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Rights versus responsibilities: Why politicians are not to blame

Rights versus responsibilities Why politicians are not to blame

ALMOST every Nigerian you run into is lamenting the state of affairs of our nation. Nothing is working, we often say. Frankly, we are never far away from the truth when we say such things. But how is it that we are so familiar with all our fundamental societal problems yet we have no idea how to fix them. Oh, my bad! We do have ideas, but they are cache stored up in random access memory. Ideas are not equivalent to solutions, they are just like those fleeting daydreams of billions of dollars we always have on a rather hot afternoon. One of the foremost minds in 20th-century theatre, Bertolt Brecht, famously said: “The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest while confessing he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies”. You see, we have talked so much about our rights and privileges —which are mandatory and to be respected— that we have forgotten our sociopolitical responsibility altogether. This is why that quote from Brecht seems offensive and I am sure it has ignited a strong (hopefully positive) emotion within you.

I must first apologize if you find Mr Brecht’s words harsh, I had to learn the hard way too. There is no falsehood in his words and that is what is of higher importance to us. As many people as we can find unhappy with where we fear the country is headed, we can also see that a majority of people don’t care much about politics and government. Most of us have become very critical and cynical towards government but there is a shocking political knowledge gap in our communities. Just before I set out to write this piece on responsibilities, I had a chat about our local government with a few people of my age group and my parents’ age group. Millennials are awesome in a lot of things but they are really awful at politics. 4 out of 5 persons between the ages of 20 and 30 don’t know who their local government chairman is (5 out of 5 in my friend’s neighbourhood in Ejigbo). The older, male, population is more acquainted with the political representatives. However, most women seemed not to care much about it at all. There are so many people who do not even know the supposed popular candidates they apparently voted for in the previous election. This is perhaps the most ironic and absurd discovery I have been let in on in the last couple of days. How can one truly care to contact an unknown representative, let alone demand their constitutional rights as a citizen living in a particular constituency with a stranger at the helm of affairs? This is obviously the reason behind our much mumbling and less probing. You cannot probe who you do not know.

Most of us are not only ignorant of who our councillors, state representatives, and federal representatives are, we also don’t know how our government is set up or the duties of each representative at several levels of government. Terms such as the exclusive list, impeachment, commissioning, bill, constituency, and recall are still very unclear to a large extent to the majority of our people. There are misunderstandings about the functions of the different arms of government and the different levels of government too. This dearth of knowledge in the politics and government of one’s nation is particularly dangerous, it is also the reason why people are prone to nagging without coming up with a solution or a counteracting approach to their failing representatives. You cannot control or remedy what you don’t know. It is a commonsensical rule to seek and find what has gone wrong with a machine before fixing it but when we are unaware of how the machine works in the first place how do we fix it? This is the question.

We are largely responsible for ourselves even in a sociopolitical way. In order not to be the sort of illiterate Bertolt Brecht spoke of, we must shun political apathy even when we are not directly involved in partisan politics. You don’t have to be a member of any political party before you care about how government works and how our politics is affecting it. Obviously, not everyone must be a party member. Either way, you must not be lukewarm, you must take responsibility too. “The punishment for not participating in politics is the fact that we will be ruled by fools”, the words of Plato. Do not fall into this group of ‘non participants’, and if you are already with this group, get out of there as soon as possible. Remember, you can have all the right ideas but they will remain a wishful dream if you don’t take action. Now is the right time to set your solutions to political conundrums in motion.

We have talked so much and presented fine criticisms about how our government is looking like a failed system, but how well do we know this system? It is hard to imagine that we know so much about what has gone wrong, have all the right antidotes, yet watch the decay get worse. We can make an argument for Machiavellian politicians in a dominance political hierarchy who abuse power in order to have infinite immunity, but that will not get us far —the politicians can do just as much if the majority of citizens are really on their case. If we don’t collectively decide to get seriously involved in actual actions, those ideas and political insights we claim to have will perish just like some of those ineffective social media raves. One thing we can learn from social media is to put words to work. That was how #EndSARS became relevant and that is how we can bring real change this time around. We have several rights as citizens under the law, and we are absolutely entitled to them, but they will eventually be taken away from us if we don’t take up our responsibility to defend them in the first place. You choose: Do we leave our dear country to perish in the hands of incorrigible kleptomaniacs? Or, do we become more responsible citizens who are well educated and proactive enough to hold their representatives accountable for their actions in public office?