BY JAMES ASHIPA
THE beauty of any democratic process is the conduct of periodic elections to avail the electorate the opportunity to assess and either revalidate the mandate of an incumbent or send it packing, if dissatisfied with its performance. Elections have always reminded us that power resides in the people who willingly surrender this sovereign power to their elected representatives. Since Nigeria’s return to civil rule in 1999, Anambra, Kogi, Bayelsa, Osun, Ekiti, Edo and Ondo states now conduct off-season gubernatorial elections due to various judicial pronouncements with the last one held in Ekiti state on 18th June, 2022 while the next one will hold in Osun state on the 16th July, 2022, which is about nine days away to determine who will be the next occupant of the Bola Ige house for the next four years.
As a result of this development, the political temperature in Osun state is very high now as about 15 political parties are getting ready to slug it out at the polls with the major ones being the All Progressives Congress (APC) with Alhaji Isiaka Gboyega Oyetola who is the incumbent governor as its flagbearer; the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has Senator Ademola Jackson Adeleke as its flagbearer; the Social Democratic Party (SDP) with Goke Omigbodun as its flagbearer; Dr. Akin Ogunbiyi of the Accord Party and last but not the least Hon. Lasun Yussuff of the Labour Party (LP).
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and other stakeholders such as security agencies (police, army, and civil defence), local and foreign election observers (YIAGA Africa, EU, NGOs’, etc) are on ground for the conduct of the election.
The Osun election will be the second after Ekiti to be conducted under the amended Electoral Act 2022 and INEC will use E-transmission of results and the Bimodal Voters Accreditation System (BVAS) that is capable of both fingerprints and facial recognitions, which is an improvement over the Smart Card Reader, thus deepening the use of technology in our electoral process.
Although there was significant improvement in the just-concluded Ekiti gubernatorial polls that was won by the APC as it was adjudged by election monitors/observers to be violent-free and INEC got a pass mark for its performance, the issue of vote buying and selling reared its ugly head during the election, as all political parties were alleged to be involved.
Judging from the above, the Osun gubernatorial polls is expected to follow the same trajectory but violence could be heightened due to intra and inter party crisis among the political parties, especially the two main contenders- APC and PDP, as there have been reports of clashes between supporters of both parties at their political gatherings. Also, there are allegations of vote buying and selling by political parties due to the crippling poverty in the land that is a creation of the political class so as to make the population more subservient and amenable to their control. There are also reports of missing Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs), which will result in the disenfranchisement of voters. The situation is worrisome to the extent that a bigwig of one of the political parties never denied the existence of thugs but only claimed that calling party supporters thugs is mere semantics.
As the Osun gubernatorial election is fast approaching, there is no gain-saying the fact that although Osun state has increased her Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) from N13.8 billion to N19.6 billion, it is still a far cry when compared to Lagos, FCT and Rivers states with N267.2 billion, N69.1 billion and N57.9 billion respectively and with her huge agriculture and mining potentials, the state needs an innovative and visionary leader to transform her economy and improve the quality of life of the people of the state. However, it is a pity that rather than focus on issue-based campaigns, most of the political parties are busy engaging in narcissist smear campaigns.
Moving forward, we must strive to promote politics of decency and jettison power politics that is based on the Machiavellian principle of “the end justify the means”. We must refrain from zero-sum tendencies and reform our political system to provide a role for the main opposition, maybe some form of shadow cabinet. Also, the political system should be made less lucrative by cutting down on the perquisites of office to attract only genuine and decent characters into the political space.
These measures will douse the tension associated with aspiring to political offices in Nigeria like we have experienced in the past and are currently witnessing in the forthcoming Osun state gubernatorial election.
