This administration can avoid being the object of nature's derision, and let its word be its bond
The triumph of hope over experience', was the comment of our erudite Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) about a man who was said to have remarried immediately after the death of a wife with whom he had been very unhappy.
Obviously, some people learn from experience; and some, from experience, never learn. But, whether we learn or not, nature continues to teach us. Take the simple matter of time: it ticks on, no matter how you literally hold back the hands of the clock. Take also the seasons: they change no matter how much you want to hold them back. Seasons come, seasons go; governments come, governments go; only the universe remains.
Enough of our philosophising, dear reader; we are talking today about the sudden, some would say even unnecessary, postponement of Nigeria's general elections. I am having trouble understanding it; but then I generally have trouble understanding anything because the people around me have all agreed that I am somewhat slow to comprehend things. I think they had to hold a meeting on the subject or something. I am still scratching my head on why it took them so long to come to that realisation. Anyway, I am so slow it took me a long time to know my left from my right, my friend in my enemy, and that what I took to be a creeping plant giving off hisses into the air in my garden was really a green snake looking for sunshine.
I must confess though that the postponement took many of us by surprise. There I had been, believing that the word of the government was its bond. There is an unwritten code that says that your word is your bond. That code has guided many for centuries. I remember growing up in a community where this word-bond agreement ruled the farms. If a farmer needed extra hands on his field, he did not go to hire.
No sir, he simply asked his fellow-farmers to leave off farming their own field and attend to his own needs for the two or three days he might need them. And they often did, barring sickness. The unwritten law was that should any of his friends ever require his services, he would willingly abandon his own needs and meet that one at his point of need.
Thus when the government gave the word that the elections would hold as scheduled, we took it to be its bond also. Alas, not so! We had no way of knowing that the word belonged to the government while the bond might belong to us. Imagine a farmer being left holding a bond in that fashion, after having given his own time and energy to develop his fellow-farmer's farm, only to be told that the time chosen was no longer convenient, particularly in view of the fact that the weather is not under any man's control. Like that farmer, I am still holding the election bond in my hand, much to my chagrin and definitely not to my pleasing, or even Jega's. Indeed, the postponement has made nonsense of all our personal programmes which we all, to a man across the nation, strenuously strained to postpone just to make sure that, should movements be restricted, no important thing would suffer during the elections.
I do not want to go into the reasons for the postponement, contrived or not. I'm only interested in what effects it has on me. The first thing that struck me was the question: don't the rest of us count? Is it possible for all of us who constitute the electorate to be as negligible as all that and maybe more? The story is told that someone remarked to his father, at his parents' 50th wedding anniversary, that the said parents never seemed to fight. His father replied that they sure had their many battles, like any other couple; it was just that sooner or later in the fight, one of them would realise that he, the man, was wrong. That is one version.
Another version has it that the man replied that early in the marriage, they had decided that in order to avoid all conflicts, he, the man of the house, would take all the big decisions while the wife, the woman of the house, would take all the small ones. In the fifty years of being together though, the man found out that there had not been one big decision to take. That was why the union had lasted for so long.
The reason that we the electorate don't count much in electoral matters should be the subject of a treatise for a political scientist, but not for us here. You and I must nevertheless be struck by the deep, deep irony and amusement in the situation. If you possess this knowledge, my friend, you possess a great thing indeed – that the land belongs to the people; the instruments of governance belong to the people; the power deriving thereof belongs to the people; therefore the state belongs to the people. My friend, I congratulate you for knowing this; not all of us do. You see, at critical and crucial moments, most government functionaries think it nothing to yield to the temptation to use the same state against the people, or to forget them altogether. Now, say news reports, there are soldiers circling people's houses. When will we learn?!
Naturally, it never works, mostly because the protection of the people against such misuse is writ large in nature. Take the example at hand. Postponing these elections is not really to the people's liking: the people did not ask for it; the people did not want it; the people still do not understand it. The thing just went right over the people's heads. That just gives one the feeling of déjà vu, does it not, and makes one rather tired.
Let's take one or two government functionaries who have gone over the people's heads like this and have rued the action. At the height of his power in France, Louis XIV was said to have claimed, 'L'Etat c'est moi (I am the state)', and as he was dying in 1715, he was claimed to have said, "Je m'en vais, mais l'Etat demeurera toujours (I depart, but the state shall always remain)", while Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette, also absolute monarchs, departed via the guillotine. The June 12 saga in Nigeria is still fresh in the collective mind. The then president single-handedly cancelled an election that was said to have been the freest and fairest to date in this country. I believe that president is still smarting from some of the consequences of not respecting the owners of that election, the people. The State remains, always.
Experience, they say, is the best teacher. Of course, no one can singly go through every experience that he needs to learn from. That is why we have history and literature books. That is why we have others. That is why we have visions. That is why we have our religions. History, literature, visions and religions tell us what nature has always made clear: the land belongs to its maker. This in effect translates to the fact that nature has ways of correcting the errors of mankind when he attempts to play God. Nature does so because it knows that sometimes in the heart of some unknowing ones among us, hope triumphs over experience.
We tend to think that the people before us were unlucky or they got it wrong somewhere. It must be different with us, just like motorists who come on the scene of an accident and then speed off. Tch, tch, feed in the same data, use same method and expect different results? This administration can avoid being the object of nature's derision, and let its word be its bond.
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Author: Oyinkan Medubi
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Opinions expressed above are solely those of the author.
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