When you go to the movies several minutes late, you automatically become your own movie: you scramble through to find a seat, apologetic smiles for being a distraction, the struggles to update and follow the play; and the worse is the pretence to have caught up, but merely following the general emotions and expressions in the auditorium per scene. Does this aptly describe the conditions of our (Nigeria and Africa) participation in the global auditorium? Are we struggling to catch up? Are we asking the right questions? Or are we just following paradigm? Are we not creating scenes in the global auditorium?
Again, when you think about democracy and elections, ancient Greece comes to mind. We bother less to know that early Athenian philosophers had an interesting perspective on democracy. The earliest known of them, Socrates, thought of voting as a skill that should be taught and learned. He invites us to imagine an election debate between two candidates, one less skilled- a sweet-shop owner and the other very skilled- a doctor. The sweet-shop owner would manipulate the audience saying: ‘this man is of no good; he works evil on you, hurts you, gives you bitter potions, and places restrictions on your eating and drinking. But I will serve you feasts of many and varied pleasant things’. How effective could the doctor respond? Intuitively, the true answer- ‘I cause you troubles and go against your desires to help you’ would cause uproar among the voters. To Socrates, those who should vote are those who have thought deeply and rationally about it. Plato draws from this when he argued that philosophers should vote otherwise, what Aristotle called mob-rule would ensue. These philosophers all warned against the direction of modern day democracy where age and not the proper education is the ultimate franchise to vote. They warned against demagoguery where the elites appeal to the (hidden) emotions and prejudices common among some class of the citizens rather than to rational reasoning. We have seen this rhetoric played out in advanced democracy as hitherto perceived-the Brexit debate and US elections. How much more in a quasi-democracy where more than half of its citizenry could be unsophisticated about political matters and their poverty is all the emotion there is to be manipulated? In such places as with Nigeria, the rhetoric could just be one word, change!
We do not find it necessary to talk about elections and voting until it is the eve of elections or after the elections have produced unanticipated outcome. I will talk about elections, after all the elections are not so ‘general’ anymore; some states have elections for the executive positions later or earlier than the others. The underlying primitive here is that the condition of any democracy is as effective as the education system that surrounds it. Our democracy is weak, our electoral process is marred, take a look at our educational system. We must distinguish between intellectual democracy and democracy by age and birth right otherwise we would continue as we have it already to produce more sweetshop owners and fewer doctors.
I am not in any form promoting an elitist argument neither am I implying by any means that only fewer people should vote, but I am like the Athenian philosophers, triggered by recent events pessimistic about the paradigm on elections and democracy as would any discerning mind. Moreover it is not so much about who is better to run the affairs of a country than who decides who is better to do the earlier. Nor is it so much about the number who decides than the quality of those who decides who is better to administer a country. Understandably, it is never easy to change a ruling paradigm or an accustomed way of thinking, but there is already too much that we are not questioning. I am not talking about us changing the global course but our own. Unbeknownst to many, the underlying motive of the recent democratic outcome in the EU/UK debates and in the United States is Economic nationalism, a finer coat for mercantilism. The only way this extreme ideology could find expression in this generation, in two countries that preached globalization is through rule of the masses. Is voxpopuli still voxdei?
We have to carry our own torch and find our own path. The electoral commission could organise electoral schools and programs of enlightenment to educate the citizens on the power of voting and their choices in an election. This could also be infused in school curricula across the nation and made mandatory for all. In organized forums, those knowledgeable about the subject matter could counsel those less so. We could work towards intellectual democracy, reduce the number of sweet-shop owners and increase the number of doctors.
Amamchukwu Okafor
Is from Friedrich Schiller University- Jena, Germany and can be reached on
Amamchukwu.okafor@uni-jena.de
