When billionaire Donald Trump took the plunge to contest for United States presidency in June, last year, few people gave him an iceberg’s chance in a fiery forge to secure the Republican Party nomination.
Today, he is the presumptive nominee of that party for the presidential poll holding in November. And he is well within a striking chance of the world’s most powerful office. The real estate mogul and TV reality star has effectively metamorphosed from a seeming comical act to a potential President-in-Waiting, and he owes the feat to American voters who propelled his aspiration and batted down all hurdles within the Republican Party establishment on his path to victory.
Trump’s example shows how unassailable voter power can be in electoral aspirations. It was on that power that the brash billionaire rode to edge out all rivals in a crowded field of 16 contenders for the Republican ticket. And he made that accomplishment despite his fiercely divisive rhetoric and a deliberately crafted persona of political incorrectness that scandalised even the most radical in the American political class.
Obviously knowing where to locate his support base, namely with voters, Trump ran against the grain of electoral conventions and positioned himself as a brutally frank outsider taking on the establishment brand of politics, which not a few Americans perceived as gridlocked and short-ended on candour anyway. He made a virtue of being a non-politician in politics.
Expectedly, he captured the fancy of voters who disliked the establishment norms and were angry at Washington’s way of doing things.
So fiercely loyal were Trump’s supporters that his tantrums and relentlessly controversial rhetoric did nothing to diminish his following. The man once boasted that he could stand on New York’s Fifth Avenue and blind-shoot at someone, and it would not dent his poll rating in the least. He also never fought shy of blowing his own trumpet: once describing himself as the “most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far,” and pointing out even that he owns a “Gucci store that’s worth more than (his vocal Republican critic and former presidential nominee, Mitt) Romney.” Trump told all who cared to listen up that he is very successful as a businessman, flaunting a whopping $8.7 billion as his net worth, and adding: “That’s the kind of thinking our country needs.” He asserted that his wealth and successful business career not only qualified him to be president, “I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.”
Frontliners in the Republican Party had not hidden their aversion for Mr. Trump, but they did that at their peril, and it was not sufficient to arrest his political momentum anyway. Fellow contenders for the party’s ticket railed at his divisive rhetoric, only to end up buckling out of the race in turns and clearing the field for his controversial candidature. The mogul’s most serious challenger, Ted Cruz, threw in the towel after the Indiana primary recently where he said he had laid all out on the field, without success in convincing voters not to go with Trump. He could only wish the Republican Party an assured future in political power. Notable leaders like Mr. Romney stood up to be counted in open opposition to Trump, but it was of little effect against the businessman whose candidature had assumed such a momentum with voters that could not be restrained. In any event, Trump had the figures stacked in his favour. The number of people that have cast their ballots for Trump is higher than the number of people who cast ballots for Romney who was 2012 Grand Old Party (GOP) – i.e., Republican – nominee, according to International Business Times calculations. Through Super Tuesday, Trump had about 3.37 million total votes. Romney at that point in 2012 had 3.28 million ballots — even though seven more states had voted. It has also been established that more Republicans have turned out to vote in the current state primaries than usual. Pew Research Center reported that through the first 12 primaries, GOP turnout had included 17.3 percent of eligible voters. In 2012, it was 9.8 percent.
Even after ‘The Trump’ emerged as presumptive nominee, Congress Speaker, Paul Ryan, spoke out that he was not yet up to endorsing him for the ticket; but the billionaire brandished voter support to threaten unseating Ryan as chairman of the Republican National Convention in July. Apparently conscious of the limitation of their individual relevance against voter power, the Republican chiefs that were opposed to Trump lately locked down in rapprochement with him, towards rallying the party behind his candidature. After truce parleys in Washington, they announced that there were yet more grounds to cover, but did not dare foreclose a deal to support the nominee.
Trump’s playbook on voter power is actually a universally applicable rule. Politicians seeking electoral office should best devote their energy to rallying voters after their cause and cultivate those voters’ steadfast support, even against the run of establishment forces – including fraudulent election managers – that may be arrayed in opposition to them.
