Biodun Jeyifo : Why I have never voted and why I am not a religionist

These were the closing sentences of last week’s piece in this series: “As far as I know, no existing bourgeois political party in the country has any program or manifesto remotely dealing with this predatory alliance between politics and religion in our country. And yet it must be engaged; it must be transcended. Perhaps then, a political party of the Left for 2019? My answer to this question is an unequivocal no! This will be our starting point in next week’s conclusion to the series”.

Well then, as promised, I start from that concluding declaration last week. And I say, compatriots, we will need far more than a political party – even of the Left – to powerfully and successfully challenge the deadly, extremely predatory alliance of religion and politics in our country. More pointedly, I say that we will need not a political party but a broad mass movement that combines the best traditions of the anti-capitalist humanism that exist in politics and religion. Since this is the bottom line in this concluding piece in the series, permit me to explain what I have in mind here as clearly and concretely as possible.

What do Nigerians in general feel about politicians and political parties, beyond the common factor that they come from and have their ethnic and regional bases in certain parts of the country? Hasn’t APC, the new ruling party that replaced the old one, the PDP, lost all credibility as a force for change? Isn’t the PDP itself now a spent force beset by insurmountable internal and external fault lines? And the other ruling class parties, the ANPP and APGA? Beyond the certificate of registration that they have from INEC and the dwindling followership that they enjoy in certain parts of the country, who sees any future, any political weight in them? And that other unregistered, nameless ruling “party” rooted in the armed forces – who wants it back in power, who? What of the non-ruling class political parties, especially of the Left? Are they not too small, too insubstantial in membership and visibility? How many blocs and formations of Nigerians know of their existence, know what they stand for, know who their leaders are, and have the confidence that in office they will think and act differently from the bourgeois parties?

I am of course presuming that the reader implicitly recognizes that in asking these questions so tendentiously, I am deliberately suggesting that most people reading this piece share my view that the moral and ideological capital of politics and politicians in our country is at an all-time low in the opinion of most Nigerians. I don’t know if most readers also share my view that the best indicator of the abysmal state of politics and politicians in Nigeria at the present time is our political parties themselves. Dear reader, think of this observation by reflecting on the open secret of how little the President, Muhammadu Buhari, apparently thinks of his own party, the APC. Think, think also of what Olusegun thought of his party, the PDP, of how crudely and disrespectfully he dealt with the party’s national officers, constitution and even other members of party’s Board of Trustees (BOT) of which he was the Chairman.

The upshot of these observations is as clear as it is inescapable: beyond floating them as vote-getting machines, our politicians have such little respect for their own political parties that it is a wonder that at least every four years, they have the effrontery to come and regale us with stories and propositions that these parties can be instruments for a just, civilized and vibrant democratic order. This is as fatuous, as delusionary as the idea that most of the hospitals and health centers in the country are places where sick men, women and children in their millions get proper, life-saving and enhancing treatment! Indeed, this telling analogy between the state of our hospitals and health centers throughout the country and the abysmal state of all our political parties brings me back to the instigating ideas of this series of articles: why I have never voted and why I am not a religionist. What do I mean by this observation?

I don’t think about it consciously but all the same, I know that deep down, I make every effort not to have to go to any hospital clinic or health center. Certainly, the fact that for part of the year I live and work in America helps a lot, but this habit goes all the way back to when I lived and worked entirely at home in Nigeria. On the surface, this may seem to be a universal phenomenon: most women and men everywhere hope fervently that the need for them to have to go to a hospital would be as few as possible. But the Nigerian variation of this common human factor is significant and has been growing bigger and bigger over the years and decades to the extent that, as everyone knows, India has now become the thirty-seventh state of Nigeria – as far as going to hospitals for dear life is concerned. Mercifully, at least so far in my life and in about the four to five months in the year that I am in Nigeria, the need to go to a hospital has been infrequent. However, ultimately, like everyone else in the country, the need does arise for me now and then to go to a hospital and be seen by a specialist or be treated by general, non-specialist staff and/or auxiliaries.

