This stomach infrastructure is ruining our democracy, by Eric Omazu

Last Saturday, the people of EkitiState in South Western Nigeria trooped out in their numbers to cast their votes and elect a leader of their choice in the governorship election that held solely in the state that day.
No matter what the two dominant parties in the country, the All Progressive Congress (APC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) wanted us to believe, INEC had earlier informed Nigerians that there were nineteen other parties contesting in the election.
This brought the number to twenty-one parties and showed that the election was not just about APC and PDP.
In line with democratic principles, that election ought to be about the people of Ekiti State and their collective wellbeing.
Deciphering what collective wellbeing of a people is in a democracy is one of the hard knots which that system of government throws up.
Thus, when the people vote, they take that decision, they choose the person they think will secure their wellbeing.
Their choice could make or break them, but the sweetest thing about it is that the praise or blame for their choice comes back to them, either to trouble or to glorify them.
For this reason, I think that elections should be characterised by sober atmosphere, the type we experience just before an examination.
It should be a time of introspection and deep reflection for the voter.
It should also be same if not more for the man or woman seeking the votes of the electorates.
This is because the voter needs peaceful atmosphere to reassess the choice he or she is about to make.
None of these happened in Ekiti last Saturday.
The peace of the entire space was broken as APC and PDP successfully turned the contest into a two-party affair leaving off the remaining nineteen parties in the wood.
The people, the supreme kings of any true democratic process, were heartlessly manipulated into a tool that took away their own powers.
Shamelessly, they collected money from the two dominant political parties and sold their votes to them.
At the end of the election, the candidate of the APC, Dr KayodeFayemi, a former governor of the state, was declared winner of the election.
Would Fayemihad won that election if he had not enticed the voters with money as was revealed by the BBC’s undercover reporter who exposed the shameful practice? The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.
There is a big temptation to blame the Ekiti voter for succumbing to the fleeting lure of stomach infrastructure and like the Biblical Esau, selling his birthright for a morsel of yam.
But we will be unfair to the people to do this.
Why? The Ekiti voter, just like his counterparts in all the other parts of Nigeria, has been so-emasculated that nothing makes any sense to him apart from what goes into his stomach.
The politicians know this.
Part of the training to becoming a politician in our country, it seems, is the ability to impoverish the people and to exploit that impoverishment to politicians’ advantage during election.
Otherwise, how do we explain the fact that in 2018, stomach infrastructure that formed the major plank of Fayose’s campaign in 2014 would still be used as a campaign strategy to the same people.
In 2014, Fayose and the PDP had predicated their stomach infrastructure strategy on the general impoverishment of the people championed by the ACN/APC of Fayemi.
The people were hungry and needed to be fed.
His only action then was to feed them.
After all, didn’t Jesus feed his 5000 followers when they were hungry.
Nigerians bought into this.
And Fayose won the election.
If in 2018, the Ekiti people were still hungry that they needed to be fed again by a gubernatorial aspirant and his political party, then important questions should be asked the leaders of that state.
On this note, it is necessary to remind incoming Governor Fayemi, that the measure of his success as Ekiti Governor in the next four years is the ability of Ekiti people to accept or reject campaign strategy built on stomach infrastructure.