the people and their readiness to defend their own interests. Nigerians can only hope to enjoy the fruits of democracy when they are prepared to regard their welfare and wellbeing as the most important reasons why government exist in the first place. If democracy fails in Edo state henceforth, then the people themselves must be to blame.
But I need to stress that while the good performance of Governor Adams Oshiomhole in his first term in office was responsible for the overwhelming endorsement he has received from the people for a second term, performance alone is not all that democracy is made of. Provision of good social and physical infrastructure, education, healthcare and other goodies for the vast majority of the people is a bounden duty of every government and not that of democratic governments alone. Good performance in the area of physical development as witnessed in Edo, as necessary and desirable as it is, must never be the yardstick for determining overall democratic performance. Let me hasten to remind us that Nigerians protested, struggled valiantly and many even died, and generally made near super-human sacrifices to rid our polity of authoritarian military rule, not because military regimes failed to perform or provide good social and physical infrastructure, but because military rule is antithetical to democracy. To be honest with ourselves and fair to the military, it was during the three decades of military dictatorship that Nigeria witnessed some of the most impressive infrastructural development that we still enjoy today. Soldiers paid salaries, established schools and universities; built hospitals, stadiums, good roads and flyovers, bridges, electricity generating dams and other wonderful structures. Yet, Nigerians overwhelmingly rejected them and successfully forced them back to their barracks in 1999. It then implies that, at bottom, democracy must surely mean more than mere performance and provision of physical development.
In reality, some of the basic elements which are unique to democracy, and which no other form of government is able to guarantee include the notions that:  sovereignty ultimately belongs to the people; governments exist at the instance and for the welfare of the people; it is the right of the people to freely choose their own leaders through free and fair elections in which all adults are allowed to participate without restrictions except as stipulated by law; the rule of law as opposed to force must prevail, which implies that all are equal before and subject to the law, and that government operates according to law and not outside it; rulers are accountable to the people they govern and that the people have the right to change any government they no longer want, among others. These, in a nutshell, are the integral and irreducible minimum dividends which people are entitled to in every democracy, regardless whether democratic governments actually performs well or not in the area of physical development. And these are the standards that Edo people and, by extension, all Nigerians, must insist their governments adhere to. Any government that fails to meet these minimum standards is at best a caricature of democracy and not a real one. With regard to performance, democratic governments strive to meet the yearnings and expectations of the people for development if they ever hope to be returned to power next time. However, adherence to the democratic tenets mentioned above, rather than mere provision of good infrastructure and evident physical development, which even dictatorial governments often excel at, must be the yardstick for assessing democracy.
Many Nigerians are today totally dissatisfied with our democratic experiment because it has failed to satisfy the minimum standards listed above. We are saddled with an executive arm of government that is overbearing and anti-democratic in temperament and action; a National Assembly that shamelessly appropriates a quarter of the national budget for fewer than five hundred members against the welfare of 160 million Nigerians, and one that is unrepresentative of the people, if not anti-people in its conduct; and a judiciary which should ordinarily be the last hope of the people for justice to prevail but is, unfortunately, the bastion of injustice, delayed and twisted justice. Today twelve years later, impunity reigns supreme in the conduct of government, corruption and insecurity have combined to make life a nightmare for majority of Nigerians, and the democracy they struggled so hard to enthrone is almost going totally berserk before their very eyes. Only popular will, and not any government, can make this democracy work. The ball is therefore in our court!
Permit a little digression into godfatherism and its impact on politics and governance which I alluded to above. Beyond the opprobrium it has attracted in Nigerian politics, godfatherism has positive role in democratic politics.
Unfortunately, most of those whom our local media erroneously refer to as godfathers are little more that political entrepreneurs or contractors whose main interests are selfish and at variance with what real godfathers are known for. I reserve a fuller discussion on godfatherism and democratic politics for another day.
Four years from now, Adams Oshiomhole will himself start acting out the role of a godfather in Edo politics once he completes his second term as governor. It is common knowledge that every elected leader is always interested in who succeeds him/her. General Ibrahim Babangida, even though unelected, during his interminable transition to civil rule programme, reportedly asserted that while he did not know who would succeed him, he certainly knew those who would not be allowed to succeed him. End of story! Comrade Adams Oshiomhole as leader of the Action Congress of Nigeria in his state would definitely not sit idly by and allow anyone who would rubbish his accomplishments to take over from him. That would be against commonsense. Since he would also not want his party to lose to the opposition in the next elections, he would invariably find himself playing the role of gate-keeper and godfather. Governor Bola Tinubu did that by carefully overseeing the emergence of a credible successor before leaving office as governor of Lagos State in 2007. That is godfatherism of sorts. All good political leaders are supposed to be godfathers to mentor others, oversee their adherence to party manifestoes, rules and regulations, and whip them into line when need be. So, godfatherism is not such a bad thing after all.
This is the positive role that Governor Oshiomhole and, indeed, all political leaders and elder statesmen, would be expected to play once out of office so that our democracy can be run by real democrats and it can begin to deliver to us the much anticipated dividends.