By Innocent Okon
Time there was in this country when politics was appreciated as a dignified route to altruistic public service. Accidental wealth and its siamese twin, power, ranked low as incentives for desiring public office.
That possibly explains why civil leadership recruitment process before independence and after the first military disengagement from governance in 1979 was arguably rigorous and integrity driven.
Professionals like teachers, lawyers and community leaders readily provided the human capital pool that politicians were harvested for both elective and appointive offices.
This was the process that produced teachers like Tafawa Balewa, Shehu Shagari, Solomon Lar, Akper Aku and Pa Solomon Ajasin as political leaders!
On record, they were not millionaires before and after exiting public office. Service, garnished with integrity and humility was their mantra. Some of them like K.O. Mbadiwe and “Uncle” Waziri lit up the political firmament with quotable quotes and catch phrases.
On the soapbox, Mbadiwe would tell you that his Party had come to “cement the cementable” with ” men of caterpillar, timber and calibre”, and asked: “when the come comes to become, what would become of the come?”. Uncle Waziri, though a millionaire business man, kept preaching humility and “politics without bitterness “.
It is sad to observe that the emergency labour ward superintended by General Abdulsalami Abubakar in 1999 had midwifed a peculiar specie of politicians that have defied conventional definition!
When pecuniary interest is not their target, obscene hubris becomes their stock in trade. No display of the garb of oratory and razzmatazz anymore in the political space.
Last week in my home state, Akwa Ibom, a politician on a soapbox was reported to have taken serious exception to the absence of a local government chairperson at a political rally, and publicly vowed to make the absentee elected officer to explain such ‘sacrilegious and unpardonable’ action.
The last time I fact checked, the absentee public officer belongs to the third tier of government, while the ‘imperial boss’ is neither the state leader of the Party, nor a member of the National Working committee of the Party! Where does he derive the locus standi to query an elected politician, and on a soapbox?
It was in the same axis and the same Party, but a different political rally that another chieftain of the Party was reported in a viral video as telling a motley crowd of youths that the election of a particular candidate in that Federal constituency was without option “whether they like it or not”.
What a brazen usurpation of the sovereignty of choice in a participatory democracy! Why should intimidation and threat be deployed on soapbox to coerce electorates?
In other climes with rich democratic history, an election season and soapbox are special moments that electorates are seduced, pampered and flattered. It’s one rare season that their relevance is non-negotiable and constant as Shakespeare’s Northern star.
Why should electorates be treated with ignominy before and after elections in Nigeria? What a double tragedy! But are the electorates ready, if given the chance, to push the purveyors of this disrespect from the soapbox into soup pot?
Okon, a lawyer, lives in Uyo
