At the risk of sounding pedantic, let me reiterate that the 2023 presidential election should be about who can best implement a workable plan with the highest chances of resolving our many burning national issues. It’s the implementable plan, stupid!
By Tiko Okoye
Welcome yet again to another election cycle – and to another motley crowd of presidential aspirants – from the electable to the pretenders and wannabes. Everyone of the known aspirants appears determined to have his/her day in the sun, ventilating his/her ‘vision’ for the nation and Nigerians, even as there‘s unfortunately a greater emphasis on a garrulous preening of feathers.
I read about the first-ever state visit made by the Head of Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) to the United States of America (USA) at the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s. The record belongs to then-Russian political leader and Soviet Premier, Nikita Khrushchev. During the visit, the American Press was just too eager to entrap him into conceding that freedom-peddling politicians in the West were engineering a much better society than what Soviet politicians are trying to achieve with their doctrinaire policies.
But the wily Communist leader turned the table against them with his striking quotable quote: “Politicians are the same all over (the world). They promise to build a (magnificent, long-span) bridge even where there is no river”!
It should, therefore, hardly come as a surprise to hear politicians in Nigeria talking about their ‘vision’ for one or a combination or more of the following: 24/7 uninterrupted power supply, free healthcare, free education from crèche to university, free houses, free spouses, free three-square meals, etc., for ALL Nigerians within “the shortest possible time”! But truth be told, considering the existential crossroads we are now at, Nigeria does NOT need a so-called visionary leader. Talk has always been – and will continue to remain – cheap!
Let me expatiate my point with a civil engineering illustration. When you’re set to build a house, you start with a photograph, concept or ‘artistic impression’ of the edifice. That photograph, concept or artist’s impression is tantamount to your vision of what you desire to build. But that’s the easiest part. It is only the beginning rather than the end of the matter because you then need an architectural/structural plan to prove how the vision represented by the photograph can be accomplished.
All political parties, since the return of civil rule in 1999, have foisted candidates who were the highest bidders – paid for from their deep pockets or by proxies with ulterior motives – on us as presidential candidates. It is hardly surprising that they turned out to woeful failures because they simply couldn’t deliver what they clearly lacked the capacity to do. Is there anything new under the sun? Is there any promises now being made that we didn’t hear about in yesteryears?
Still, we continue to play same type of politics while expecting a different set of outcomes, only to continue hereinafter to grumble, complain and point fingers at imaginary enemies. There’s a maxim that says “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me!” Our politicians have continued to fool us time and again and the only plausible reason why they have been getting away with it so far – and would most likely continue to do so – is because we are stuck in the rut of extreme primordial impulses driven by tribe, creed, region and partisan loyalty.
But as gloomy as the prospects may be for a real positive change in the nation’s electoral processes, we must keep hope alive. Miracles still happen! Just a little over thirty years ago, then-POTUS George H. Bush was riding high on the wave of a military action in the Persian Gulf that the American public deemed a great success. His approval rating ratcheted up to a dizzying 85 percent!
It was hardly surprising that the crowd of Democratic presidential hopefuls suddenly melted away when the polling statistics appeared in the public space, presenting the party with the seemingly insurmountable hurdle of finding a candidate with a death wish to challenge an incumbent president seeking re-election with an overwhelming public support!
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I was then living in New York and was privilege to the flurry of ‘pilgrimages’ the Democratic Party national leadership made to the home of then-New York State Governor Mario Cuomo, pleading with him to throw his hat in the ring, as arguably the only party-man with the national clout and name-recognition to give Bush a run for his money, and simultaneously rescue the party from the shame and embarrassment of not being able to field a presidential candidate in the over-200 years of American history.
As a matter of fact, Nintendo had just then launched a very well-received new computer game in the American market in which the hero was coincidentally named ‘Super Mario.’ But the wily and veteran politician rejected the grand offer to drink from what was widely-perceived to be a poisoned chalice. He jumped and passed and opted to live to fight another day!
Salvation came to the Democratic Party from a most unlikely source. An upstart governor of the backwater southern state of Arkansas, William “Bill” Clinton, burst on the scene with no comets seen. But he soon began to acquire extraordinary gravitas and build an unstoppable momentum with a single byline which snowballed into one of the world’s greatest quotable quotes: “It’s the economy, stupid!” His strategy was to make a vast majority of the American public to begin to perceive the outcome of Desert I as a hollow victory.
It was reminiscent of the “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” rhetoric that GOP challenger Ronald Reagan had creatively used to unseat President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Presidential election. In effect, Clinton was asking American voters to decide if they were economically better-off at the end of the war than they were before it started. The 1992 presidential contest, Clinton bellowed, would be more about who could manage the economy better and less about who could win military battles.
Since the 2023 presidential election represents the last chance of keeping Nigeria a prosperous, united entity, it has become imperative that we make drastic changes in the way and manner we’ve been interviewing candidates for the top post. And at the risk of sounding pedantic, let me reiterate that the 2023 presidential election should be about who can best implement a workable plan with the highest chances of resolving our many burning national issues. It’s the implementable plan, stupid!
Here are my two-bit suggestions: First, let the APC and PDP each produce a consensus candidate based on the ranking of relevance and practicality of their vision statements, experience, antecedents and carrying-capacity. There isn’t a scintilla of doubt in my mind that if the screening process is done objectively and transparently, the winning candidates – and the runners-up in that order – from the APC and PDP would be Bola Tinubu/Rotimi Amaechi and Peter Obi/Nyesom Wike, respectively.
Fortunately for our nation, they all happen to come from the South, meaning that aspirants of Northern extraction in both parties should immediately announce their withdrawals and give this nation the last chance to overcome the fissures threatening to irredeemably tear us apart.
Next would be to robustly interrogate the plans both candidates have drawn up to deliver a new, improved Nigeria – certainly not through rabble-rousing social media graffiti artists with different kinds of less-than-altruistic motives. That’s where credible institutions like the Nigeria Elections Debating Commission would play a significant role. As a Pentecostal Christian I was viscerally opposed to the Muslim/Muslim presidential ticket of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 1993 presidential election.
But after the televised debate between the SDP candidate, MKO Abiola, and Bashir Tofa of the National Redemption Council (NRC), when it became indisputable that the former seemed more like the president Nigerians were yearning for, I decided to play a very active role in Abiola’s campaign efforts.
There can be no gainsaying that the 1993 debating format is the way to go, and the National Assembly should enact a bill to standardise and legalise both the institution and the process.