I SAW it differently. We have been long on this, sometimes, misbegotten journey without any destination in sight from 1999 to 2015, for instance. Our arrivals and departures have always revealed mirages and milestones and other unchartered routes not previously spotted in the electronic trackers of our political voyage. The desired salvation, pardon the religious connotation, is always in the future – in the future that has appeared perpetually impossible to transform into reality.
In the years, and from the political experiences, before the 2015 elections, 2015 was marked and preserved as another stopover that would afford the nation the opportunity to reset all the apparatus of our journey in the hope that with a renewed consciousness we would push or guide the workings of our nation into greater efficiency, perhaps, for the first time in our sociopolitical memory. The troubles and struggles of electing or re-electing the right and qualified persons were simply Olympian in quality and magnitude. It was reckoned that the centrality of the game of politics to the nature and texture of our democratic survival was no longer an exclusive preoccupation of the professional politician but also of any Nigerian who had life in him anywhere in the world.
However, it looked quite bad that it became an inauspicious time to stand for any interest in the political or electioneering space even for an ordinary electorate. Lives were lost here and there but the anonymity of the social media played a significant role lending some impetus to the erstwhile voiceless electorate who waylaid their own political villains or engaged in political grandstanding for their heroes. The atmosphere was critically charged but when all the equations in the democratic calculations and miscalculations had been sorted, we were left with victorious politicians and groups who were returned as the answers or quod erat demonstrandum of all our pretences and commitments to a better political dispensation. For the newcomer politicians, victory must have come at a high emotional cost; paradoxically, a possible honeymoon quickly faded into the rising urgency of delivering value to their constituencies.
The campaigns and choices were made in the avowed hope that the time had come to mean well for Nigeria; the time to shame political personalities, browbeat them into obscurity and scuttle interests whose leanings and orientations have always portended grave and indescribable danger for the polity. The promises and counter-promises were encapsulated in CHANGE and CONTINUITY, two words that presented a paradoxical understanding and deployment of their meanings and intentions. One man’s change obviously became another man’s continuity; and those who clamoured CHANGE in one context frantically urged CONTINUITY in another. But the electorate progressed and managed intentions as they unfolded and there was no doubt that the general atmosphere was one of a sweeping, umbrella commitment to what some have now differentiated as the real change. The emerging order is thus different from the political CHANGE massively campaigned for earlier this year; it is a sort of transmogrification that tends to consume even those who clamoured for it but at the same time nursed the hidden agenda to take us back once they gained victory to the place and phase we desired to consign to the receptacle of our democratic failures.
With elections and selections into leadership positions in the National Assembly yet to be conducted at the time, we imagined it was not hallelujah days. Experience offered us very little in our expectation of what was coming for it was never reckoned that such a process in the hallowed chambers would be such a gridlock believing that the major hurdles for the nation had been scaled at the general elections. The entrenchment of House leaders, however, proved problematic and eventually delayed our national destiny in a manner that became highly embarrassing and served as a potential discredit to the wholesale emotional investments that yielded an evolving political renaissance. The drama that unfolded in the buildup to the emergence of leaderships at the National Assembly bears episodic reruns.
The intrigues and horse-trading upset calculations and caused far-reaching disappointed expectations for particular interests and groups. It was protested that ‘party supremacy’ had been grossly undermined. As a nation, our political procession was halted. From all indications the vehicle conveying certain sensibilities had been smashed in a political accident of sorts. The resultant outburst of the starry-eyed propagators of such interests evoked the typical you-don-hit-my-car road rage in the city of Lagos. Once that collusion of interest happened, the polity was threatened so much so that all highways leading to the mainstream of our expectations were literally barricaded. They called it crisis choosing to avoid the proper name for such naked gangsterism! The nation was plunged into a waiting game while pregnant silences and inflammatory utterances filled the political space. Of course, the scenario represented a democratic pathos against the seemingly overwhelming success in the elections that held earlier in the year.
The outcome of the you-don-hit-my-car road rage at NASS among other negative portrayals was the aura of go-slowness that gathered around the president who was or is being accused of suffering from political inertia. To drive the frustration home, Nigerians have likened him to the barber’s chair, destined to constant motion without movement. After several weeks of such political hiatus and intrigues, however, the party in power gave the waiting nation a wry, cynical smile and announced that the crisis had been amicably resolved. That was not a strange outcome going by the highlights of our democratic experience. For all practical purposes, the nation was kept waiting while the damage done to the egos of the dramatis personae in the collision of interests was being fixed. More than we may be willing to admit, the body language indicated that to a great extent there is more than one ignition key to the engine room of our new democratic contraption. Appointments have been slow and laboured and the national assembly appears bogged down in a myriad of self-absorbing challenges. Ironically, the reality of a cabinet as an integral part of governance has been kept in abeyance, a development construed as one of the negatives from the you-don-hit-my-car imbroglio.
In the final analysis, the roads ahead look free and well paved for effectiveness. The nation appears poised to go the distance in the hope that familiar and strange speed breakers will not surface once again on our path to political epiphany. These crises in their various manifestations have, however, raised the alert level of the nation; numerous spotlights are being beamed on any conceivable move or intention, and every Nigerian has become a potential whistleblower, literarily speaking.
The crises have set us back but at the same time reordered our pattern of political vigilance. The ills and challenges inherited from the last dispensation seem to have become the contrived blueprint of the new democratic order.
It is however hoped that the new government will not reduce itself to a task force of fund repatriation considering the highlights of the recent visit to the US and other concerns. The narrative continues and the plot possibly thickens but it has to be said that Nigeria has stumbled into a crucible from which it is highly likely to emerge with an enduring political culture for our democracy.
Mr. Dumebi Onwordi-Okonji, a copywriter, wrote from Lagos.
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