Africa-Press – Gambia. The purport and import of our future that we sold for cheap dollar bills, as well as the mannequins without human feelings, in whose veins run no blood, which those dollar bills created at party primary grounds, will soon boomerang on us. By then, in the words of The Mighty Diamonds, a Jamaican harmony trio which recorded root reggae, with a strong Rastafarian influence, there will be “weeping and wailing and mourning and gnashing of teeth.”
While touring Northern Nigerian provinces in the 1950s to canvass for votes, Ahmadu Bello, the great-great grandson of Uthman dan Fodio and premier of the Northern region, used to have his flowing robes stuffed with banknotes which he distributed to the electorate. For the Sardauna, that munificence took the place of campaigning. This was aptly captured by John Meagher, in his “The Establishment of Military Government in Nigeria” of February 16, 1966, with additional information from the National Archives and Research Administration (NARA) in Maryland, USA.
So, on May 29, 2023, rather than victors in the All Progressives Congress (APC) and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential, National Assembly, gubernatorial and House of Assembly primaries, Money will be the Superman that will get sworn into office. Considering its overriding role in the primaries of the Nigerian political parties in the last few weeks, it will be grossly unfair not to give Money its due pride of place. By then, Money will be the Nigerian president, Lord of the Fish of the sea; birds of the air and commander of all living beings in the geography of Nigeria.
To be fair, Money didn’t just snatch this consequential role in Nigerian politics all of a sudden. From the First Republic, when politics took its shape as a decider of the fate of a vast number of people seeking development, Nigerian politicians immediately responded through a gale of the privatisation of public wealth, with public officials turning public offices into a type of prebend. In 1955, the Eastern Region’s minister of Finance and a fierce columnist with the West African Pilot, Mbonu Ojike, also known by the moniker, “Boycott the boycottables,” whose column – Weekend Catechism, was a must-read, was accused of collecting a kickback as a ‘dash’ for the award of construction contracts to an Italian firm called Borini Prono. The money was suspected to have been planned to be funneled back into the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC) for the conduct of elections. Allegations of corruption also marooned Ojike through his involvement in the purchase of shares in the African Continental Bank (ACB) by the Premier, Nnamdi Azikiwe, while he was minister of Finance.
In 1964, a British company also offered to give a discount of 10 per cent on the bulk sales of 600 motor-scooters to S.L. Akintola’s Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), the party in government which had splintered from the Action Group. It was later found out that although a 10 per cent discount was given to the party, in real terms, 7.5 per cent showed on the party’s invoice, with the remaining 2.5 per cent ending up as kickback for the conduct of elections by the party. Indeed, party fundraising was the conduit for funneling money into party politics during that period of the First Republic.
The Republic’s minister of Finance, Festus Okotie-Eboh, said to have been described by one American diplomat as “an inveterate ten-percenter” due to his rapacious greed for creaming ten per cent off every contract awarded by government, was also reputed as “a leg man” for the Sardauna. The premier, through Okotie-Eboh, was said to have profited from the luscious public corruption of the glamorous First Republic’s minister of Finance, as he funneled huge monthly tranches of graft to him.
Nigeria’s Second Republic saw politics go a notch higher in shamelessness. The National Party of Nigeria (NPN) signposted this privatisation of the public purse. Chief A.M.A Akinloye, Umaru Dikko and other party stalwarts made the contours separating government purse from personal purse indecipherable. Politicians of the ruling party then breakfasted in Lisbon, lunched in Paris and dined in California, at government’s expense. Between the First and Second Republics, the Nigerian electorate seemed to have been taken to a schooling session, which toughened their hearts into becoming as hard as a snail’s shell. Gradually, the electorate was purged of its investment of any redemptive capability in the politician and began to take its destiny into its hands by demanding immediate lucre from the politicians.
Ibrahim Babangida’s Third Republic experience seemed to be the final nail on the coffin of a moralistic Nigerian politics. Babangida embossed the official stamp on political corruption. Through his National Republican Convention (NRC) and Social Democratic Party (SDP), the military despot grew a crop of politicians who openly purchased the souls of the electorate for a fee. By the time Sani Abacha took over the mantle of office in late 1993, leading to the final ascendancy of the Fourth Republic in 1999, both the politician and the electorate had become alumni of the school of sewage politics, one offering, the other purchasing, haggling and bargaining the cost of votes, the same way market women do with tilapia fish.
