The elections in Kogi and Bayelsa last Saturday shows a heightened desperation in the pursuit of political offices. Evidently the democratic process is retarding.
The Bullet has become a vital ingredient of the process. As people get set for elections, they plan for violence. Citizen reporting, which politicians now want to stifle with capital punishment, came to the fore in exposing the shooting and killing that became integral part of the elections.
Yet politicians propose death by hanging for people who express their view in a manner they describe as hateful ( a term they will define beyond what we know), in a country where people who loot the treasury get a benign pat on the back via plea bargaining for which they spend a maximum of three years in prison, a large chunk of which is deducted from days of detention. 20 years a return to democracy, after a truncation in 1984, it would seem that the process of coming to power has remained a bullet driven process, just that the bullet has changed hands, moving from the armed forces to the civilians; either way you need the bullet to get into power.
In Africa, the military has been cowed into returning to the barracks for civilians to take the guns. They now shoot their way to power.
In Nembe, Bayelsa state, and parts of Kogi state, we saw pictures and photographs of shootings, and in the case of Kogi, snatching of ballot papers. Elections are no longer won by good manifestoes, and good performance for returning office holders.
You can simply keep the money for infrastructure, and payment of salaries for arming your thugs, to shoot you into power. The pitiable irony is that those who get the short end of the stick in the long run, still offer themselves as canon fodders in the process.
One would be hard put to describe the system as democratic given what has manifested of the process. Arms and ammunition have become a vital part of the democratic process, which is why you could hardly decide if people get into office via the ballot or the bullet.
It was a negative spectacle to watch supporters of a candidate boasting via a song about the fire power of their candidate. The song regaled listeners with the fire power of their candidate, and his ability to shoot through obstacles. Elections have become killing fields of sorts.
There seem to be a tendency for the nation to move in the direction of one-party state, which should be anathema in a democratic dispensation. It has become regular that politicians in our clime have jettisoned ideology on the altar of power. They are not driven by ideological bent, which is why it is search in a hay stack to decipher the difference between the All Progressive Congress and People’s Democratic Party.
There is an amalgam of former members of both parties across the board. In Kogi senator Dino Melaye came into office under the auspices of the All Progressive Congress, but stood for a rerun in his former party, Peoples Democratic Party.
His opponent, Smart Adeyemi came into office under the auspices of Peoples Democratic Party, but now returns to the senate, discarding the umbrella that brought him into office to embrace the broom with which he has swept away his opponent. There is no ideological rift in the struggle for power. The ultimate goal is to grab power.
In Bayelsa, there was violence but the real power play was for the former President, Goodluck Jonathan, to assert his political authority in the state.
Those tentative steps for which he was vilified as a man who is not assertive have been consigned to the dustbin of history, the incumbent Governor, whom Jonathan reportedly ruffled many feathers to put in office, began to stand up to the man who paved his way into office, and insist on nominating his own successor against the wishes of the former president.
Jonathan leant not to raise his hands in despair, and walk away, as he would have done in the past.
He stood to fight, revving up the political Machinery inn Bayesa, which he inherited from his former boss, late D.S.P Alamiesegha, his political mentor and boss. He swung into action, moving his support to the opposition party, thus swinging unprecedented victory to the All Progressive Congress.
The record of Peoples Democratic Party has been broken in Bayelsa, a hitherto unthinkable development. Jonathan has stood up, for once, in a move that now hurts his party, perhaps permanently tainting the party’s political ascendancy in the state.
The cockroaches in the cupboards of the ruling party have begun to escape in Edo, where the party chairman, Adams Oshiomoghle, wants to emerge as the new godfather.
There have been insinuations that the success the ruling party has recorded in last weeks elections, would empower Oshiomoghle to push through his agenda to unseat Governor Godwin Obaseki in Edo.
However it turns out, the nation has entered an unenviable era of politics of bullets and force.