But it would seem many politicians here in Nigeria operate by a different rule. That is what could explain the alleged N23billion poll bribery plot in which former Petroleum Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke has been named. Besides the allegation that slush funds were shared to political chieftains and party centres ahead of the 2015 presidential election, the former minister is said to have also issued huge sums as bribes for officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to falsify the election results. I do not intend to raise a mob jury here against the former minister and all others that have been named in the scandal, in preemption of what the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is able to prove before the courts. When proved, anyone found guilty as alleged should be made to pay the price for his or her malfeasance. But even the mere narrative evidences the mindset of the average Nigerian politician in the contest for political power.
The common practice code among our political elite suggests that they count voters least in their calculations for winning political offices.
That must be why electioneering campaigns are not driven by well thought-out manifestoes or clearly defined programmes, but by vacuous sloganeering and parades of rented crowds and unruly mobs. Political parties and candidates demonstrate strength, neither by superiority of ideas nor better appeal to the electorate, but by the quantum of brute force they could muster and deploy in intimidation of opponents. In many cases, you hardly knew what a political office seeker offered different from other contenders for the same office, which ordinarily should be left to voters to make an intelligent choice from. Rather, politicians often deploy violence to coerce voters to either vote or stay away from voting – towards achieving a determined outcome. Surely, these can’t be legitimate building blocks of true democracy!
The pending allegation against the former Petroleum Minister indicates another dimension of the ills of our electoral system: politicians seek to suborn poll officials against the very ethic of their constitutional duty. Officials who give in, of course, do so at their own peril, and must be made to face the law; but they certainly can be helped if they were not subjected to needless pressure with such offers. Former Chairman of INEC, Professor Attahiru Jega, had occasion to berate the
tendency in a presentation he made at a Roundtable Conference organised by the National Institute for Legislative Studies of the National Assembly in November 2012. Among the many variables he listed as characterising political parties and elections in Nigeria, Jega said: “There is the exhibition of corrupt and corrupting tendencies, deliberately promoted or instigated by the political parties…It is incredible the amount of money that is budgeted.
Political parties budget funds in terms of how much money is to be given to security agencies, how much is to be given to INEC or electoral officials and so on. Really, this is a very serious challenge for deepening democracy in our country. Of course, people should resist being induced; and when people resist, all sorts of other tendencies come up. It is very important through legislation, through behavioural changes and through the activities of civil society organizations, that we curb this exhibition of corrupt and corrupting tendencies in the electoral process.”
He added, among other things: “Again, it is not just a matter of cutting corners and abuse of due process and violation of laws and procedures, there is also clearly what I call exhibition of uncivil conduct. There is terrible lack of civility in the ways in which political parties operate and relate – either with one another or with other stakeholders in the political process. If we learn from the experiences of other countries, we can see that civility is the underpinning principle in democratic conduct – whether it be in elections or in legislative activities, or in the executive governance process. When the process is characterized by lack of civility and insensitivity, then, obviously, this results in unnecessary tension, even unnecessary conflicts.”
In other words, the political culture in our clime needs to become a lot more civil and issue-oriented, with politicians according voters the high value twhey deserve in determining who gets entrusted with political office.
Perhaps here is a good opportunity to recall that nearly the most challenging experience of the conduct of the 2015 elections was a fierce campaign by some faceless political support group to discredit the former INEC Chairman ahead of the polls. Full-page adverts were serially placed in national and regional dailies – sometimes in more than a dozen newspapers daily, and for days on end – caricaturing the electoral chief and aggressively impugning his credibility. It was suspected that this was a preemptive plot to disable him from presiding over the conduct of the elections, given his reputation for uncompromising integrity. Well, political adverts don’t come cheap – not the least so at the height of an election season. Enormous funds must have been committed to prosecuting that campaign by its sponsors, who apparently preferred such a strategy to courting the support of voters. I think it would really be enlightening to know where the money came from, and who was doing the spending, just in case that might point to another slush funding scheme.