Although the Fourth Republic has been riven by a rather novel godification of money, what we have witnessed in the last few weeks is the limit. Politicians have been openly corrupting the electoral process recklessly, openly buying the hearts, the votes and the tomorrow of the electorate. Having reduced the naira to the uselessness of Zimbabwean dollars and the Benin Republic CFA Francs, no thanks to Godwin Emefiele, politicians have been deploying the American dollar to corrupt the electorate.
Today, Mammon, that god of wads of crispy currency, reigns in Nigeria’s electoral politics, like D. O. Fagunwa’s Arogidigba. Anytime Nigerian politicians are about their festival of rituals, they capture the polity and money is slaughtered in sacrifice. According to Fagunwa, whenever Arogidigba wants to celebrate her rituals, there is always a spiritually occasioned storm. For the Nigerian polity, the case is similar. The electioneering process in Nigeria is a time that can be likened to when a hen perches on the rope and both – the hen and the rope – are in a state of quandary. In Ireke Onibudo, the Fagunwa character, Arogidigba, is the queen of all the fish in the sea.
This fish, whose consuming powers and majesty can be likened to the Sir Victor Uwaifo-made popular Mammy Water, came under Fagunwa’s magically descriptive powers through his lead character, Ireke Onibudo. The queen of fish, Arogidigba, needed to feast on human flesh to celebrate her annual fish festival. It was the same time that Ireke is on a journey by boat and his boat gets overturned by a raging storm. He is subsequently captured and taken right underneath the sea bed, which is the kingdom of the fish. In Ireke Onibudo’s description of Arogidigba, this part animal, part human, wears the visage of a young lady, adorned with a beautiful hairdo and with a large fin. Arogidigba also has her house adorned with pots which, on entering it, a huge snake saunters out of. This consuming nature of the Queen of fish during its annual festival answers to the Nigerian period of election.
Although the Fourth Republic has been riven by a rather novel godification of money, what we have witnessed in the last few weeks is the limit. Politicians have been openly corrupting the electoral process recklessly, openly buying the hearts, the votes and the tomorrow of the electorate. Having reduced the naira to the uselessness of Zimbabwean dollars and the Benin Republic CFA Francs, no thanks to Godwin Emefiele, politicians have been deploying the American dollar to corrupt the electorate. It got to its zenith last week, with an American dollar exchanging for well over N600 – an unprecedented swing in thehistory of the Nigerian currency.
Why has graft successfully become an emblem of Nigerian politics in this manner? Is there any hope that it will take a backseat in subsequent electoral considerations? To the second question, there is no hope that a jealous index like money will allow any other factor relegate it to a second place. This is because, like many parts of Africa, Nigeria operates a political and social culture where gratification occupies a prime place of prominence. Counterfeit democracies being run by the African political class have sustained this culture because our political culture has intermixed with our social culture, to the benefit of the political class. Indeed, graft has become an embedded feature of African democracy.
“Gift,” “dash” and sundry monikers have been given to corruption from time immemorial in Africa. Parents sent their wards on errands promising them “dash” on return. Favours done in homes are requited with “dashes” and rewards. It is this culture of rewards that has enveloped and turned into the highly cancerous system of corruption in Nigeria. Unfortunately, it has metastasised in Nigeria over the decades. And because politicians go to office to line their esophagus, the electorate also feels compelled to wring their own dividends from representatives who are only seen when they are canvassing for votes in a four-yearly ritual.
For the electorate, as such, the period of electioneering is one of excitement when they squeeze money from politicians. Between both, there seems to be an understanding that money given as bribe during election periods are the only dividend of democracy that would be given. Nick Cheeseman and Brian Klaas, in How To Rig An Election, said that between 2012 and 2016, 67 per cent of elections held in Sub-Saharan Africa featured significant vote-buying, while Latin America witnessed 36 per cent. According to them, there are also regional variations in the currency of clientelism (the purchasing of political clients through graft). While in Ghana, cutlasses are given out by politicians as gifts to influence votes, especially in agrarian communites, in Malaysia, the corruption is disguised in such a way that it does not look like vote purchase. Lucky draw raffles in which winners emerge are the order of the day in Malaysia. In a rural area of Thailand, like the Chonburi Province, vote buying goes for about 300 baht ($9) and as high as 3,000 bahr ($90). It is so exciting to the electorate that they call the lucrative night before election “the night of the howling dogs” – kheun maa hawn.
