Mfonobong Inyang: This Year, Have the Gift Of Critical Thinking & Perspective

My start-of-the-year homily is about civics because there is nothing more paramount right now than the 2023 elections.

You don’t just vote for a man, you vote for his model, machinery and mindset. Appreciate the fact that creatures – humans, animals, vegetation or any other animate thing are designed to reproduce after their own kind. A model is the standard operating procedure of a person, business or organisation. If a candidate’s model is to privatise profits and socialise losses, that’s what you will get if he or she gets elected into public office. If a candidate’s model is feudalism, which weaponises poverty and illiteracy, don’t expect huge budgetary allocations to the education sector or business-friendly policies. On the contrary, if a candidate sees education as an investment, not as a cost, you can expect a more educated population and a more successful marketplace.

Machinery is simply the ecosystem that typically brings a candidate into power. This means that the values that drive people into power will be the same set of values used to perpetuate themselves in power. Understand that the incentive to get on the straight and narrow lane when in public office is little or non-existent. If a person’s emergence is aided by thuggery and violence but for some reason, you expect peace to reign when he or she wins the elections, then I have a flying elephant to sell to you. If a person believes in buying or bribing his or her way through to power, don’t delude yourself that he or she will suddenly transform into czar of anti-corruption when in office. On the contrary, if a candidate believes in the rule of law and prefers to use the legal system to seek redress, he or she will replicate same in office. So your best bet is to avoid what human resource managers refer to as recruitment errors.

Pay attention to the mindset more than a manifesto – a person appears how he or she thinks. A manifesto is also important but it’s a well-articulated policy document that one can pay people to do. This is why some unscrupulous politicians have mastered the art of deceiving the electorates by stating one thing in their manifestoes but doing the exact opposite when in office. How you know this is true is that they avoid interfacing with the media because out of the abundance of the mind (not the manifesto), the mouth speaks. They have the morbid fear of their true intentions being revealed when interrogated in unscripted conversations. You gerrit now?

A person who prioritises physical infrastructure over developing human infrastructure will prefer building bridges (usually at super-inflated amounts) to bridging the gap between unskilled labour and higher economic opportunities. A person who doesn’t have empathy, has intentions to capture the economy for private interests, and has a sinister agenda for the corporate existence will subsequently appoint communications, finance and security managers respectively to align with those ungodly intentions. On the contrary, a person who believes in an egalitarian state, shared prosperity, and protection of lives and property will consequently make decisions along those core values.

I took time to construct these archetypes and outlines because there is an evil of cognitive dissonance that particularly comes into play during election periods in this country; not even from uninformed electorates but from supposedly educated electorates who are known to serially misinform others. We all know what we know about the leading candidates in the forthcoming elections, so burying our heads in the sand is not a strategy. It’s intellectual dishonesty to hide behind one finger when we all know that voting a ‘Nero’ into power typically means that he or she would rather throw a lavish party while the rest of Rome burns to the ground because such people don’t mind ruling over ruins. In fact, it fits perfectly into their dystopian model. I was taught in my Neuro Linguistic Programming classes that how you do one thing is very much how you do everything; it’s owing to your meta-programming. So some character traits being manifested by certain politicians are not bugs, they are features.

Renowned thinker and best-selling author of Atomic Habits, James Clear, shares a quote from his book inspired by Greek poet, Archilochus: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” This means that human beings are creatures of habits and as you know, old habits die hard. This is the political education that most electorates don’t have because they think that the solution is simply to vote in new people without considering that the dysfunctional system is still intact. Guess what? A bad system will defeat the intentions of a good person every day of the week and twice on Sundays – not forgetting public holidays. This is the more reason you shouldn’t just vote in a great president but more importantly, vote in great federal representatives into the National Assembly. Don’t just vote in a great governor, also vote in great state representatives.

So any red flag that pops up over any candidate should not be waved aside or dismissed as conspiracy theories because we have learnt very painful lessons on how such unpatriotic concessions have come back to haunt us as a collective. If you’re a private citizen, we’re not really interested in your business (that’s for the state to superintend). However, anyone running for public office must be subject to intense scrutiny because this is a fledgling democracy, not a monarchy where kings and queens cannot be questioned. To put it in bluntly, if you cannot stand the heat, then get out of the kitchen.

Don’t allow someone who is trying to prove that he or she is the devil’s favourite demon sell you a one-way ticket to hell. These people are not patriots; they are snake oil sales agents who are more interested in the personal perks accruable to them from successfully marketing bad products with banalities than in the collateral damage such sales will inflict on the wider society. I am familiar with their game, they can’t fool me. They usually come on the timeline after the elections to ask for forgiveness – talmbout how they made a mistake and how their faves don fall their hand. What they won’t tell you is that they have cashed out on the low and will move to a country where things actually work to continue enjoying the life of their heads. Meanwhile, you are left to deal with the hordes of hell and the horrors of abominable governance. My advice to you: either vote in good leaders or get a valid passport because if you lose out on both, otilo!

Go and ask the Americans, they once voted someone into office who won the elections but their democracy suffered heavy collateral damage. Today they are frantically trying to redeem their global image as the bastion of democracy and reassure allies that they are still the leaders of the free world. If such can happen where institutions are more powerful than individuals, what carnage do you think will befall a country where individuals seemingly exert an inordinate amount of influence over institutions? In the unfortunate event that it does happen this year, I sincerely doubt we would be able to course-correct in this generation – maybe our children or grandchildren will. In a polity where you can be anyone, be a Mitt Romney and have some balls. Grow a spine like Liz Cheney who said, “I’m a conservative Republican. I believe in the principles on which my party is founded. I love its history and I love what our party has stood for but I love my country more.”

Dare to believe in something bigger than bigotry. For once in our lifetimes, we should stand for something that transcends our ethnic, religious and partisan sentiments even if na only you waka come. It’s okay to be the odd one out, to have coconut head and to act with the thoughtfulness of your children. Being a fencist is no longer sexy. This is no time for any type of equivocation – you know, talmbout, “there are very fine people on both sides.” Leadership is modelling at its highest form, stop voting for people who you would neither hire for your private businesses nor allow to mentor your children. Elections have consequences; vote wisely.

“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery” –  Octavia Butler.