The monetized, Ekiti State, elections is a warning signal that those who will win the 2019 general elections may be those with the deepest purses. In a manner of speaking, it will be money for hand, thumbprint for party. Of course, there is no controversy that money-for-vote played a significant role in the Ekiti elections. What is disputed is who started it and to what extent the outcome of the elections was affected by the money-for-vote harvest.
While the ruling party in the state, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is claiming that they lost to a federally backed money-for-vote harvester, the winner of the Ekiti election, the All Progressive Congress (APC), reminds the PDP that it started that gambit well in advance through the infamous stomach infrastructure, of the departing Ayo Fayose-led government. Regardless of who started it, the bottom line is that vote buying has added to the other tragedies that make our elections more of a farce.
For this column, the tragedy of the money-for-vote syndrome is that it is a double whammy for Nigerians. As cynical as it may sound, considering that the cost of the vote is determined by the forces of demand and supply, the retail vote sellers are not likely to get any serious value for their ware because the buyers know that they are poor, hungry and desperate. Because of their desperation, they buy their votes for peanuts.
So, the people who sell their votes at the retail end, being so poor, sell so cheaply. These grades of sellers are different from the intermediaries or the wholesalers, who receive humongous sums to deliver the votes from their respective communities. A recent example is the revelations of how PDP kingpins received humongous sums from the former National Security Adviser, Col. Sambo Dasuki, to deliver votes in the 2015 elections. In some cases, the votes are manufactured, in which case the wholesaler gives the community members nothing.
The other whammy is that the people are made poorer because of poor governance. Whether the money is out-rightly stolen or mismanaged because of incompetence, the story is substantially the same across the country. So, before the next election cycle comes around, the officials at the local, state or federal levels, having paid for votes, help themselves from the common resources, as much as they can, thereby compounding the poverty level. Pauperised and traumatised, the votes get cheaper.
As reported recently, Nigeria has slipped further down the poverty index, overtaking India, as the nation with the highest concentration of the poorest of the poor in the world. With poor governance the order of the day, it is likely we will continue the drift further down the road. With more people made poorer by the day, those who could ask question from those who buy cheap continues to decrease.
With the number of the poor continuously increasing, the bargaining power of the retail sellers of votes will continue to go down. So, the more they are pauperized the cheaper they sell, and the cheaper they sell, the more likely they elect inefficient government, and the more inefficient government they elect, the poorer the governance standard, and the poorer the governance standard, the poorer the poor will become. As basic as these reasoning may sound, in reality, this cycle has been the bane of our country for many decades now.
And the biggest tragedy is that there are no signs that things will get better soon. Most public officials, still leave the false lifestyle of the past, when things were relatively better. For instance, in the states with the lowest income per capita, the state executives still live large. They still drive around in large convoys, engage in gigantic white elephant projects, and employ retinue of assistants who add no value to the system. Of course, they still heft home, the so called security vote.
The northern part of the country which is worse hit still behaves as if all is well, because money comes cheaply from Abuja, every month. They have not paused to ask themselves how sustainable the present system is, with all the agitations for change. Except in one or two states, the governors of these states have not realised the urgent need to declare a state of emergency in education to liberate their people. Some of their leaders, unfortunately, still prefer to push those false cultural and religious precepts that have held the region down.
In the absence of any serious local economy, many northern leaders believe that the solution to the regions’ problems lie in retaining power at the federal level for as long as possible. While such measure could get them some breather, common sense should dictate that unless they use the temporal opportunities it provides, to develop an alternate economy, the retention of power in a dwindling economy cannot solve the increasing challenge from a bourgeoning population, especially of the young strata. With the population increasing at geometric proportion, while the economy is sluggish, as reports from national and multi-lateral agencies have indicted, the nation is sitting on a keg of gun powder.
To make matters worse, armed banditry, cattle rustlers, internal wars and sundry criminalities have become the lot of many states in the north. Of course, those fall outs are the result of decades of mismanagement across board. But the biggest tragedy, is that even the present state actors are yet to come to terms with these challenges, talk less of proffering solutions to the problems. They still think that dominating power at the federal level, and consequently being in charge of the sharing of the oil resources from the Niger Delta, will suffice to deal with the challenges.
Unfortunately, the Muhammadu Buhari’s presidency, which holds the best chance to change things, because the ordinary people, particularly in the northern part of the country trust it, is bogged down by charges of ethnicity and poor vision. They are accused of ethnic bias; instead of seeking the best hands, to help our dear country in a time of unprecedented distress. Amidst the general discontentment, the nation drifts. Last week, something as basic as traffic management in Lagos State, required the intervention of the vice president. Now, with 2019 in sight, all energy is devoted towards winning the next general election.
But, if money-for-vote, will be the model for the 2019 elections, then the Buhari government is in a quandary, considering that integrity and anti-corruption, is its main mantra. When elections are determined by the level of monetary inducement a party is willing to muster right there at the polling booths, will the government not be tempted to harness state resources to buy a second term in office? If the government falls into that tempting strategy, would there be any redeeming feature left, for the talakawas, who incidentally are the majority, especially in the northern part of Nigeria?
