A veteran broadcaster, sociologist, lawyer, administrator and former Director General, Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), Prof. Tonnie Iredia, has urged the Nigerian electorate not to tie their votes to political parties but candidates with the potential to deliver the dividend of democracy to them. In this interview with BRIDGET CHIEDU ONOCHIE, Iredia insisted that the competence of each candidate is crucial in elections. He also spoke about some political developments in Edo State ahead of the forthcoming governorship election in the state.

In your recent public statement, you faulted the campaign process in Nigeria, especially with regards to Edo and Ondo states governorship elections slated for September and November respectively. What exactly did you perceive wrong about the process that you would want to be corrected?
Well, I am not really sure whether this subject is restricted to the two states. In most states in this country, when an election is coming, they wear a toga of war rather than a jersey of a game. But election is a game; somebody wins and somebody loses. It is not a war and you don’t need to kill in order to win.

We have still not moved away from that old system and it really bothers those of us who have covered elections as journalists for the last four decades in this country. The way politicians do their things can be very astonishing and frightening. I am not able to see the reason we cannot have campaigns that are based on issues. Nigeria has developed to a level where we should no longer be doing that. We cannot be doing campaigns that are based on personal and intemperate and abusive language, you know.

It is not just Edo State, just that Edo State’s election is the next one and I am sure that we are going to have a repeat of that in Ondo, which comes immediately next. It is a political culture that has not changed in Nigeria. And it is a culture we need to do quite a lot about in order for us to be seen to be having a semblance of what election really means. That is one of the issues.

The second issue really has to do with the attitude and posture of the gladiators. If you look at Edo 2024, you will see that the most vocal persons are not the candidates. So, what are they vocal about? Why are they making noise? They are not the ones we want to elect. They are never going to be in office by virtue of their noise. What is the purpose of their own noise? Why do they want to drown the opportunity we have for hearing what the candidates want to do for us? And that is the one I find difficult to understand. I am the candidate but somebody else is speaking on my behalf. I am not deaf; I am not dumb but I am not just speaking. What is the purpose of noise making? Is it to show that he is a rascal or what? Why must rascality garnish our political endeavours? That is what I find difficult to understand. So, I don’t like that.

Then, there is the issue of lack of a level playing field where the government of the day, be it federal or state, uses its powerful organs to stop opponents from campaigning. You see, the problem I have with that is that while it looks as if they are disturbing their opponents, they are actually short-changing the electorate. By not allowing those other people to speak, we don’t know what they want to give to us. So, we are just going to vote blindly because one powerful person is not allowing the other person to tell us what he will do. And if he had allowed him, probably all of us would have preferred that person. So, you just block us by being temperamental and aggressive. It doesn’t help. If the person that will be governor is supposed to be the choice of the people, you must let the people make the choice. Not to talk about personal attacks and insults – ‘this one doesn’t have a wife, that one doesn’t have a child’; things like that. They don’t arise; we don’t need them; they don’t help and what does not help does not come into show. There is absolutely no need for them.

So, those are some of the issues that I thought of and I said, “look, let us stop this pedestrian approach to elections in which we make noise, nobody hears what the other person is saying and we can never see the manifestos; when a person talks about his manifesto, we don’t have opportunity to find out from him how he intends to implement that manifesto.” So, what we hear are just promises but how those promises would be fulfilled, what is put on ground to show that such promises will see the light of day are never shown to us.

You tried to compare some governors, who had performed creditably well with homeboys. In this circumstance, how would you advise Edo people to vote in the coming governorship election? What should be their considerations for voting?
I think that all of them are good. There is nothing wrong in being a homeboy but homeboy must not be narrowly defined. Homeboy does not mean somebody who lives in Edo. Somebody who is of Edo origin is a homeboy. You have to live in Edo before you can be an Edo person. Your father, your mother are Edo people and you live in Lagos or you live in Port Harcourt or anywhere else, it doesn’t stop you from being an Edo person. But I think the point they are trying to make with this Edo boy thing is that they are talking about those who are familiar with the communities and therefore, know what the communities lack. Anybody that wants to be governor ought to know what communities lack. My position is simple; anybody of Edo origin is a homeboy. We don’t need to use that kind of grammatical calculation to say that somebody is not a homeboy. I don’t agree with that.

Secondly, being a homeboy as they try to put it does not confer on anybody capacity that the person does not have. You need to have capacity whether you are a home or away boy. Being a home boy does not guarantee performance. It is an advantage. No problem because it means the person is familiar with the terrain. That is the point but that does not give you the capacity you don’t have. You need to have capacity to do certain things, not just knowledge of what is missing. Do you get what I am trying to say?

So, for me, I think they do those things just to give an impression to the public that their party is popular by making a lot of noise. As you know, this rented crowd is still there. A lot of people say, “if you see the crowd that was at one location, it was wonderful.” I say, look, listen, that same crowd was at another location another day. These same people. So, this is election time and some people are using it to garner some little money here and there, which they never got before. At the end of the election period, they won’t see anything again. So, you can’t really blame those people who go to these rallies because of the little handouts they get from the rallies. But that is not a basis for saying that a party is popular or that a popular party has a popular candidate and I think people must know the difference.

