OUR ROVING REPORTER WRITES In his first term in office as the chief executive of Akwa Ibom State, Governor Godswill Akpabio visited The Nation to showcase his doings to the editors. In the midst of his characteristic flourish about his strides in infrastructure and education, I propounded a question. I asked him whether he was worried that his evident performance did not guarantee his re-election, as history had proved time and again. The decibel of his oratory dropped a note, and he said every leader ought to pray that they should not suffer the fate of Jesus when the people chose Barabbas, an armed robber, in his stead. The next morning, Governor Akpabio’s picture blossomed on the newspaper’s front page, with a caption, “No to the politics of Barabbas.” He is rounding off his second term. Everywhere a performing leader has lost, it is choreographed as the people’s will. The people, some historians have argued, rejected Winston Churchill, who is now regarded as perhaps the greatest leader the British ever knew, ranked by some only with Queen Elizabeth. The poet prime minister, who saved a nation from the ruins of its pride in the shadow of a hectoring tyrant, was swept out of power. They said he was a warmonger. When Bill Clinton left office, the Americans chose a warmonger – they did not know it then – rather than Al Gore, who worked with Clinton to give them the greatest economic expansion in history. They rejected Gore because Clinton, his co-traveller, had a dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. The election, it was argued, was about character. Ditto the case with Charles de Gaulle. The Germans did not vote Hitler to power to foment a world war or to exterminate the Jews. They embraced the mustachioed despot to reassert the German pride after the ignominy of the First World War. Hitler was the apotheosis of the martial spirit on the rise in Germany since the middle of the 19th century. Sometimes we overcast the people either as villains or heroes. It is, to me, always about the elite. It is the elite who manufacture content. They flatter the people’s hopes and vanities. The people come to believe it themselves and act as though in consensus. That has always been the danger of democracy. It is in that light I view the Ekiti vote that brought Ayo Fayose victory. No one can tell me that the civil servants in Ekiti State thought it was wrong to run a bureaucracy based on honour, where no forged certificates or ghost workers abounded. No one can say that even the teachers did not want a better education system in the state since most of them had PhD holders in their families. It is hard to accept that all those who rode the state roads did not see the difference before and after Governor Kayode Fayemi took the reins of office. The winner succeeded in telling them it was not good enough for them and they believed. What happened in Ekiti arose from the ability of the opposition to take advantage of the weakness of the Fayemi style and recalibrated it as the people’s enemy. They abhorred his aloofness. De gaule was aloof when he fought for France, when they voted him in as hero, when they rejected him and when they re-elected him. Governor Fayemi took bonds in billions of Naira, why did he not follow the patronage pattern, they asked. Why did he not spend the money on persons rather than principles? Why did he not build an infrastructure of followers who ran the politics for him? The money would go round, and even if you do not perform, you will have enough people, both in high and low places, in your party and outside, who love your deeply. When election comes, they will concoct excuse for you where you fail and exaggerate your doing where you pass. He would have done well even if within his party he understood that he was a politician in Nigeria and not in Washington. They knew him well, and they changed the narrative. They did not say he did not do infrastructure, or build schools or hospitals, but he did not touch them in their vital part: the stomach. I have two stories. One, a woman said in Yoruba, “he built roads, he built schools, he built hospitals but he did not build the stomach.” Another woman, an elder who did not receive the N5,000 social security benefit, went to the polls to cast a malice vote because her neighbour received it. The programme gave the money only to elders who did not have any support from either well-to-do children or existing sources of income. The woman in question was receiving support from a son, who was a Customs officer in Lagos. I call this elder envy. The ordinary folks, both young and old, who wanted largesse, envied the sort of life where government loaded them with free money. The young envied the elder who received N5,000 and the other elders envied their neighbours. It is the force of the spin we witnessed in Ekiti State. Would you say that they did not know that Fayose was in court over alleged murder and theft? They knew. Why did they not convict him at the polls? Because one argument defeated another. The same people who hailed Churchill also cursed him for being a warmonger. They forgot that at one time in the war, virtually every household had a gun in Britain. The same people who called Jesus messiah also shouted, “Crucify him!” Those who spun the story of a disconnected Fayemi worked on a number of factors. One, Fayemi’s belief that when you do your work, you will get the praise. This did not work because they knew Nigeria had changed progressively over a generation of alienated leadership. Honour has been redefined in the culture of the people. Infrastructure is important in government to inspire dignity of labour. When government provides them, individuals work for their own profit, and so earn their own pride. But before their eyes, lazy men become billionaires and smart men work for them. Success no longer depends on the assiduity or the acumen but on indolence. They see the political elite buy all the lands, hold parties in Dubai and New York, and their labours lead nowhere. It is to the credit of the cynical elite that they impressed the people that buying bags of rice for them, which will satisfy them for a few days, is more important that the bags of cement that make a school that can make them wise for life. The election shows that we have bred a cynical citizenry because we have had a cynical political class. The people do not feel part of the system. They don’t want to be productive. They want to be receptacles, and that is what infrastructure of the stomach means. They don’t want to be cheated anymore. If the leaders steal, let them give us part of it, even if it is a bicycle, or a bottle of beer. It is that bad. The very currents of this election exposed the so-called National Conference in progress. What the people are calling for, by this logic, is the nanny state. The nanny is closer to the child than the parent. The nanny does not own the house, the food, the furniture, or the car, but she is closer to the child than the parent. Some have said we should meet the people halfway. Give them some pork, and develop a little. Just as Apostle Paul said, he is a sinner to the sinner. Maybe it is a model, but it is not a model of development. What it means is that we have moved, as a people, from the hypocritical phase of our politics. We have, by the vote, agreed that we are a corrupt country, and only corruption can give us our leaders. It will be tragic if this is true. Then what we might have are leaders like Coriolanus in Shakespeare’s Plebian Play where the man who fought and saved the people is forced into exile because he did not want them to see his wounds because they already know his story. Our people need to be saved from themselves, and that calls for a more communicative elite. But then, when the people chose Barrabas over Jesus, was it because Jesus did not communicate well? Were his miracles not enough? His parables, his lofty morality and common touch? Jesus was no Coriolanus who said: “I have not been common in my love.” But the people rejected him. What happened in Ekiti was not the battle of ideas, but the triumph of corruption.
Posted on: Mon, 30 Jun 2014 05:47:34 +0000
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