Someone
said a politician is a dealer in hope. By that it is meant that a typical
politician carries on with so much confidence of victory in the elections such
that his/her supporters are almost driven to believe that they have won the battle
before the ballot is cast. That explains why it is impolitic to say ‘if I am
elected’ but to say ‘when I am elected’. A lot of such is playing out this
election season here in Nigeria. But as everyone knows, there will be more
losers than winners in the elections which start less than two weeks away. So
are people preparing for electoral losses? I can almost hear someone say ‘it is
not my portion’.
Whether
we accept it or not, there will be losers in the elections. And it could be
anyone. The contestants know that fact, despite sometimes trying out some
braggadocio acts when the result is out. Too often, they mellow after the
initial ‘gra-gra’ and even end up
partnering with the eventual winner to ‘move the state forward’, if not to push
their personal interests and recover from their financial losses. That’s why
the private closets of many a politician has enough mementoes of different
political parties to be dusted up for use as the occasion demands.
But
that is one secret many of them don’t let their supporters know. And if the
supporters know, it hardly reflects in their quality of support or limit how
far they go in supporting their principals. I have observed from a vantage
position the sourness in the heart of many supporters of politicians when such
politicians eventually did not get their party tickets and never bothered to
try their luck in alternative parties or did and lost. In one case a
gubernatorial hopeful complained of being cheated out of the contest. He
threatened everything and made his supporters believe he was on the way to
another political party to achieve his aspiration. After a few weeks, he sneaked
back to the hierarchy of the old party and pledged allegiance, leaving his
supporters in the lurch. Some openly cursed the politician for ‘using’ them.
Truth is the politicians are adept at ‘using’ people and in the process setting
the ‘ordinary’ people against one other and taking advantage of them.
It
is therefore to those supporters that we should advise to look beyond the
elections to see where they will be in the picture and what would be left of
their personal relationships with their fellow ‘ordinary’ citizens. This season
has certainly brought out the beast in many citizens, fighting their otherwise
closest relations and friends. This builds up to anger and bitterness which
escape through hate messages, malice keeping and hatred just because friends,
neighbours, classmates, co-workers, religious brethren and families support
different political parties and candidates.
And
this is where many of us find this particular electoral season very dehydrating
and energy sapping, seeing as compatriots so easily build high walls of
distrust and go for each other’s jugular. It is indeed scary. The volume of
venom circulating on the cyberspace is enough to annihilate a country and one
only hopes this is not eventually manifested in the physical realm. We need to
stem or reverse this tide and urgently too. We need to advise citizens to not
only plan electoral victory but prepare for electoral loss or defeat, which is
a natural possibility in any contest. After all, 13 of the 14 presidential
candidates will lose and their supporters, who could be anyone should brace up
to that.
One
way of preparing for electoral loss is to acknowledge that the eventual winner
is going to be a fellow Nigerian, nothing more. Why then must we split hairs
over who wins? Why would right-thinking citizens want to wake up the day after
the elections to not being able to have an honest and open conversation with
their long-time neighbour or even members of the same faith, just because they
supported different candidates in the elections? Truth be told, the candidates
in the election do not even have personal knowledge of and could not be
bothered with the identities of the supporters who are willing to put their
lives on the line for them. As many supporters as get bloodied physically or
traumatised even on cyberspace altercations are left to sulk and remain mere
statistics, at best. Even those who get killed ‘die wrongfully’, in the lyrics
of the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.
The
lessons of 2011 are still fresh in our memories. Only last week, a television
station ran a news report showing that many of the victims of the 2011
post-election violence were yet to be compensated as promised by government.
But some others were compensated. Has anyone wondered who the lucky ones were?
It would most certainly be the elite, who lost some of their luxury goods. And
certainly not one of the poor, anonymous fellows who were in the thick of the
fight; spewing their anger all over the place. The moral of that report is that
when the chips are down, the foot soldiers get sacrificed to serve the selfish
interest of the ruling class.
Published on February 1, 2015 in The Niche newspaper http://www.thenicheng.com/preparing-electoral-loss/
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