By Ijeoma Thomas-Odia
With less than 52 days to the elections, former presidential candidate and founder, Centre for Value in Leadership (CVL), Prof. Pat Utomi has berated the growing incivility amongst people in public office.
Citing the scheduled rally by the Peter Obi and the Labour Party for Monday, January 9, in Delta State, he said there has been threat following alleged attempts by the state’s government to frustrate the activity.
Speaking to newsmen at CVL office in Victoria Island yesterday, Utomi who is also the convener of the Big Tent said, “I have been on the campaign trail, travelling around the country and have been observing what is going on. I am particularly worried about the growing incivility in public life. I have seen clearly where opposition politicians are prevented from opportunity to express their positions about the way society should be organised to the people.
“As I speak today, LP is supposed to have its rally on Monday but the state government have done everything to frustrate the use of any government facility for this purpose. Even to religious bodies and traditional rulers have said that the government is too vindictive and wouldn’t want to risk the government coming for them for allowing us use their grounds.
“What kind of a democracy is this; if any other political party has had the use of such a ground and others are denied that use, can you call this a democracy?”
He further noted that our democracy has been on a downward slide for a long time. “With the existence of Afro Barometer, which measures how people think about Africa, since 1999, the result has been sliding backwards. Increasingly, people didn’t vote because they came to a point where democracy doesn’t matter. But then we saw resurgence in interests, as we recorded 12.9 million registrations of new voters and this is hardly the number of Nigerians who wants to vote.
“Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), however, rushed through this, though the law said INEC must continue to register voters till one month to the elections, but then almost a year before elections, INEC has stopped and even at that there was a dramatic turn from the slide that Afro Barometer captures in terms of our attitude towards the elections.”
The professor of political economy also said that social conditions in the country have become so bad and sometimes our politicians pretend, “in a remarkably unbelievable way about the Nigerian condition which is terrible.
“In the last six years, our country has experienced two recessions, it has also seen nationwide decline in security especially with Northeast and so the misery index became unbearable and this woke something up in many Nigerians who say, ‘enough is enough’ and the only platform we have for doing this, is elections process.
“And so we saw a sudden surge of consciousness that led to the registration of nearly 13 million people. These don’t only endangers our democracy, but threatens to move Nigeria close to the brink of a class war.”
While stressing that Nigerians should begin to hold governors accountable and bring them to trial after their tenure, he noted that our institutions have become too weak to hold them accountable, hence international court would help to curb the level of irresponsibility and incivility in their actions.
“There is also intimidation; you cannot open a party office even in some parts of Lagos. The landlords are intimidated, you can’t put up posters as they are torn down and increasingly, the concept of voters intimidation has come to be a part of defining our democracy; people are threatening to fight back and what I perceive is a class war.”
While speaking on the concept of bandit elite, Utomi said the country is dealing with people who come from criminal backgrounds; get into politics and using politics to justify their criminality.
He said, “No sense of shame; a person says something today, and goes back and act like he said nothing and they say that is politics. Character matters, if you cannot get people of character into politics, the society is sunk and that is where we are now and it needs the urgency of this moment to begin to hold people in public office accountable for their behaviour.
“Anywhere in the world where there is a democracy, the key question should be, are you better off today than you were four years ago, if the answer is no, then you have a moral obligation to vote off those you who did poorly. It is only in Nigeria that the government that has performed so woefully comes back which defeats the purpose of democracy.”
Source: The Guardian
