VOTE OR SHUT UP!

It’s appropriate that I write an article about voting right after watching Selma, a powerful movie about the fight of Martin Luther King and his fellow activists to pass legislation to enable African Americans vote.
The right to vote is something that is easy to take for granted, especially in a country like Nigeria where, on account of the average age of the population, an increasing number of people cannot remember life without democracy.

Now in its 16^th year, another cycle is here again, and I am sure a fair few of you have had your fill of political adverts on every conceivable platform, promoting one candidate or the other. As a result of the postponement, that ‘torture’ has been prolonged for 6 more weeks, even though Valentine’s Day, which would have been heavily overshadowed by the Presidential elections, was freed up for loving, and not politicking.

The prevailing mood till March 28, is that of uncertainty, a certain foreboding. The reason given for the postponement was security; that Boko Haram need to be driven off our soil and the North East area secured. All this is supposed to happen in 6 weeks, where it did not happen in the preceding 5 years.
This post details why that will be difficult to achieve. It also raises questions. The date of the election has been known for months. Why were the necessary operations not conducted before now? Let us even assume that they manage to achieve that objective. The question then becomes: Did they know what to do all this time, and decided to delay it till now? If the objective is not achieved in 6 weeks, do we have another postponement?

While that is going on, the markets are not handling all this uncertainty well at all. The Naira’s value continues to decline with no end in sight, and the stock market is taking a beating as well. Simultaneously, there is a coordinated attempt to discredit INEC and Attahiru Jega by the PDP, which is worrisome due to rumours of his being sent on terminal leave, just like what happened with Maurice Iwu in 2010. Jega’s term is to end in June.

It is easy to get overwhelmed by all this, especially when you take it all together. However, there is some good that can come out of the extension. Most importantly, those who registered in 2011 can and should go and collect their PVCs. Encourage those around you to do the same as well: friends, relatives, the cleaner in your office, and so on. After that, engage with the process by examining the candidates at all levels, and get ready to exercise your right to vote.

I see a fair few tweets from young people, talking about how no candidate ‘inspires’ them, and saying how they are likely to not vote. It is an argument that makes a sense only on the surface. At every level, choices will be made whether you cast your vote or not, and for the vast majority of people, voting is the limit of their involvement with the political process.

In reality, voting is the barest minimum. Martin Luther King and his colleagues got organized, negotiated, demonstrated and resisted in order to get the attention of American public and the President at the time – Lyndon Baines Johnson – to pass legislation that enshrined their right as people of colour to vote. Many of them were beaten, locked up, and died for that right. They died for the right to determine their destiny.
When you vote, when you cast your ballot, you are determining your own future. You get to decide who represents you and your interests, and you get to change that decision – or not – every four years based on your assessment of that person’s performance. That person’s performance affects you, in all kinds of obvious and not so obvious ways. Every time you hear a heart wrenching story about someone in a hospital who died because of lack of medical facilities, or a building burnt to the ground because firefighters didn’t have water (or were not even available) or a bad road that turns a one hour commute into three hours, someone, somewhere, is responsible for that, and that person was elected into office.

Democracy does not guarantee good leaders, but it gives you the power to vote bad leaders out of office. If you do it enough times, if you punish incompetence, corruption and abuse of power enough times, you finally get to the decent ones.

It’s the start of another week and I would like to suggest you make plans to track down and collect your PVC (if you haven’t yet) and then select your candidates at all levels. For a variety of reasons, some who registered in 2011 will not be able to vote. For everyone else, there is no excuse.