Abdu Rafiu contributes the RAM column to USAfricaonline.com
Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
The phrase, being smart, connotes something unsavoury; something that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. I believe it is for impactful meaning that the emphatic tautology is employed to paint the picture of how disgusting playing smart could be! Being opportunistic. Otherwise, how do you explain a man voted a winner in a crucial election on a Saturday and by Monday he had defected from the party that provided him the platform to contest an opposition party?
For those who have shame, it evokes the wrinkling of faces and momentary biting of lips. Of course, it is to be noted that where there is no shame, there is no embarrassment. In other words, shameless people cannot be embarrassed. If that was the party the fellow had had in mind, ab initio, why would he not allow somebody else to stand who would proudly brandish the flag of the party that will now be denied representation on the council, legislature or executive position?
Nigeria’s Peoples’ Democratic Party, PDP must, therefore, be feeling badly hurt for losing the only seat it won in the just February 2026 council elections in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja.
Defection is the bug of the democratic dispensation in Nigeria, today. Many turn their back on their erstwhile parties once they are sworn or much later–some out of peer pressure; some others are lured; traps are set for others. There are promises of indulgent El Dorado. Some switch parties under compulsion: we don’t want to be left out, we want to be part of the centre; there is a lot to gain by our state being part of the centre, some governors say, and leave the platform through which they ascended the throne en masse for the jolly party: the executive and the legislature. And I ask myself: Where is Justice Ekwo? How I wished Justice John Idowu Conrad Taylor of blessed memory were still in our midst in these times that things have really gone repugnantly down! Taylor, the no-nonsense jurist more often referred to in love, admiration or trepidation as J.I.C. Taylor?
Some people seek power to afford them the opportunity to genuinely serve their fellow men, no doubt. Love, compassion and a deep feeling of help run through their veins. They see the conditions of their fellowmen and gaps to be filled to uplift them to heights that can be adjudged lofty. These, however, can be counted, literally speaking, on the fingertips. Some other people feeling the same way may see and prefer a different approach to bringing succour and happiness to the same people, the same land or the same community. Competition then ensues. The prospective servant-leaders sell their ideas to their compatriots. Each group drawn to one another through the Law of Attraction of Homogenous Species, that is the Law of Homogeneity—birds of the same feather flock together—then form parties to animate and put their ideas into action through what they call manifestoes which they canvass before their people. So, what then happens to the manifestoes brimming with lofty ideas they sell to their people and ask to be trusted to represent and serve them? Is it then to be concluded that there is no iota of truth in them, that they see only the allure of office and its attendant indulgences! A great many leave, willing victims of manipulation and cunning; many others are attracted by the possibility of status changing through glitters dangling in the horizon, far before their gaze, some for immediate gain. Many want re-election and all the power, influence and public acknowledgement that go with it!
These go on seemingly enabled by the judiciary that concentrates more on the letters of the law than the spirit of the law. The lacuna the defectors exploit is where the constitution says a legislator can defect if there is division in his party the platform on which he was elected, or he is recalled by his constituents after a petition signed by no less than half of registered voters in the area is presented to the INEC chairman saying they have lost confidence in him and a referendum is thereafter conducted within 90 days affirming the petition by a simple majority of the registered voters– again in the constituency.
Section 109 of the constitution states as follows (among) other conditions in sub-section (1g): “A member of a House of Assembly shall vacate his seat in the House if being a person whose election to the House of Assembly was sponsored by a political party, he becomes a member of another political party before the expiration of the period for which that House was elected:
Provided that his membership of the latter political party is not as a result of a division in the political party of which he was previously a member or a merger of two or more political parties or factions by one of which he was previously sponsored.
In the case of a governor, it is if he is found guilty of gross misconduct by the House of Assembly (Section 188) of the grundnom, or he is unable to perform the functions of his office as a result of ill-health. It was thought inconceivable by the framers of the Constitution that someone of a governor’s calibre, someone in such a high office and a more visible leader of the party than even the state chairman would cross-carpet. After all, no governor mounts the throne without standing on the platform of a political party. It was the position the Justice Ekwo of the Federal High Court took in the case of two governors—Ebonyi and Cross River states–when they defected from PDP to APC many years back. He ruled that they vacate office. He saw it as unfair and a betrayal of trust that a governor would move away from a party that brought him to power and still keep his office. There is some that just doesn’t jell, he reasoned. Unfortunately, instead of the Appeal Court upholding the position and turning it into a case law shot it down, saying there were clear provisions on the removal of a governor in the constitution! Those provisions were not violated by the governors. Was that the spirit of the law? What could be greater misconduct than the betrayer of trust and abuse of confidence of the electorate who saw hope in the party and its manifestoes, they embraced and put their candidate in office. The framers of the Constitution did not see what Professor John Kenneth Galbraith saw about the nature of politicians in our clime when he says in his work, The Affluent Society, “Politics have long been known to make incongruous bedfellows.”