Analogically, this profile of my attitude toward hospitals and health care centers in Nigeria is pretty close to my attitude toward elections, political parties and religion. As I have said repeatedly in this series, I myself don’t vote, have in fact never voted, but I do not sit by in idleness and indifference during elections. As regular or dedicated readers of this column know, in every election cycle that comes around, I participate in vigorous debates about the parties, the candidates and the officials conducting the elections. In some cases, I have been fierce in my advocacy of a candidate and/or a party, but in very limited, very specific instances. One instance that I hope some readers will recollect clearly is the contest between Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola and Iyiola Omisore in Osun state in August 2014. Similarly, in the presidential elections of 2015, I wrote passionately in support of the gallant efforts of my old comrade, Professor Attahiru Jega, then Chairman of INEC, to conduct free, fair and credible elections in the face of the relentless, proto-fascist efforts of Jonathan, Dasuki and the military chiefs either to steal the elections outright for the PDP or postpone the elections indefinitely and rule the country through a duplicitous “government of national unity”.

Though of a completely different order of the investment of my hopes, aspirations and what remains of the idealism of my youth, my attitude toward religion and the church is similar to how I relate to politics and elections: I go to church – about once or twice a year – when important milestones in the lives of very close friends and relatives are consecrated in special worship and celebration. I do confess that sometimes, on such occasions, the power and beauty of hymns and organ music as I used to experience them when I was a religionist, comes back to me in ineffable moments of uplift of psyche and spirit. But no, I am not returning to the church, to religion! Like political parties, like hospitals and health centers, churches, mosques and religion in general play vital, irreplaceable roles in our individual and collective lives. I not only accept this fact, I go further than mere acceptance of unavoidable aspects of life to assert that in fact, politics and political parties and churches, mosques and religion in general can be – and have many, many times been – invaluable reservoirs for the best aspects of the things that make us human, the things that could make us better and more fulfilled Nigerians and Africans. As a matter of fact, it is this conception of politics and religion that lies at the root of why I have never voted and why I stopped being a Christian, a religionist. Let me explain what I mean by this observation and in doing so bring this piece and the series of which it is a part to a close.

For the most part and for most of recorded history, only very rarely do we see politics in its noblest, most honourable and respected aspects: a Nelson Mandela; a Mahatma Gandhi; a Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Euro-American suffragette movement for the rights of women to vote and be voted for; idealist revolutionaries throughout history who, against all the odds, launched waves and tides of revolts against tribal, feudal and modern slave-owners; the nationalist revolts against Western colonialism and imperialism in virtually all parts of the world at stages when their leaders were yet to be compromised and corrupted by taking over the reins of power from the departing Western overlords. At this level, politics is higher and more valuable than any other human institution and practice. I say this, I should add, without having suffered an amnesia about the contending and formidable claims of religion, science, technology, law, art, music, poetry. At its noblest, politics, in my opinion, is higher and more valuable than each and every one of them! With a whisper and not a shout, compatriots, I say that it is this conception of politics that has kept me from ever voting or be voted for in electoral politics in our country or any other country in the world.

I do not need to say as much about religion and the role it can and has played in directing the affairs of our humankind toward the best part of our nature. One role, one achievement that is not often remembered is the role that religion played for centuries in the advancement of knowledge and human understanding, both of who we are and our physical and intergalactic environment. Perhaps the most moving and astonishing aspect of this story is the moment when, after a period of great recalcitrance and obstructionism, religion gracefully stepped aside and allowed science to flourish unimpeded, even if this was not without a terrible struggle!

Religion has also sometimes been a powerful ally of the oppressed, the forgotten, the wretched of the earth: liberation theology and its activist priests in Latin America; the Revd. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Baptists of the Southern Leadership Christian Conference (SLCC) in America; the Anglican Church under Archbishop Desmond Tutu in apartheid South Africa.

Can politics and religion in Nigeria at the present time be brought closer to these sorts of historic and exemplary developments. I think so and, indeed, I hope so! But is any of the existing political parties of the Left positioned to be the catalyst for this development? I don’t think so. In that case, why not create a new party from the existing ones and put everything we have in it? I disagree. What is needed now, I think, is a mass movement or, rather, the recreation of movements in this country that have enabled progressive, left-leaning parties and candidates to win and win big. In one case, the victories were at the level of the state governments of Kaduna and Kano, two of the most politically influential states in the country. In another case – June 12, 1993 – the victory was at the highest level of the political order. In every one of these and other cases, the critical factor was not the parties; it was the mass movement, compatriots. This mass movement for justice, genuine unity and peace: we do not have to wait for 2019 for it; and beyond that date, we will still need it!

The series is now concluded. But in a next week’s column and under a new title, I will briefly address crucial theoretical, ideological and historical issues pertaining to the relationship between mass movements and political parties of the Left, especially in our country and our region of the world.