Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make noise are the only inhabitants of the field”. —Edmund Burke
I loved it when the president continuously enjoined the people to vote whoever they wanted. I love it even more that the people are choosing to vote who they want. I have to make this week’s piece a virtual parody of a previous one which I had titled ‘Democracy Without Democrats’. Enjoy it.
In underscoring the importance of the doctrine of ‘popular sovereignty’ –or the right of the ‘people’ in modern democracies, to be the sole conferrers of ‘governmental authority’, America’s Thomas Jefferson once said “I know no safe repository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.” And then he added “and if we think them (the people) not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it (the power) from them but to inform their discretion.” Namely to educate them to make the right choices; so that, in time they may begin to exercise that ‘power’ beneficially rather than detrimentally to themselves. But no matter what they do, Edmund Burke said, the ‘people’, in a democracy, ultimately are their own masters. They must be allowed to decide who governs their affairs. And which is what we are currently seeing happening in the second rounds of gubernatorial elections here in Nigeria. Against the predictions of analysts, the people are insisting on voting their own way.
What Thomas Jefferson meant by the ‘people’ being the repository of ‘governmental authority’, is that the right of the ‘people’ in a democracy to ‘freely’ and ‘willfully’ elect or remove their governments is sacrosanct; and that at no time and under no guise should that right be abridged by any, even if for the reason that the people may not be sophisticated enough to handle that right. In fact the ‘people’ in addition to possessing that power –ad nauseam or ad libitum or both- also possess the right to exercise it however they wish! And maybe it is the reason John Patrick said that democracy is “the right (even) to make the wrong choice.” Or as the poet, James Russell Lowell said, that democracy “gives every man a right to be his own oppressor”. Whatever the majority soweth on an election day, that the nation will reap in the years of governance. It is not undemocratic that they are replacing salary-paying governors with candidates of doubtful fidelity to good governance; and they are returning salary-owing governors in deference, trivially, ethno-religious and sectional egos.
Abraham Lincoln said “No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent”. But maybe he should’ve said ‘No man is good enough to govern a majority without that majority’s consent’. Because, truth is, in modern democracies the majority has always been made good enough to govern the minority without the minority’s consent. There is no ‘moral minority’, outside of the due democratic process, that can arrogate the right or suffer the obligation to save majority of the people from a political ‘affliction’ that they are determined to bear, or to impose on them a political ‘relief’ that they are not prepared to enjoy. Rivers’s Wike, Kano’s Ganduje, Benue’s Ortom, Kaduna’s El-Rufai or Lagos’ Ambode are either ‘afflictions’ or ‘reliefs’ only those who elected them have a right freely to ‘cure’ themselves of or to sit back and ‘enjoy’. I have always quoted this cartoonist, Mike Peters, who once asked “When I go into the voting booth, do I vote for the person who is the best president or the slime bucket who will make my life as a cartoonist wonderful?”
Meaning that as people are bound to vote particular candidates for sundry –often self serving- reasons, they will equally be right not to vote particular ones for sundry –often self serving- other reasons. Many hailers for example still want Ganduje back in Kano in spite of the albatross of bribe allegation hanging around his neck. Conversely, many wailers who may seem genuinely scandalized by this pro-Ganduje sentiment, may not, themselves be averse to having their own little Gandujes elsewhere they would want returned no matter how politically sinning they may be. Truth is no one electorate is any more righteous than another in the choice of who or who not to elect into political office, provided that candidates are not inhibited by law to contest, those who will vote them cannot be hamstrung by morality to vote one and not the other. If a Ganduje is still good for the people of Kano State, why should a Bala Mohammed not be good for the people of Bauch State? They are both alleged to be corrupt, one practically in the taking, the other perceptively to the hilt. To prevent others from contest for the reason that they are ‘morally’ undeserving of the trust of the people, or that the ‘people’ who will elect them are “not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion”, is to forcefully assume trusteeship of that fundamental right of the ‘people’ to ‘freely’ determine who they elect into, or who they vote, out of office.
But sometimes democracy, as someone rightly said, is ‘four wolves’ and a ‘lamb’, voting on what to have for lunch. The ‘lamb’ will merely have a ‘say’ and the ‘wolves’, a ‘way’; because it has always been democracy’s eternal dictum that to the minority is a ‘say’, and to the majority, a ‘way’. And that is just the way that the democratic ‘cookie’ always crumbles. The whisper of a faction, said the British Prime Minister, Lord Russell, should not “prevail against the voice of a nation”. The problem we have in Nigeria has been this arrogant arrogation, by the minority, of the right to have both a ‘say’ and a ‘way’. And often this is done in a manner that potentially self-destructs the entire system. We need an electoral minority or an opposition that is content always with its own democratically allotted station. It is the way of all ‘civilized’ democracies: that self-righteous oppositions bide their time with superior argument, to take over governments –not with a lethal narrative, to subvert the system. Lyndon B. Johnson once said: “The vote is the most wonderful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice”. How can we establish justice in our society if we persist wantonly in violating the sanctity of the electoral process?
Isn’t it time we let only the people decide.