As a lecturer at the University of Ibadan over the last 35 years one has participated in and witnessed many cases of colleagues who contested election into Deanship of their Faculties but lost at the first attempt only to bounce back a few years later to win massively, or even be elected unopposed, the same Deanship election. Yet, the composition of the Faculty Board, comprising all the academic staff would not have changed drastically over the intervening period. In essence, the majority of those who voted against a particular candidate in a previous election are now satisfied that the same person is now the preferred candidate to lead the Faculty as Dean. As it is in this academic community, which is a microcosm of our great country Nigeria, so it is in the country itself.
You do not have to bring down the roof of the house simply because you lost an election. A certain retired General Muhammadu Buhari contested Nigeria’s presidential election in 2003, 2007 and 2011 but lost on those three occasions. He did not give up; in its stead he contested again in 2015 when he defeated a sitting President, a record in the annals of Nigeria’s political history.
In every election, the electorate is presented with a list of candidates from whom a choice is to be made. A voter is not obliged to submit to some imaginary Examiner the reason(s) why he/she is voting for a particular candidate. It is the inalienable right of a citizen to vote for the candidate of his/her choice. That you did not vote for a particular candidate today is not to suggest that that person is your enemy. By preferring one candidate over the other candidates necessarily makes you partisan wittingly or unwittingly. The only two options for you not to be partisan are either to abstain from voting which is tantamount to a boycott or to thumb print the ballot paper for all the competing candidates; obviously the later option is redundant insofar as such a ballot would not be valid.
Our thesis is that all the 25 million or so members of the Nigerian electorate who voted during the Presidential election of 25th February 2023 were partisan, even though only a small proportion of that figure are card-carrying members of the 18 registered political parties in the country.
Partisanship is legal and we have to live with it. The results of those elections have been released; the winners have since been declared and given their Certificates of Return. Nonetheless any loser who is dissatisfied has the constitutional rights to approach the Election Tribunal to ventilate their grievances and this could be done up to the level of the highest Court in the land, the Supreme Court.
On the other hand, one is not particularly excited reading some inadvertent calls for truncation of this democracy by calling for the setting up of an interim national government or even a worst case scenario of a forceful military take over of government. We should not be taken back to the dark days of 1993 -1998 following the annulment of the pan Nigerian mandate given to Alhaji Moshood Kasimawo Olawale Abiola (1937 to 1998) on June 12, 1993.
In our humble opinion, such unpatriotic moves would lead to a total breakdown of law and order. Any invitation to chaos and anarchy is unpatriotic. The next election cycle is just four years away which is very short in the life of a nation. Those who lost in the recently concluded election should be patient. Their own time will soon come.
There is this Yoruba adage that I was reminded of on another platform “Kaka k’eku maje sese, afi se awadanu” which approximates the strategy of the opposition. The best English translation is the story in the Bible that illustrates the wisdom of Solomon. In paraphrase: Two women claim to be the mother of an infant. The matter was brought before King Solomon. Since there was no DNA technology during the period the King ruled that the baby should be cut into two equal parts and each part should be handed to the disputants.
One of the women thanked the king for his wise decision, but the other said she would rather give up the contest than have the baby slaughtered. King Solomon immediately knew who of the two was the true mother of the baby.
As pointed out by Professor Olabode Lucas, outside the shores of Nigeria, there was the case of Richard Nixon in USA who was narrowly defeated in 1960 Presidential election by Jack Kennedy, only to come back in 1968 with a landslide. In England, Winston Churchill after leading the British to victory in the Second World War was defeated in the 1945 General election. He came back in 1950. Harold Wilson lost 1970 General election only to come back in 1973. Mitterand in France lost many Presidential elections but made it in 1981. Politics should not be do or die. It should be for healthy competition for service.
We rest our case, at least for now.
Professor Idowu Olayinka served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ibadan, 2015-2020.
Saturday, 25th March 2023
