Democracy and the tyranny of sentiment — by Bamidele Johnson
One of the more durable lies we tell ourselves about democracy is that it naturally rewards competence. It sounds lovely, but it ends up in smithereens the moment it comes into contact with reality.
Whatever we think or say, elections are not IQ tests, but emotional brawls conducted with ballot papers, sometimes with broken bottles and machetes. That is the type we are used to.
In elections, tribe matters. A lot. Religion matters. Big time, too. Familiarity matters. People vote for the fella who speaks their language, sprays money at their weddings, attends their funerals, dances badly but vigorously at their festivals and, more crucially, abuses the people they dislike with Bello Turji-level wantonness. Some vote out of hope. Others do out of fear. Many also vote just to protect the source of their daily “chop”.
Does competence matter? Like hell, it does. Decisive? C’mon. If competence alone determined electoral outcomes, half the political class would struggle to win elections on their streets.
What makes the whole thing more amusing is the way many define “competence” through the fog of their own sentiments and then assume everybody else must accept that definition as gospel.
They imagine they are making icy rational calculations. while others, whose education and morality are questioned, are voting emotionally. Usually, this fantasy is most visible in the gold-plated contempt shown towards the underclasses, whose voting choices are dismissed as ignorant, transactional or induced by stomach infrastructure.
Somehow, the banker voting because “our son must spend eight years,” the graduate voting because “our region cannot lose power,” the activist voting because a candidate provides emotional gratification on TV and the market woman voting for rice, cash or both are all responding to the same basic human software composed of fear, loyalty, appetite, identity, self-interest and emotion. The packaging differs, but the underlying impulses are most often identical.
Democracy can be brutally humbling that way. My vote acquires no additional constitutional weight because I can quote Montesquieu and Rousseau after a few glasses of cognac and bucket meat. Professor Wole Soyinka’s vote counts as one as that of Indaboski. So does that of Isikilu, the vulcaniser. I recently discovered that the name is Hizqeel. Yoruba people are going nowhere near Al-jannat.
There is no weighted voting system in which emotional decisions by the educated are upgraded into informed civic participation, while emotional decisions by the poor are downgraded into medieval ignorance. A dazzlingly capable candidate can, therefore, lose comfortably to an outstanding mediocrity who simply understands sentiment better. A man with the administrative competence of Lee Kuan Yew can be politically garrotted by an Ortom, an Aregbesola, a Theodore Orji, an Okezie Ikpeazu or a Saminu Turaki. Democracy does not guarantee victory for the best candidate. It guarantees victory for the most electorally attractive candidate. The gap between those two things is wider than the Lagos Lagoon and often smells worse.
It is exactly why electorates endlessly lament bad governance while repeatedly rewarding the same habits, the same rhetoric and the same manipulations at the ballot box. I doubt that the ballot paper was invented as a certificate of competence. Perhaps unwillingly, it was created as a mirror reflecting the fears, prejudices, appetites, loyalties and vanities of society itself. Politics is called partisan for a reason.
Did I think Awolowo would have made a better president than Shagari? Absolutely. To the enduring chagrin of my late dad, who was Egbe Onile-inclined. NPN was Egbe Onile in Yorubaland. Did I think Awolowo won the 1979 and 1983 elections? No. I did not then and even now.
NYSC cured me of whatever romantic illusions remained. If the opinions of many northerners I met reflected broader northern sentiment at the time, Awolowo never had a prayer. The region’s opinion clergy had spent years presenting him not merely as a political opponent but as a threat to an entire social order.
The free education he championed carried little emotional weight there. The North already had free education of its own sort and was hardly aflame with passion for Western education anyway. There is a wide gulf between social aspirations there and down south.
More importantly, Awolowo was no admirer of feudal arrangements. That mattered far more viscerally than brilliance, discipline or administrative depth. His intellect could not overcome the perception that he was hostile to the North’s preferred socio-political structure. There you have democracy’s awkward truth in its Hings singlet and pants. People do not always vote for who is best. They vote for who feels safest, closest, most familiar, most protective of their identity or most emotionally satisfying.
Voters are no machines, but humans dragging centuries of tribe, fear, memory, hunger, resentment and sentiment into a polling booth and pretending, for a moment, that they arrived there guided purely by reason. Politics is emotional. Pretending otherwise is comedy.
