Never reward those who have burnt your trust with another deposit of trust; never trust those who promise to do everything for you while you do nothing. Elections are about the last sentence. More often than not, elections are between an incumbent seeking another term and a main challenger seeking to win the people’s mandate. Where the incumbent is not constitutionally permitted to seek another term, his/her party gets to nominate another party member to stand for a fresh mandate. Who then do you vote for? It depends on the scenario.
Incumbents, whether the president, governors or local government chairmen and those standing for other elective offices, must always be judged based on one thing and one thing alone: their performance or lack of it during the previous term. If they failed the previous term, you should never trust them to perform with a new mandate. Is an office holder who failed in an earlier term able to do better with a new mandate? Possibly. But would you continue to trust a company whose fortunes affect the means of livelihood of several millions of people in the hands of a Chief Executive Officer who has failed the company for four years? More often than not, big companies do better than countries because companies are quick to do away with bad CEOs while countries are often burdened with bad leaders for several years.
Any electorate that forgives bad governance deserves all the consequences that come with it. We must learn to be ruthless with our votes. If you don’t perform, you become history! Shikena! If you perform, you earn a new term or you put your party in good stead to form the next government.
How do you judge a candidate or political party challenging the ruling party? Two major things, antecedents and the people they are surrounded with. Pay attention to most leaders who failed, you’d find that their first mistake in office was always the fact that they surrounded themselves with the wrong people. Success in life will always be about working with the right people. A competent leader working with the wrong people is likely to fail; a listening incompetent leader working with the right people is likely to succeed. Leadership at the end of the day is about the ability to deploy the right tools and resources to improve the livelihood of the led. In the context of this conversation, people are resources for success or failure in the hands of a leader.
You should never vote anyone into office on the credibility of their own ability and previous records alone. The people they work with are likely to have a lot more effect on the country’s or state’s fortunes than their own ability. How many times do we look beyond candidates to focus on their possible cabinet? We need to do that because when you pay attention to where we are coming from as a people, you’d see most of our leaders failed because they worked with the wrong people. They formed cabinets that were mostly big on ethnic and religious balance but small on competence and passion to make change happen.
Useful instance: you should not vote a governor who is better remembered for his faces on billboards and posters against a challenger who is better known for getting things done with the right people.
Where a candidate is no longer running, he or she is likely to support or put his or her weight behind a new candidate. The new candidate is of the same political party and is likely to work with some of the people who worked with the outgoing administration. In essence, you cannot look at the new candidate beyond the canvas of the administration backing him or her to ascend power. Nigeria does not currently have space for Independent candidates so that does not apply here.
The above applies if you are more interested in the good of most than in the interest of a few. When we start rewarding poor governance by voting out poor governments, change will be given birth to in Nigeria. As it is, the power to fix this country is in the hands of the people. The National Assembly’s budget moved from N50 billion to N150 billion because we slept while they changed the books. Don’t blame them as much as you blame us for taking it all in without looking to force their hands to do the right thing. We have work to do!
Views expressed are solely the author’s
