The So-called Plateau State Local Government Elections -By Ayubei Majidadi

The local government elections in Plateau state was a lackluster. The elections took place on Saturday 9th of October without PDP participating, the most formidable party in the state . Few voters attended the polling stations, but, paradoxically, huge votes were recorded. Won all the seventeen local governments by a large margin, APC remains exclusively the party that calls the shot in the state.

It was not the first time that local government elections were mired with inconsistencies in Plateau, but allowing this kind of trend to keep on happening without check will mar or rather kill our fragile democracy. Before the election, a week to the polls, the PDP was barred from participating in the local polls on the ground that the party is operating in interregnum at the national level. This single verdict has put a wedge under our democracy. Suppressed the opposition by barring them from participating in the elections, the Apc led government has systematically disenfranchised the members of the public to cast their votes, not to talk of the issue of candidates imposition the party made prior to the elections. The stories going round from the polling stations, again, were not good to hear in that the party agents and the electoral officers were in one way or the other abettors in the tortuous elections. Since PDP was barred from participating in the election, it looks like a party of friends and APC plays the host.

As a rule of thumb, our justice system needs a serious rejiggling. Allegedly severed from state government, the courts have to be very serious in administrating justice to the public. The APC led government, from its inception , touted that it will overhaul our justice system. But what transpired in Plateau state categorically belied the notion espoused by this government—indirectly messing around with the system— and as if the touted claim was a ruse.

As the parties supreme leaders in their various states, governors wield immense influence in determining the leadership of their parties and who should emerge as candidate in the local elections. Sometimes the influence is not restricted to their party alone, it transcends to any party the governors fear could affect their success in the elections. Come hell or high water their favorite candidates must emerge the winners of the local elections. Candidates with personal link to the governors have an excellent chance of becoming chairmen or councillors. It follows that , as the result of this kind of political calculations, we are in for the typecasting of similar incompetent leaders that are still destroying our aspirations as a nation. To break away from this political skulduggery, we need to change our politics from the grassroots; inversion, from bottom to top.

Majority of the APC members were disaffected with the arrangement made from above, in the previously concluded Plateau state local government elections. A fierce competition will make the party and the government to disburse money for campaigns since they would face strong enemy at polling stations. But they are afraid because people are fed up with the government. And this is the only way the APC members at the local level could make for their struggles. The ousting of PDP in the elections is a cog on the wheel of their politicking. As the way of doing elections in Nigeria, local government excos and their ward counterparts usually look up to elections for monetary compensation, though a paltry amount.

Unlike the national polls, local government elections are not given due consideration. I sometimes wonder whether we have a second class category of elections, which is devoid of attention from the public and the authorities, in the kind of democracy we are practicing. As if democracy is not a people’s mandate to select their leaders themselves. As if it is the other way round, in regards to the local government elections, government of governors by governors and for governors’ families and friends. Since they, like the ancient kingmakers in their empires, are the ones who appoint chairmen and councillors in their states.

It should not escape our attention that these set of leaders who are imposed on the people are more closer to them than the governors or the legislators at he state or the federal level.

1. In order to engage the people at the grassroot, we need a participatory government so as to uproot the cancerous leadership problems we are bedeviled with. If the common people at the bottom of the government can elect their leaders by themselves without undue interference from the top echelon, they have themselves responsible for the failure and the success of their local governments.
   The local government elections are left at the mercy of the state governors. The reason for doing that is dubious insofar as democracy is concern. We know how violent this is wont. Sometimes around 2009 Ibrahim Shekarau, former Kano state governor, made a mistake of imposing his candidates in all of the forty four local governments in Kano state , and the result was a backlash from the members of the public, culminating to bloody clashes between security forces and the citizens of the state; some local government secretariats were even torched down as the result. Plateau State has suffered immensely from leadership indiscretion and bad governance. To disallow PDP to participate in the previous elections was a political miscalculation and a gamble well played with people’s lives.
   Comes 2023 APC expects to go to the polls without the PDP to participate in the governorship election. The local government elections was a litmus test and it went smoothly,hitchfree .But how does that augur well with the relative peace the state is enjoying? Citizens of Plateau state are not satisfied with the APC led government way of doing things in the state. And it seems that the opposition party,which the people are looking up to, are compromised. A polyglot state, Plateau requires a government that can unify its people, bind them under the same banner , and at the same time it needs a strong opposition to keep the government in equilibrium.