Nigeria of today, as a developing society, must not foolishly tie itself to a political party. The competence of each candidate is crucial. If a candidate is not good, no matter how popular his party is, he is not good. If a candidate is good, no matter how unpopular his party is, the candidate is good; it is as simple as that. That is why you are talking about track record. What have you done before that can make us believe that you can do this or do better? I mean, those are issues. You cannot wave away the track record. It is very important. But all those party things where you run up and down don’t mean anything to me. Let the candidates tell us what they want to do, how they want to do them and when they want to do them. These three things matter. If we know them, we will say, “okay, this is likely going to happen” so that by the time you become governor and you are pulling away from that promise, we will say; you cannot get away with it. But if you made a general promise, nobody holds you to it, nobody asks you to explain anything, nobody asks you to tell us when, where and how.  But unfortunately, they will get away with it. Yes, because nobody was able to ask them where, when and how.

And that is the point we are making now, that the campaigns are missing it again. They are not telling us the real ingredients of campaigning. They are telling us promises that are neither here nor there, that anybody can explain. I can say that I am going to build 75 hospitals or 100 hospitals but if I put down when, where and how, and what the sources are, the ideas I am putting forward and how it was done somewhere before that I was part of, then you see the thing becomes clearer.

But if you just say, “well, I will do this, I will do that, or our party is known for doing this, no; it is not what your party is known for doing; it doesn’t make sense. After all, we have had the same party in the country in the last eight years but we don’t have the same candidate. The present President is not the same as the former President but they belong to the same party. So, we can’t use all those kinds of classifications.

You said that the power of incumbency appears to be shaky in Nigeria now, making elections quite unpredictable. What do you think has changed? Is it that electorates are becoming more aware or you are considering what people call the federal might?
Well, I don’t know really why Nigerians allow things like that to really stand, and we start worshipping it or talking so much about it. What is federal might? Is there federal might in the ballot paper? You are going to thumb print a candidate you want. Where does federal might come into that? For me, I think federal might is either a device by the ruling party members to instill fear in their opponents or manipulation. Yes, that is what they want to do. And federal might works where election is neither free nor fair. If election is free and fair, there is no might there. It is who the people want that would be voted in.

So, what we want is a strong electoral body that can conduct elections without fear or favour, and give the candidate that gets the highest number of votes the verdict. If you have power of incumbency and you want to use it to stop people from campaigning, that is wrong because the facilities you claim to be yours are not yours. They belong to the people. It doesn’t belong to any government. It belongs to the people. Therefore, anybody who wants to use that same instrument to convince the people about his own ability ought to be given the chance. You don’t have to be in the government party to use the stadium, conference hall or to use anything that is public, or to use the public media. You don’t have to belong to that party because that party is not a government. It is a political party. Government is for all of us and that is what is missing in Nigeria. You see somebody tells you, “our government.” There is nothing like our government.

The government is for all of us. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu is of the All Progressives Congress (APC). That was his political party, But today, President Tinubu is the President of all Nigerians whether you are an APC or not. So, when you begin to talk about your party, then, you are not drawing the difference between party and government and there is a difference. Before election, party matters but after election, somebody is elected – a governor or a president. He is the governor or president of all of us. I think the Edo people, like every other group of people, every other group of voters in Nigeria, should hold on to track record. What does a candidate have? What can he offer? What level of competence does he have? What has he done before? What is he capable of doing? It is not his political party that we can hold at this point in time. It is the candidate. What can he do for us? Because by the time he gets there, he cannot blame the party.

So, Edo people should not follow the crowd. No, no; everybody should convince himself that the person he is voting for is the best as far as he is concerned. And the person who is best for you may not be best for me. So, let everybody vote his conscience and by the time we collect the votes together, we will be able to see the majority and who every other person thinks is the best candidate. We don’t have to go into it and say, “you know, this is sometimes a major party.” There is nothing like that. If a major party brings out a candidate that is not very good, you don’t have to follow him because it is not a party thing. It is government. So, I think Edo people should look out for a candidate that is serious-minded, a candidate that has a good manifesto, that also has an explanation as to what he wants to do and has persuaded the voters into believing that going with him is the right thing to do.

Some political analysts believe that democracy has not actually produced the desired dividend for the ordinary Nigerian. How does this school of thought apply to your state, Edo?
I don’t think it applies to Edo State better or worse than it has to others. Democracy in Nigeria has not been institutionalised. It is obvious from the way people do their things that they are not really ready for what democracy talks about. Democracy is about freedom. It is not about claims. If you cannot make everybody have the same opportunity, then you have a problem. You see, in democracy, there are pillars.

The first pillar is the sovereignty of the people, where the people matter the most. Do we have that now? If we don’t have it, then, it means we have not had a good democratic experience. The second is rule of law. Is the rule of law in place today? Can you say that everybody in Nigeria is equal before the law? Can I commit an offence and be penalised, and you commit the same offence and be penalised just like me? If it is not so, then our democracy is not yet on ground. The third is majority rule. Majority rule is about election, which is what we are talking about now. Is it the person with the highest number of votes that actually wins elections in Nigeria? It is not one person that can answer that question. All of us had our experiences in the last election. So, you can know whether we have really gotten there.

But I can tell you that we have a lot to do when it comes to the electoral process. We need an electoral commission that is purely and properly independent. Yes, there are one or two persons in the current Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) that have strong characters. That is not all; are there people among them who are partisan players? If there are, then that is a problem. It is not about the chairman or one or two others. Do they have politicians among them? If that happens, then we don’t have a proper electoral body. And if you don’t have a proper electoral body, you cannot have free and fair elections.

Finally, are there minority rights? They said that democracy is a game of numbers, the majority matters; the minority must have their say while the majority will have their way. Do we allow the minorities to have their say in this country? If we don’t, then, we are not yet in a democracy.