By Anthony Akinwale

In January 2027, which is just around the corner, Nigerians will be called upon to chose their leaders.

Making a choice is a function of the will. The will, in conjunction with the intellect, functions by making a choice of the good. The intellect, assisting the will, identifies what is truly good. The will therefore choses the good as understood by the intellect. It is such that, whenever the intellect is in error as to what is truly good, the will ends up making wrong choices.

Whoever freely makes a choice assumes or must assume responsibility for the choice he or she is making.

But to be truly responsible, one must neither be coerced nor ignorant. A choice made out of coercion is no choice at all. It is not an expression of free will. It is, instead, an expression of the power of whoever or whatever forces one to make such a choice. A choice made in ignorance is no choice either. It is an expression of whoever or whatever has deceived one into making a wrong choice.

For, as has just been said, it is the function of the will to chose the good as understood by the intellect. The intellect understands and the will choses what the intellect understands as the good. The democratic process is weakened, if not damages, where and when we allow party propaganda to deceive us. That is when we end up making wrong choices at the polls. And this has happened in almost every election, not only in Nigeria but also around the world.

What has just been said underscores the necessity, the moral obligation to allow our God-given intellective faculty to direct us in making choices. But there is an even most fundamental obligation.

It is the moral obligation to cultivate the intellect, to train it, to sharpen it, to build its capacity to know. Acquisition of knowledge, the search for wisdom, the intellect’s ability to identify what is truly good, what is to be presented to the will as the truly good, the good to be chosen—these must come into play in the process of making decision, the process, in this particular instance, of making a choice as to the most suitable leaders to direct the affairs of our land.

This is not a matter of voting following the dictates of ethnic, religious and regional sentiments. Of course, we must expect those who are soliciting our votes to whip up familiar ethnic, religious and regional sentiments. But we have a responsibility to transcend sentiments before we cast our vote.

The reader would have noted that I have avoided calling them politicians but “those who are soliciting our votes.” My choice of words is quite deliberate. We are accustomed to calling them politicians. But not all those who seek our votes are politicians in the proper sense of the word. In the proper sense of the word, a politician is one who engages in the task of intelligently ordering the affairs of our common life for the sake of the common good. It is in that proper sense of the word that a politician is called a statesman.

Properly speaking, a politician is a statesman, and a statesman is a politician, that is, one who devotes his faculties to the task of working for the common good of citizens. Such was the understanding in Plato’s Republic, in Aristotle’s Politics, in Augustine’s City of God, in Aquinas’ political philosophy encapsulated in his philosophy of law, and in the body of Catholic social doctrine in papal encyclicals and other forms of ecclesiastical interventions. In Nicolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, however, we have a dissenting voice.

For Machiavelli, the function of the politician is to seek and maintain a grip on power for the sake of his own selfish interest. Machiavelli’s Prince does not work for the common good, he does not work for the people, he works for himself. That is why he cannot be properly called a statesman. He is a selfish man and not a statesman. And if we care to take a careful look at politics in our time, not only in Nigeria, but everywhere in this “global village”, we shall notice that most of those who find themselves entrusted with affairs of state resemble Machiavelli’s Prince.

It is the responsibility of citizens who cast votes in an election to educate themselves or allow themselves to be educated on what is truly good for our society. That is why it is their responsibility to cultivate intellects that can understand what is truly good. Such intellectual formation is a moral prerequisite for the exercise of free will in the election of leaders. It is a task to be assumed so that we do not end up making wrong choices.

We must know before we can choose. The first is the task of the intellect, the latter is the task of the will. Democracy is in danger where voters do not seek knowledge before voting: knowledge of our history, knowledge of those asking for our votes, of their antecedents, of what they have been able to accomplish and of what they have been unable to accomplish. That is why, in hiring a worker, the one who hires would usually insist on having the curriculum vitae of the one who intends to be hired.

We have a set of obligations we must fulfill if we are to call ourselves responsible citizens, and if we are to call ours a democratic polity: we must inform ourselves as to the issues that confront us in Nigeria. We must envision the type of Nigeria we need. We must be able to describe the qualities that must be found in whoever wants to be President or Governor, Senator and members of national and state houses of assembly. We must look at the profile of those asking for our votes before we can discern as to whether or not they fit into the profile of leaders we need. We must discern whether or not those asking for our votes possess requisite qualities of statesmen or women.

We must recognise the danger that the 1999 Constitution is. It is a Constitution that has taken Nigeria away from Nigerians and handed her and her riches over to a political class who then resort to bargaining—they call it euphemistically “zoning”—over which section or faction of the Nigerian ruling class will be sitting over Nigeria’s wealth for the next four years. That is why, as so many are beginning to say, the major parties are identical. The Constitution must be an issue in this season of campaigns and voting. Those we are to vote for must be men and women who recognise the danger represented by this constitution, and who have the wisdom and courage to embark on the task of far-reaching constitutional amendments.

Today, democracy is in danger, not only in Nigeria but worldwide, because the right to vote is mistaken for competence to vote rightly. Everywhere in the world, most people would vote on ethnic and religious grounds. And those who ask people to vote for them, for the most part, would exploit these differences in demagoguery making promises that they know they are unwilling and incapable of fulfilling. That is why the voter must know what is at stake in an election. To know before we vote is to look before we leap. For if we leap before we look, we shall foolishly end up in a ditch.

Father Akinwale is of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Augustine University, Ilara-Epe, Lagos State.