Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity
— Vera Brittain in Rebel of Passion
Dr. Dalhatu Sarki Tafida, the Director-General of Goodluck/Sambo Campaign Organization, said a couple of weeks ago that Goodluck Jonathan as one of the presidential aspirants on the platform of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), needed to be respected as the current President of the country. This is unarguably correct.
But last week Saturday, just as the President was opening his campaign in Jos, the police were blocking the opening of IBB’s campaign office in Kaduna.
The excuse given by the Kaduna state Commissioner of police is that the IBB group did not seek for permission for the function early enough and that the venue was not conducive for security reason. The Police Commissioner explained that because Vice President Mohammed Namadi Sambo was in the town he could not guarantee peace between the supporters of IBB and that of the Vice President.
The Jos and Kaduna scenes sharply contradicted the new direction in which President Jonathan has been drumming into the ears of Nigeria he wants to take the nation.
It is indeed, a self-confessed incompetence on the part of a police boss to say that he cannot organize his men and officers to control even the worse of security situation, much less a political rally whose line of activities was clearly defined and confined. The Kaduna police commissioner and other security formations may not have been cultured on the new dawn of politics and politicking which President Jonathan is desirous of launching Nigeria into at the turn of this century. If he does, he would stretch himself a little to avoid the embarrassment he caused the president by playing cheaply to the gallery only to put a dark spot on the government’s avowed determination to break away from the dirty past.
It looks fitting for other aspirants within and outside the PDP folds to see the hands of government in any move against them by agencies of government, though, in practice, the government might not as much as knowing what happened.
It obviously sounds like the familiar political rehearsals which police people and other security formations, in the past unfortunate political electioneering, have used to cow down any opposition to their subsisting pay-master.
President Jonathan’s promise of free, fair and credible polls in 2011 is being eroded daily by the gradual slide into the old political order in which overzealous security agents would overdo their loyalty to the incumbent president to the detriment of the much talked about fair play. Free and fair elections presuppose that, not only the physical conduct of elections and counting of votes, but that other paraphernalia are free, fair and transparent.
Political scientists have widened the scope of election malfeasance to include the politics of security intimidation of opponents under whatever guise, open harassment, indirect exclusion from the mainstream of government’s instrument of communication and even, the use of government agencies, institutions and bodies to overshadow and limit the electioneering strengths of fellow aspirants and or candidates while that of the pay-master remain unlimited.
Yes, there is the political insinuation in democracy that, like in war, all actions are fair, but the Presidential new direction to Nigeria’s elections in 2011 ought to be seen to have jettisoned such old insinuation and come clean on all fours.
Attempt in any form to heighten the already rising political temperature in the country will not help anybody, not even the presidency the police might be doing what they are doing to please.
As a matter of fact, it would amount to childish political adventure to continue to intimidate and harass and shove aside any perceived opposition to anyone in authority and still claim that there will be a breakaway from the old political orders.
Invariably, intimidation of opponents in any form and character and for whatever reason, taking undue advantage of the weak financial base of the opponent in matters of exposure through publicly owned media of communication and other arm-twisting devices are considered to be the by-products of electoral frauds and riggings
This is the main problem embedded in democracy, especially in Africa which is still within the base point of crudity, oiled by egocentrism, ethnocentrism and group pride.
The desire by President Jonathan to take us out of Henry Adams’s postulation on “Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds” should be matched with action so that Nigeria doesn’t continue to be saddled with the same old, but sad story of hatred and immaturity (accessories of electoral fraud), in the practice of true democracy.
The story of free, fair and credible elections in 2011 may be a mere paper work or an exercise in verbal deception if the trends in our political system are not addressed and a new course charted in the way security becomes overzealous on flimsy excuses.
Warning by PDP chieftains on Wednesday this week, to its presidential aspirants on the sardonic ways they have been carrying on with their campaigns is instructive here.
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