A SEMINAR AND PAPER PRESENTATION SPONSERED BY VOICE OF ALL PROGRESSIVES CONGRESS (VAPCON) KANO, NIGERIA PRESENTED BY ABBATI BAKO, MA, political strategy and communication, psc, University of Kent, UK (bsis, mti, Political Strategist) PRESIDENT/C.E.O INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL RESOURCE CENTRE (I.P.R.C) NIGERIA TOPIC:- POLITICS, DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP WHO IS A POLITICIAN? (5) A politician should be a man or woman of honor, integrity, morally up right, and honest, and transparent, who believes in accountability, rules of law, due process and patriotism; who loves his people and his nation dearly; and not a person with questionable character, or who wants to be a master rather than a servant. In advanced democracies, most of the politicians are groomed, and guided right from childhood to be tomorrow leaders. In Nigeria, leaders have to re-formulate and re-orient citizens on how the politics should be and who should be a politician or leader. Ghana and South Africa in the election of 2009, showed shining examples for Nigeria and other African nations, their politicians demonstrated sense of maturity, patriotism and responsibility. Professor Paul Collier of the University of Oxford, London is an expert in African/Asian political economy says (2009): “Elections are the institutional technology of democracy. They have the potential to make governments more accountable and more legitimate. Elections should sound the death knell to political violence”.3 He also observed that our times have seen a great political sea change; the spread of democracy to the bottom billion (Africa). But is it democracy? The bottom billion certainly got elections. They were heavily promoted by American and European pressure, and, as the most visible feature of democracy, they were treated as its defining characteristic. Yet a proper democracy does not merely have competitive elections; it also has rules for the conduct of those elections: cheating gets punished. A proper democracy also has checks and balances that limit the power of a government once elected. The great political sea change may superficially have looked like the spread of democracy, but it was actually the spread of elections. If there are no limits on the power of the winner, the election becomes a matter of life and death. If this life-and-death struggle is not itself subject to rules of conduct, the contestants are driven to extremes. The result is not democracy: I think of it as demo-crazy. He further says in a democracy a government has no choice but to try to deliver what ordinary citizens want.” The question now is that the way we practice democracy in Nigeria can really be described as democracy? Wasn’t not the former president Olusegun Obasanjo once said that “politics is a due or die affairs”? And again that; what is currently happening (misfit and bad governance) in Nigeria under the rules of PDP is that what the ordinary citizen of Nigeria want? Paul Collier, a highly regarded and respected political economist and expert on developing countries, especially African political economy argues that, “the spread of elections and peace settlements in the world’s most volatile countries may lead eventually to a brave new democratic world. In the meantime, though nasty and protracted civil wars, military coups, and failing economies will plague the bottom billion-unless national sovereignty is curtailed and economic disciplines introduced.” When shall the economic disciplines be introduced in Nigeria? (Accountability is one of the key of principles of democracy). It’s only in Nigerian nation that an ordinary civil servant will mismanage or misappropriate government funds (tune of billions of Naira) and go free and unprosecuted due to the culture of impunity in Nigeria? The APC party will do everything humanly possible to correct and right all anomalies that has been afflicting Nigerian nation in the last 14 years. It was last week that the Chinese Court in Beijing sentenced the former Minister of Railways and Transports to death for corruption ($10m) and mismanagement of government funds. When shall this kind of justice happen in Nigeria? To be continued Abbati Bako (psc) Political Strategist
Posted on: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 14:28:46 +0000
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