• Mr. Idowu, former chief sub-editor of The Guardian Newspaper, a former senior Editor at The Nation and former Chief Press Secretary to INEC Chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega, is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of The New Diplomat.
Trump’s example shows how unassailable voter power can be in electoral aspirations. It was on that power that the brash billionaire rode to edge out all rivals in a crowded field of 16 contenders for the Republican ticket. And he made that accomplishment despite his fiercely divisive rhetoric and a deliberately crafted persona of political incorrectness that scandalised even the most radical in the American political class.
Obviously knowing where to locate his support base, namely with voters, Trump ran against the grain of electoral conventions and positioned himself as a brutally frank outsider taking on the establishment brand of politics, which not a few Americans perceived as gridlocked and short-ended on candour anyway. He made a virtue of being a non-politician in politics.
Expectedly, he captured the fancy of voters who disliked the establishment norms and were angry at Washington’s way of doing things.
So fiercely loyal were Trump’s supporters that his tantrums and relentlessly controversial rhetoric did nothing to diminish his following. The man once boasted that he could stand on New York’s Fifth Avenue and blind-shoot at someone, and it would not dent his poll rating in the least. He also never fought shy of blowing his own trumpet: once describing himself as the “most successful person ever to run for the presidency, by far,” and pointing out even that he owns a “Gucci store that’s worth more than (his vocal Republican critic and former presidential nominee, Mitt) Romney.” Trump told all who cared to listen up that he is very successful as a businessman, flaunting a whopping $8.7 billion as his net worth, and adding: “That’s the kind of thinking our country needs.” He asserted that his wealth and successful business career not only qualified him to be president, “I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created.”
Frontliners in the Republican Party had not hidden their aversion for Mr. Trump, but they did that at their peril, and it was not sufficient to arrest his political momentum anyway. Fellow contenders for the party’s ticket railed at his divisive rhetoric, only to end up buckling out of the race in turns and clearing the field for his controversial candidature. The mogul’s most serious challenger, Ted Cruz, threw in the towel after the Indiana primary recently where he said he had laid all out on the field, without success in convincing voters not to go with Trump. He could only wish the Republican Party an assured future in political power. Notable leaders like Mr. Romney stood up to be counted in open opposition to Trump, but it was of little effect against the businessman whose candidature had assumed such a momentum with voters that could not be restrained. In any event, Trump had the figures stacked in his favour. The number of people that have cast their ballots for Trump is higher than the number of people who cast ballots for Romney who was 2012 Grand Old Party (GOP) – i.e., Republican – nominee, according to International Business Times calculations. Through Super Tuesday, Trump had about 3.37 million total votes. Romney at that point in 2012 had 3.28 million ballots — even though seven more states had voted. It has also been established that more Republicans have turned out to vote in the current state primaries than usual. Pew Research Center reported that through the first 12 primaries, GOP turnout had included 17.3 percent of eligible voters. In 2012, it was 9.8 percent.
Even after ‘The Trump’ emerged as presumptive nominee, Congress Speaker, Paul Ryan, spoke out that he was not yet up to endorsing him for the ticket; but the billionaire brandished voter support to threaten unseating Ryan as chairman of the Republican National Convention in July. Apparently conscious of the limitation of their individual relevance against voter power, the Republican chiefs that were opposed to Trump lately locked down in rapprochement with him, towards rallying the party behind his candidature. After truce parleys in Washington, they announced that there were yet more grounds to cover, but did not dare foreclose a deal to support the nominee.
Trump’s playbook on voter power is actually a universally applicable rule. Politicians seeking electoral office should best devote their energy to rallying voters after their cause and cultivate those voters’ steadfast support, even against the run of establishment forces – including fraudulent election managers – that may be arrayed in opposition to them.
