Desperation games

We are at this point of our national life in the thick of electioneering for the 2019 general election and a couple of off-season elections scheduled before then. Hence you would find politicians going for broke to jack partisan capital even from the most flimsy tacks, for whatever electoral advantage they hoped to gain. One ready consequence of this culture is that substance gets backstaged, while trivia and sloganeering are elevated to the foreground. But experience shows that once elections are done with and a winner emerges, the business of governance inevitably comes round to substance for the most part. And that is when politicians’ fidelity to campaign promises and commitments becomes a matter.

One-time New York Governor Mario Cuomo articulated this political reality fancifully in his famous saying that you campaign in poetry, but govern in prose. The ultimate test of every elected politician is how well he or she had prepared – before and during electioneering – for the substance that governance unavoidably involves.

Ekiti State governorship election that was held last Saturday had its fair share of hype and trivia, postured as substance in din and frenzy of partisan electioneering that heralded the poll. But now beyond the election, and without prejudice to possible judicial challenges that may arise, people of the state must settle down to embrace the substantial dimensions of their electoral choice. A cursory review of the road taken to that election should meanwhile show up some less than wholesome traits of our political culture in this country.

The desperation of the typical Nigerian politician for power makes going into an election in our country seem like going to a deadly battle. As such, deployment of security armoury is contemporaneous with voting items in our electoral contexts. In other words, besides the operations of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), which has the statutory duty to conduct and regulate the poll processes, it is standard to find security operatives mobilise for safeguarding peace and order during elections as if they were making ready for crunch warfare. And though there have been protestations about militarisation of Nigerian elections, these largely constitute a shifting partisan posturing, depending on the place of a claimant in relation to the government at the centre. That is why it is common to find a party or political actor who remonstrated ‘militarisation’ of an earlier election when in opposition, hail comparable security deployment for a subsequent election being now in power.

For the Ekiti governorship poll, the Police, as the lead agency in election security provisioning, deployed 30,000 personnel with a complement of sniffer dogs, two patrol surveillance helicopters, some armoured personnel carriers and a quantum of armoured personnel and police patrol vehicles. That was not counting allied deployments by other security agencies that are members of the Inter-Agency Consultative Committee on Election Security (ICCES) – a body that works hands in gloves with INEC on election security provisioning.

‘The desperation of the typical Nigerian politician for power makes going into an election seem like going to a deadly battle’

With only a land area of 6,353 sq. km shared into 16 council areas, the Police assigned a Deputy Inspector-General to lead the charge in Ekiti; supported by an Assistant Inspector-General, four Commissioners of Police, eight Deputy Commissioners and 18 Assistant Commissioners. Force spokesman Jimoh Moshood said Police Inspector-General Ibrahim Idris as well directed commissioners in states neighbouring Ekiti to be on red alert with their personnel.

Should you consider that scale of deployment overreaching, the Police would tell you it was only a function of their risk assessment of the governorship poll. “Ekiti is a flashpoint when it comes to politicking…When the election is free and fair and election result is being announced, you still see people who want to disrupt the peace of other Nigerians…It is not peculiar to Ekiti. In Edo (September 2016), we deployed 25,000 police personnel; in Ondo (November 2016), we deployed 26,000 and in Anambra (November 2017), the same 26,000…The utterance of stakeholders and leaders in Ekiti and other areas have been inciting and instigating,” the spokesman explained.

By all accounts, the political elite do not help security profiling of Nigerian elections. Besides that Ekiti witnessed its fair share of violence, including the purportedly accidental shooting of a former governorship aspirant by a policeman, electioneering leading up to the poll – you could say just as one would find everywhere else in our clime – was far too physical than it was idea based. There was always a rather simplistic tendency to play the crowd-massing card in the name of people power, rather than articulate policies and projects that would be pursued with power and how the figures add up for those policies. And let’s cut to the cheese: outgoing Governor Ayodele Fayose, who campaigned for his deputy as successor, was far guiltier of this tack than anyone else.

Perhaps the height of the crowd-massing antic was Fayose’s encounter with security forces at the gates of Government House in Ado-Ekiti late last week, a couple of days before the governorship election. Where the outgoing governor, if you asked me, should have been explaining to the people with verifiable facts and figures how his preferred successor would meet up with defraying workers’ salaries and retirees’ pensions that were reported to be in huge arrears, and as well fund the recent promotion of thousands of workers in one fell swoop, among other welfare (not to mention infrastructural) issues, he arranged to lead a purported victory walk in the state capital even before ballots were cast.

But let me also say it was hugely indiscretional on the part of the security forces to have met the governor’s antic with brute force. Visuals from the encounter that were made viral, expectedly by Fayose’s camp, showed him sitting on bare floor, allegedly being revived after he fainted from tear gas canisters fired at will by security agents. Another visual showed him in a neck collar addressing supporters, suggesting his having been brutalised by security agents. Those postures, I would bet, were staged by Fayose to portray him as as a victim of security high-handedness and thereby reinforce his populism gimmicks. Talk about desperation games!

But my take also is that the argument proffered by the Police, to the effect that Fayose and company required their permit to rally or hold other forms assemblies, is judicially invalid. Moreover, Nigerian security operatives just need to learn refined methods of crowd management that do not have to involve cracking down brutally on the people to be managed.

The Sokoto killings

So much outcry had attended the recent massacre of some locals by suspected herdsmen in Plateau State; but curiously, not so the latest killing in Sokoto State of 32 persons who were laid to rest last week. The Sokoto victims reportedly died in an attack by gunmen, July 9, on some villages in Rabah council area of the state.

Even though President Muhammadu Buhari issued a public statement condemning the “wanton violence against innocent people,” which he restated that his administration would not tolerate, it just seemed like the Nigerian and international publics had become jaded by the recurrence of such incidents, or simply failed to register the high casualty toll as to warrant loud protestations akin to the aftermath of the Plateau killings.

But all lives are equally precious. And so, here is putting on record my personal remonstration of the Sokoto killings, just like we did with the Plateau and other killings. It is simply high time the government got a handle on this country security challenge to stem the killings.