The church and 2019 elections

(Continued from yesterday)

However, the National Assembly changed this order to its own election coming first, governorship and Houses of Assembly election next and the presidential election to be held last. Many people have reasoned that the federal parliament was merely being smart as configuring its elections to hold same day with the presidential election could tie its fate with that of the president’s. Which the National Assembly does not want. Even though this was for a selfish purpose, God is perhaps using the parliament’s foolish self-centeredness to establish the people’s electoral freedom from the hands of elections that do not represent the wishes of the people. You will recall that this scenario of having the presidential election on the same day with that of the federal legislators paid off for the legislators in the 2015 elections because, many of them, relatively unknown by the electorate, got voted into office on the hitherto goodwill and name of General Buhari. However, today, same is not the story as the parliamentarians ostensibly felt that the president’s goodwill had plummeted greatly, a baggage he could carry into the elections.

• The church and 2019 elections

The challenge of the practice of party politics in Nigeria today is also a major challenge to the 2019 elections. As I wrote in my column in the Sunday Tribune of March 4, 2018, I said that, comparatively, especially with the First and Second Republics, party politics, like everything bright and beautiful in Nigeria, has become withered flowers. Today, party politics has taken a turn for the worse. Not only has it lost its reverence, parties have no ideological base any longer. Moneybags superintend over the fates of political parties and this is simply because ordinary party men do not own the political parties. The only way to own the parties is to return to what obtained in the First and Second Republics where party men contributed weekly or monthly dues and had the power to ask how they were being administered or how their monies were being spent.

Political parties today have become mere organs of winning elections. Political party system, we must note, is central to the survival of any democracy. It is indeed the platform for recruitment of leadership. In Nigeria’s weak political architecture and absence of democratic political culture can be found the nil or weak democratic institutions of the Nigerian state. Some people have argued that the weak party politics Nigeria runs is a product of military authoritarianism and the authoritarian legacy we inherited.

The result of the weak party structure that we have today in Nigeria is that, once the political party is not able to guarantee equitable choice, it destroys the foundation upon which representative government stands, limits and pollutes the choice of the people and ultimately provides a wonky and tainted foundation for the electoral process. And the holy writ asks that once the foundation is destroyed, what can the righteous do? Once we do not get party politics right, we can as well forget about democracy. Party nomination or party primaries is the most integral element of democracy. These have been so corrupted in Nigerian party system, so much that there can be no logical mode of producing God-fearing representatives of the people with the current political party status quo. There is thus no wonder that Nigeria hasn’t been able to get democracy right since. For the church and many Nigerians, the challenge goes beyond the above. In my estimation, the greatest challenge for the church is the quality and inner constitution of elected representatives who would carry the baton of power from 2019 and beyond. For, if Nigeria is not successful in electing God-fearing men and women into positions of power in 2019, who will in turn ameliorate the social burdens that have consequentially become the heavy load which the church carries today, the pressure on the church would multiply, probably leading to a revolt of immense proportion.

The first challenge which the church has to confront is the need for it to wake up from its apathy and lethargy of the past towards politics and the process of acquiring political power. You cannot blame the church wholesale for this. The church had been driven away from having anything to do with the process of seeking power. The backstabbing, murder, corruption, occultist search for power and sundry vices of politicking in Nigeria would make anyone who has the integrity to protect to see politics and politicians as lepers. An average Nigerian politician will kill his father and rope his mother for the murder once it leads to the political office. This has been on since the 1950s when indigenous party politics took over in the country. It has driven away many God-fearing people who had the heart of bringing meaningful changes into governance.

Over the years, however, due to the abdication of space by the righteous for the unrighteous to reign, the worst of us have superintended over the best of us, while the collective keeps silent. Nigeria has been battling challenges of corruption, nepotism, selfish leadership, ethnic irredentism and cronyism, among sundry others. These challenges are brought about by the executive who executes haphazard and self-centered policies which have kept Nigeria down; as well as the legislators who legislate unrighteousness as the credo of Nigeria’s legal code. So, for how long will the righteous stay on the sideline and allow the heathens take up the space to foul up Nigeria? This perhaps is the greatest challenge which confronts the church as Nigeria marches to the 2019 elections. The first way out is that the church must purge itself of its ancient allergy to politics. Not only must it come out of its hiding place, the church must take full and undisguised interest in who runs for offices, from the minutest to the biggest office in the land. Due to its closeness to the congregation, who make up the electorate and the people at the grassroots, the church has an understanding of who the nefarious people in communities and society as a whole are. It must move against the reprehensible set of people who contest elective offices and who have, over the years, drawn Nigeria backwards. The church must also wholeheartedly goad on and support the few good ones in society who demonstrate purity of mind and character.

Even though the time is very short, the time to begin this task is now. My personal take is that the church must however be religion-blind in this task. This is because there are several people out there of different and even nil faiths but whose purity of mind is not in doubt. The church must embark on a methodic process of identifying them and parceling them for the process of seeking political power. The same zeal with which the church evangelizes for lost souls must be deployed in searching for the thousands of pure souls who can be encouraged to change the already messed up status-quo. Even though there cannot be any logical expectation that the church would be hundred per cent successful in getting righteous men to be in power in 2019, whatever strides it makes could be the foundation for future attempts.  The church must also encourage the calls for a return to full-blown democracy in political parties. As it is now, the political parties are in the hands of a very few cabals who do not mean well for Nigeria but who crave a rehash of the same political party system with which they promote charlatans and never-do-wells to political relevance.

• Dr Adedayo delivered this lecture at the Ibadan Anglican Church Diocese’s Clergy Seminar, held in Ibadan on March 6, 2018.