2023 election guide: Do not vote fluctuating desperados

It is barely a year to the general elections slated for February 2023 by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). As the campaign and pre-election year is about to fall in place in less than three weeks, arrangements are believed to be in top gear by all sorts of intending aspirants to display their ‘wares’ […]

It is barely a year to the general elections slated for February 2023 by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). As the campaign and pre-election year is about to fall in place in less than three weeks, arrangements are believed to be in top gear by all sorts of intending aspirants to display their ‘wares’ to woo prospective ‘buyers’.

The one-million dollar question from us, the potential ‘customers’ of such ‘wares’, is: How can we spot authentic and qualitative goods from fake and substandard ones?  In other words, how can the voters fish out a ‘good’ candidate among the ‘bad’ and the ‘ugly’?

There are many traits exhibited by power-seekers, both in formal (traditional politics) and informal (groups, unions and associations) settings that easily give them away. Voting such candidates will be a ‘disaster-in-waiting’. One of the red flags every voter should watch out from candidates is desperation for power by constantly changing political parties whenever their desire to clinch a ticket under the platform of a particular party is not fulfilled. These are the “fluctuating desperados’’.

Those are power-seekers who publicly claim they want to serve the electorate, but if voted, they will end up serving themselves, their wives, children and mistresses. Such kind of politicians can be in party ‘A’ today, but if they realize their narcissistic and egocentric agenda will not be achieved in that party, they will shamelessly defect to party ‘B’, which they previously castigated and characterized as ‘evil’.

The saddest part of this shameful act of indiscriminate cross-carpeting is, the person who was in party ‘A’ during the 2015 elections and defected to party ‘B’ in 2019 and verbally denigrated and downgraded his former party will now return to the same party he bashed in the past amid fanfare and cheering!

From ideological perspective, political parties are different from one another. Each and every party must be categorized either as ‘left’, ‘right’, or ‘centre’, no fourth alternative. Based on this, how can a person who identified himself as a member of a right wing party, whose manifesto says the ‘cup is half full,’ for example, pitch his tent with a leftist party which believed in its manifestos that the ‘cup is half empty’ and after some time he goes back to his former belief?

Why one will keep fluctuating, switching from one political party to another just like the Nigerian-based telecommunication companies which are notorious for weak signals and poor service delivery?

The succour in all this lies in knowing that there are decent, ideologically- and morally-sound politicians out there who, at one time or another, served their people diligently and led by example. Such politicians danced their feats without desperation and fluctuations.

In the upcoming elections, vote wisely and peacefully, please.

Farouk Isa Musa lives in Kano