The past couple of months have been an interesting time, especially on the political landscape of Nigeria. More interesting are the efforts to outdo each other by the political gladiators who come up with all manners of arguments in desperate attempts to impress the electorate, win votes and ultimately take on the reins of power.
No less interesting was the comedy in Ekiti State where an incumbent had to give way on account of what was generally regarded by the people as insensitivity to the plight of the common man. A big political lesson became apparent as the very issue that the then-incumbent and his sympathisers in the same political parties from other states took for a joke became the real winning joker for the newly sworn-in governor.
Talk of stomach infrastructure was meant to be a derisive description of material welfare support given to the grassroots people in Ekiti as a way of winning their support as well as their votes. It used to be the case that votes were nothing to reckon with in earlier elections in Nigeria before 2011. In those days, statistics were just for manipulation and not true reflection of people’s wish as expressed in electoral votes. It turned out differently this time.
Ekiti election, just as those of Edo, Ondo and Anambra and Osun States in recent times, proved the power of voters, especially when the votes were allowed to count and true winners are allowed to take their rightful places. Here then comes statistics in practical application! It is quite interesting that, after nearly four years of ruling Ekiti State, it was not clear to the out-gone administration what should be top priority for the governed. And, rather than seeing it in the right perspective, sympathisers of that administration (and actors in that government) chose to denigrate the very idea that touched the heart of the voters who held the real power, either to retain the existing government or to usher in another.
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The whole argument about ‘stomach infrastructure’ showed that those who were supposed to understand it better actually missed the point. They glossed over the reality and explained it away. This was in spite of advanced education and much involvement in NGO activities by the erstwhile governor, which ought to have placed him at a vantage point in addressing the peculiar problems of Ekiti people under his watch. For a mostly rural and agrarian state, Ekiti people, especially those living within the state, need basic support more than anything else. And, going by Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory, food ranks top among those needs. This therefore means that the champion of stomach infrastructure got it right on the priority scale by giving pre-eminence to matters of food support.
The whole argument about distributing food to win election does not have a firm footing within a moral, legal or social realm. At best, it could be reckoned as having overlapping but ill-defined connotation, particularly when those who made it an odd issue could not justify their reasons for castigating it. More importantly, the brain behind the methodology has proven it a worthwhile thing by now seeking to entrench it as an official policy.
Whether or not the idea of perpetual distribution of food is the best approach to solving the people’s need is a different issue altogether. But, truly, if an intellectually-inclined government had done the ‘know-your-customer’ exercise, the issue of stomach infrastructure would not have been reduced to the level of derision or cheap political blackmail. Rather, it would have been regarded as a core socio-economic policy intervention that could improve the lives of the people in the state. Unfortunately, Ekiti under the past governments had fallen into the same trap that all other states had fallen into (or in which they are still caught), that in which the true status of states are hardly correctly understood or appreciated by those governing them. This is a major reason for policy incongruence and non-alignment, leading to wastage of public funds and no appreciable sustainable impacts.
The democracy of the stomach should be the right of everyone, particularly the poor and downtrodden, irrespective of political leaning and background, particularly where income inequality is a prominent feature. It has its historical and economic justification. An adage in Yoruba states that ‘suffering pales into insignificance once the issue of hunger has been sorted out’. This traditional wisdom, captured in the adage, was articulated by our forefathers who did not have western education and did not study social studies, political science, public administration or economics in any academic institution. The former president of Brazil, Inacio Lula da Silva, gave expression to this traditional wisdom when he established ‘Bolsa Familia’, a Portuguese term for ‘family grant’, a social welfare programme which drew the attention of global bodies, received approbation of world leaders and elicited the praises of international media, including the respectable Economist magazine.
Olukayode Oyeleye