But it would seem many politicians here in Nigeria operate by a different rule. That is what could explain the alleged N23billion poll bribery plot in which former Petroleum Minister Diezani Alison-Madueke has been named. Besides the allegation that slush funds were shared to political chieftains and party centres ahead of the 2015 presidential election, the former minister is said to have also issued huge sums as bribes for officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to falsify the election results. I do not intend to raise a mob jury here against the former minister and all others that have been named in the scandal, in preemption of what the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is able to prove before the courts. When proved, anyone found guilty as alleged should be made to pay the price for his or her malfeasance. But even the mere narrative evidences the mindset of the average Nigerian politician in the contest for political power.
The common practice code among our political elite suggests that they count voters least in their calculations for winning political offices.
That must be why electioneering campaigns are not driven by well thought-out manifestoes or clearly defined programmes, but by vacuous sloganeering and parades of rented crowds and unruly mobs. Political parties and candidates demonstrate strength, neither by superiority of ideas nor better appeal to the electorate, but by the quantum of brute force they could muster and deploy in intimidation of opponents. In many cases, you hardly knew what a political office seeker offered different from other contenders for the same office, which ordinarily should be left to voters to make an intelligent choice from. Rather, politicians often deploy violence to coerce voters to either vote or stay away from voting – towards achieving a determined outcome. Surely, these can’t be legitimate building blocks of true democracy!
The pending allegation against the former Petroleum Minister indicates another dimension of the ills of our electoral system: politicians seek to suborn poll officials against the very ethic of their constitutional duty. Officials who give in, of course, do so at their own peril, and must be made to face the law; but they certainly can be helped if they were not subjected to needless pressure with such offers. Former Chairman of INEC, Professor Attahiru Jega, had occasion to berate the
tendency in a presentation he made at a Roundtable Conference organised by the National Institute for Legislative Studies of the National Assembly in November 2012. Among the many variables he listed as characterising political parties and elections in Nigeria, Jega said: “There is the exhibition of corrupt and corrupting tendencies, deliberately promoted or instigated by the political parties…It is incredible the amount of money that is budgeted.
Political parties budget funds in terms of how much money is to be given to security agencies, how much is to be given to INEC or electoral officials and so on. Really, this is a very serious challenge for deepening democracy in our country. Of course, people should resist being induced; and when people resist, all sorts of other tendencies come up. It is very important through legislation, through behavioural changes and through the activities of civil society organizations, that we curb this exhibition of corrupt and corrupting tendencies in the electoral process.”
He added, among other things: “Again, it is not just a matter of cutting corners and abuse of due process and violation of laws and procedures, there is also clearly what I call exhibition of uncivil conduct. There is terrible lack of civility in the ways in which political parties operate and relate – either with one another or with other stakeholders in the political process. If we learn from the experiences of other countries, we can see that civility is the underpinning principle in democratic conduct – whether it be in elections or in legislative activities, or in the executive governance process. When the process is characterized by lack of civility and insensitivity, then, obviously, this results in unnecessary tension, even unnecessary conflicts.”
In other words, the political culture in our clime needs to become a lot more civil and issue-oriented, with politicians according voters the high value twhey deserve in determining who gets entrusted with political office.
Perhaps here is a good opportunity to recall that nearly the most challenging experience of the conduct of the 2015 elections was a fierce campaign by some faceless political support group to discredit the former INEC Chairman ahead of the polls. Full-page adverts were serially placed in national and regional dailies – sometimes in more than a dozen newspapers daily, and for days on end – caricaturing the electoral chief and aggressively impugning his credibility. It was suspected that this was a preemptive plot to disable him from presiding over the conduct of the elections, given his reputation for uncompromising integrity. Well, political adverts don’t come cheap – not the least so at the height of an election season. Enormous funds must have been committed to prosecuting that campaign by its sponsors, who apparently preferred such a strategy to courting the support of voters. I think it would really be enlightening to know where the money came from, and who was doing the spending, just in case that might point to another slush funding scheme.
• Mr. Idowu, former chief sub-editor of The Guardian Newspaper, a former senior Editor at The Nation and former Chief Press Secretary to INEC Chairman, Prof. Attahiru Jega, is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of The New Diplomat.