There are no qualms about actions and responsibility. About honour! It is about anything goes to take power or remain in power. And this then brings into sharp focus the subject of free will, constraints, restraints and the nexus between them and the unavoidable responsibility. In the affairs of man there are constraints either voluntary which a person places on himself following the promptings of his intuitive perception or honour flowing from simple thoughtfulness. There can be restraints imposed by external forces. Politics can be both constraining and restraining. In restraining, there could be loss of freedom leading to servitude and the one with the upper hand regards his action as being smart. The strong bends the cause of the weak willy-nilly to serve his end. If politicians could be incongruous bedfellows, what that suggests is that they have torn themselves out of the natural order that homogeneity engenders and implies. Defection, therefore, means the coming together of strange bedfellows. Peace and cohesion are wont to flee from such an assemblage as it is held only by all manner of force, visible and invisible. Those who lure and those who are lured burden themselves with guilt, a great deal of which will have to be atoned for in the beyond. Every such burden bordering on paralysis of free choice, indeed, avenges itself most bitterly in life hereafter. Thus, man’s problems are earthly in consequence but are spiritual in cause because we are spiritual beings. Every action lends itself to an outward expression of an inward, indeed, deep inner process.
Herbert Vollmann, writing on Constraints in his treasure work, A Gate Opens, states that the opposite of resolution freely expressed is “the free will which is curbed or altogether suppressed by compulsion, that manifests in many ways.
“There is forced labour, coercive measures, family constraint; people bemoan the force of circumstances, of customs, of habits, or they themselves hard pressed, and finally bow to the force of tradition.
“Nothing good is contained in all these expressions, because as with so much else man has debased and distorted the concept “constraint.” In reality, natural constraint has existed from the very beginning, as a result of the effects in accordance with the Laws of Creation. However, as man limited his spirit more and more, giving the upper hand to his intellect which is directed solely towards earthly things, he no longer understood the natural constraint which is borne by the warmth of the spirit.
“Against it he set the cold perverted constraint of the intellect, based on feelings of power, threat, extortion and violence. For thousands of years now men have exercised such a constraint on their fellowmen in the most diverse forms. Thus, one part of mankind always sought to hinder or completely suppress the other in its God-willed development towards spiritual maturity, and to dispute his upward striving fellow-man’s right to his own personality, his own thinking and volition.
“Just let us think, for example, of the various forms of slavery, of serfdom, of Inquisition.… All this has been increasing right up to the present time. Of course, in many things the form was changed, but the basic evil remains: an absolute striving after power, together with deliberate suppression of the spiritual and earthly development of one’s fellow-man for personal advantage, by making use of all manner of constraints.
“In this connection, however, one thing must be borne in mind, which lays itself like a burden on those who exercise the strong constraint, namely the responsibility!
“He who compels a person to do something which is not in accord with the Laws of Creation, be it through deed, sufferance or omission, burdens himself with guilt, and must bear the responsibility for what the person concerned thinks and does under the constraint imposed. This begins with restriction of the outward freedom of action, and increases to the binding of the spirit by force through hypnosis.
“Now many think that the Law of Sowing and Reaping, also called the Law of reciprocal Action, applies only to the earthly sowing; it could still be surveyed because the sower knows of his sowing! However, the Laws of God are not so one-sided that they take effect only on one part of Creation. Like all other Laws of Creation, the Law of Reciprocal Action holds good for the whole of Creation, for this side and the beyond, thus also for processes not visible on earth, which include the forming of thoughts and intuitive perceptions. Man must receive the harvest of the seed planted by him, at the moment which inevitably comes about from the workings of the Laws of Creation.
“He is certainly free in the choice of his decisions, owing to the free will peculiar to his spiritual nature, but the consequences arising from them are in turn subject to the constraint of the Laws of Nature.
According to him, man frees himself “only if he obeys these Laws aright and lives with them, if he earnestly strives to recognise the Will of God working in the Laws, and translates It into deed in everyday life in his thoughts in everyday life in his thoughts, words and actions.
Herr Vollmann goes on to add: “We must, therefore, distinguish between the natural constraint borne by the Laws of Creation swinging in Divine Love, and the cold, wrong constraint of Luciferian character, with the hall-marks of threat, extortion, oppression and violence. To become free of all wrong constraint is, therefore, a demand which the Will of God now makes on men, so that their spiritual ascent can begin unhindered.”
From the foregoing it can be seen clearly that man bears unremittingly full responsibility for all his actions and what he lures others to do against their wish or conviction!
ELECTRONIC TRANSMISSION Et Al
I am in complete agreement with any step that will make for transparency in our elections. The point the National Assembly didn’t buy was the issue of electronic transmission in Real Time. The argument pressing for transmission in real time has been eloquently made. If real time support transfers to our aged parents back in the villages hardly fail, why should real time transmission of vote count tally forwarded with more powerful INEC gadgets fail? Let the law be there. Yes, anything mechanical or electronics can sometimes fail, but transmission cannot suffer cliches in the course of uploading to IREV in all the numerous polling centres across the country and in all 774 local councils of the country at the same time.
And just in case, there is no harm in having the voting result forms also manually filled as standby remedial measures. The counting is manually done in the presence of party agents or interested voters who stay behind after casting their votes and simply want to know which candidate and which party are coasting home to victory. Party agents have copies of the result. If there is foul alteration in the hand of X party agent, that cannot be the case with results agents of Party W, X, Y, Z have in their possession for their principals. If what has been transmitted has been tampered with, hacked or illegible, results with the party agents and their principals can easily come handy to authenticate what all have as the correct results and effect corrections.
The point I am driving at, therefore, is that we need electronic real time transmission and we need manually recorded forms, copies of which are in the hands of party agents and the party candidates themselves. One device does not disturb the other. What we are yet to face is the human character in which INEC clerks/returning officer, overwhelmed by local sentiment shows voters the party to thumb-print! This usually occurs in very remote villages and party agents look away!
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