20th October, 2010
Politicians have started assaulting the sensibilities of Nigerians by blowing hot air in the name of campaigning for the 2011 general elections. To quote William Shakespeare, all they are telling the electorate is full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Unlike politicians and political parties in the Second Republic that rode on the crest of their manifestoes to convince the electorate to vote for them, politicians of today and the over 50 existing political parties don’t have concrete issues on which to anchor their campaign. In the Second Republic, the leading political parties like the Unity Party of Nigeria, UPN, led by the late sage Chief Obafemi Awolowo and the National Party of Nigeria, NPN, led by former president, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, anchored their campaigns on concrete issues the electorate could identify with. UPN promised free education while NPN, whose symbol depicted cubs of maize, promised agricultural revolution.
Other parties such as Nigeria People’s Party, NPP, led by the late Nnamdi Azikiwe, People’s Redemption Party, PRP, led by Aminu Kano, and Great Nigeria People’s Party, GNPP led by Waziri Ibrahim also anchored their campaigns on issues that were enshrined in their manifestoes. This enabled the electorate hold the politicians accountable if they failed to keep their soapbox promises.
These days politicians and their parties don’t have cardinal programmes to offer let alone anchor their campaigns on issues. Rather, what we see are mud slinging and shadow chasing. An apt example is the independence day bomb blasts in Abuja which presidential aspirants and their lackeys have politicised. For almost three weeks now, they have been dissipating their energy on the circumstances surrounding the bomb blasts.
With barely five months to the general elections, none of the political parties has come out with its manifesto to enable the electorate make a choice on who or which party to vote for. Voter apathy could also be caused by political parties that do not have clear-cut cardinal programmes. Why politicians get into office and fail to offer the people the so-called dividends of democracy is that they don’t even have a clear agenda for seeking such political offices in the first instance. And so when they get there, they just amass wealth and feather their own nest.
We expect robust and meaningful debates by aspirants on how they can fix our comatose power sector, rebuild the education and health sectors which are in shambles, fix our dilapidated roads and generally alleviate the plight of the common people who have been ravaged by poverty and hunger for decades.
We challenge politicians and their parties to prove their worth by coming up with issue-based campaigns and manifestoes so that the electorate can judge them based on their policies and programmes. Blowing hot air and engaging in a campaign of calumny against one another won’t take the aspirants anywhere. It will only earn them derision and scorn from the voters.