In Kenya, as at 2017, it was estimated that the total money spent by candidates for six elections contested for was $1 billion and governorship candidates spent up to $6 million. In India, politicians were said to have spent the sum of $5 billion to campaign for offices in 2014.
By the way, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) will be a shameless and toothless bulldog if it does not go after and grill the candidates who purportedly gave each delegate those huge American dollar bills at the venue of the PDP primary election. How was that behemoth sum come about? What jobs do the aspirants do? We have seen the bucks, where are their shops?
All those were dwarfed by the bazaar in Nigeria in the last few weeks called party primaries. Ultimately, however, the people would be the losers of this huge votes or voters’ purchase. Though the bulk of the money being spent by politicians to buy the consciences of the voters were liberated from public purses, in cases where they are products of debts incurred from either loans or pawning of personal properties for the elections, the public purse suffers eventually as these politicians, upon coming into office, will first gouge out their investments and with interests.
It is a colossal shame that electoral heists got to this astonishing level under a man who, on coming into government, parodied himself as a representation of the noblest values of public office. Under the tip of the nose of Muhammadu Buhari, political and electoral corruption have worsened and taken the shape of a hydra. When politicians paid N100 million to obtain party presidential office nomination forms and N50 million to run for the office of the governor, what absurd extent would they not go to ensure that their investments are secure?
Political party primaries, preparatory to the 2023 elections, went into Albert Camus’ theatre of the absurd, in form and content. Not only were the sums on parade with which voters were bribed bafflingly shameful, money became the passport of election. The PDP presidential primaries held in Abuja on Saturday was said to be such an ugly spectacle that one of the aspirants, Muhammed Hayatudeen, stormed out of the process, claiming that there was “obscene monetisation of the contest.” Some aspirants were said to be offering as much as $15,000 dollars per delegate. Only an oil “bunkerer” could offer that much! In some other primary grounds, delegates, in the process of haggling about the amount on offer, unabashedly told aspirants not to bother to bring any infrastructure or development to their constituents once they paid them the acceptable amount of dollars. Exerting their pounds of flesh in instances where the delegates collected money and failed to vote accordingly, some aspirants were recorded to have used violence to recoup their money.
The overall result of this charade that we call primaries is that, Money, rather than electorates, would “elect” into offices persons who will be sworn-in in May, 2023. Athenians of the Ancient Greece, who where the first known to practice democracy in the world in the 5th Century BC, and who came about this system of election, knew what they were doing by that concept of voting. Voting contains a spiritual element. In other words, when a voter drops his vote into the ballot, there is a spiritual bond that is created between him, the elector, and the elected. That bond is the adhesive that cements good governance and development in society. Now, in Nigeria, in place of that spiritual spectacle, what we have are mannequins who are ultimately creations of Mammon. They have no link with us, are not answerable to us and owe us nothing.
By the way, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) will be a shameless and toothless bulldog if it does not go after and grill the candidates who purportedly gave each delegate those huge American dollar bills at the venue of the PDP primary election. How was that behemoth sum come about? What jobs do the aspirants do? We have seen the bucks, where are their shops?
The Yoruba will say that you cannot merchandise sand and refuse to collect stones as payment; something that Pete Edochie, in his striking local proverbs on Twitter, expressed as, “a man who puts local gin in a Hennessey bottle may deceive onlookers but not his own throat.” The purport and import of our future that we sold for cheap dollar bills, as well as the mannequins without human feelings, in whose veins run no blood, which those dollar bills created at party primary grounds, will soon boomerang on us. By then, in the words of The Mighty Diamonds, a Jamaican harmony trio which recorded root reggae, with a strong Rastafarian influence, there will be “weeping and wailing and mourning and gnashing of teeth.”Support PREMIUM TIMES’ journalism of integrity and credibility
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