When billionaire Donald Trump took the plunge to contest for United States presidency in June, last year, few people gave him an iceberg’s chance in hell to secure the Republican Party nomination. Today, he is the presumptive nominee of that party for the presidential poll holding in November, and well within a striking chance of the world’s most powerful office. The real estate mogul and TV reality star has in effect metamorphosed from a seeming comical act to a potential President-in-Waiting, and he owes the feat to American voters who propelled his aspiration and batted down hurdles within the Republican Party establishment on his path to victory.
Trump’s example shows how unassailable voter power can be in electoral aspiration. It was on that power the brash billionaire rode to edge out all rivals in a crowded field of 16 contenders for the Republican ticket. And he did that despite his fiercely divisive rhetoric and a deliberate persona of political incorrectness that scandalised even the most radical of the American political class. Knowing where to locate his support base, Trump positioned himself as a brutally frank outsider taking on the establishment brand of politics, which not a few Americans perceived as gridlocked and short-ended on candour anyway. He made a virtue of being a non-politician in politics. Expectedly, he captured the fancy of voters who disliked the establishment and were angry at Washington’s way of doing things. So fiercely loyal were Trump’s supporters that his tantrums and relentlessly controversial rhetoric did nothing to diminish his following. The man once boasted that he could stand on New York’s Fifth Avenue and blind-shoot at someone, and it would not dent his poll rating in the least.
Captains of the Republican Party had not hidden their aversion for Mr. Trump, but that was at their peril, and it was not sufficient to arrest his political momentum. Fellow contenders for the party’s ticket railed at his divisive rhetoric, only to end up buckling out of the race in turns and clearing the field for his candidature. The mogul’s most serious challenger, Ted Cruz, threw in the towel after the Indiana primary where he said he had laid all out on the field, without success in convincing voters not to go with Trump. Notable leaders like former presidential candidate Mitt Romney stood up to be counted in open opposition to Trump, to no effect because Trump’s candidature had assumed such a momentum with voters that could not be stopped. Even after he emerged the presumptive nominee, Congress Speaker Paul Ryan spoke out that he was not yet up to endorsing ‘The Trump’ for the ticket; but the billionaire brandished voter support to threaten unseating Ryan as chairman of the Republican National Convention in July. Apparently conscious of the limitation of their individual relevance against voter power, the Republican chiefs by late last week had locked down in rapprochement with Trump, towards rallying the party behind him. After truce parleys in Washington, they announced that there were yet more grounds to cover, but did not dare foreclose a deal to support the nominee.
Trump’s playbook on voter power is actually a universal rule. Politicians seeking electoral office should best devote their energy to rallying voters after their cause and cultivate those voters’ steadfast support, even against the run of establishment forces – including fraudulent election managers – that may be arrayed in opposition to them. But it would seem that many politicians here in Nigeria operate by a different rule. That is what could explain the alleged N23billion poll bribery plot in which former Petroleum Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke has been named. Besides the allegation of sharing slush funds among political chieftains and party centres ahead of the 2015 presidential election, the former minister is said to have issued huge sums as bribery for officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to falsify the election results. I do not intend to raise a mob jury here against the former minister and others that have been named in the scandal, ahead of what the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is able to prove in court. When proved, anyone found guilty as alleged should be made to pay the price for malfeasance. Meanwhile, even the mere narrative evidences the mindset of the average Nigerian politician in the contest for political power.
The common practice code among our political elite suggests that they count voters least in their calculations for winning political offices. That must be why electioneering campaigns are not driven by well thought-out manifestoes or clearly defined programmes, but by vacuous sloganeering and parades of rented crowds and unruly mobs. Political parties and candidates demonstrate strength, not by superiority of ideas, but by the quantum of brute force they could muster and deploy in intimidation of opponents. In many cases, you hardly knew what a political office seeker offered different from other contenders for the same office, which should be left to voters to make an intelligent choice from. Rather, politicians often deploy violence to coerce voters to either vote or stay away from voting – towards achieving a determined end. Surely, these can’t be legitimate building blocks of true democracy!
The pending allegation against the former Petroleum Minister indicate another dimension of the ills of our electoral system: politicians seek to suborn poll officials against the very ethic of their constitutional duty. Officials who give in, of course, do so at their own peril, and must be made to face the law; but they certainly can be helped if they were not subjected to needless pressure with such offers. Former Chairman of INEC, Professor Attahiru Jega, had occasion to berate the tendency in a presentation he made at a Roundtable Conference organised by the National Institute for Legislative Studies of the National Assembly in November 2012. Among the many variables he listed as characterising political parties and elections in Nigeria, Professor Jega said: “There is the exhibition of corrupt and corrupting tendencies, deliberately promoted or instigated by the political parties…It is incredible the amount of money that is budgeted. Political parties budget funds in terms of how much money is to be given to security agencies, how much is to be given to INEC or electoral officials and so on. Really, this is a very serious challenge for deepening democracy in our country. Of course, people should resist being induced; and when people resist, all sorts of other tendencies come up. It is very important through legislation, through behavioural changes and through the activities of civil society organizations, that we curb this exhibition of corrupt and corrupting tendencies in the electoral process.”
Perhaps here is a good opportunity to recall that nearly the most challenging experience of the conduct of the 2015 elections was a fierce campaign by some faceless political support group to discredit the former INEC Chairman ahead of the polls. Full-page adverts were serially placed in national and regional dailies – sometimes more than a dozen newspapers daily, and for days on end – caricaturing the electoral chief and aggressively impugning his credibility. It was suspected that this was a preemptive plot to disable him from presiding over the conduct of the elections, given his reputation for uncompromising integrity. Well, political adverts aren’t cheap – not the least so at the height of an election season. Enormous funds must have been committed to prosecuting that campaign by its sponsors, who apparently preferred such a strategy to courting the support of voters. It would really be enlightening to know where the money came from, and who was doing the spending, just in case that might expose another slush funding scheme.