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Ahead of the presidential elections holding next month across the country, the Serving Overseer of the Citadel Global Community Church, Pastor Tunde Bakare, has warned Nigerians to avoid politicians with a sense of entitlement.
Bakare gave this counsel while speaking at his State of the Nation Address which took place during service at his church in Oregun, Lagos, even as he also charged Nigerians to reject vote buyers in the 2023 election and called for the entrenchment of good politics which focuses on issues of development.
The cleric, while offering the counsel, warned that politics of entitlement, which he referred to in his speech as “Emi lokan type of politics,” manifests among perennial candidacy, not with the intent to serve, but to gratify long-term personal ambitions, declaring that Nigerian presidency was not a reward for anyone’s lifetime of sacrifice to the nation.
“Emi lokan type of politics insists on one’s turn even if circumstances do not align. Politics of entitlement also manifests as a perennial candidacy, not with the intent to serve but to gratify long-term personal ambitions. It could also manifest as insistence on a given political office as a reward for what one considers a lifetime of sacrifice to the nation.
“Politicians with a sense of entitlement evade political debates and do not consider it imperative to communicate with the electorate. Entitlement politics will breed an imperial presidency that is distant from the people and has no sense of responsibility or accountability to the people.
“Such imperial governance will slide towards dictatorship and will be intolerant of dissent. Entitlement politicians set low-performance benchmarks for themselves when they secure power and are content with projecting molehills as mountains of achievement,” he stated.
Speaking further, Pastor Bakare equally warned Nigerians to avoid politicians that practise politics of division, deception, manipulation, merchandise, exploitation and politics of betrayal.
According to him, politics of merchandise is practised by politicians who buy delegates and candidates during primaries, purchase endorsements from power blocs and influencers during campaigns, and buy voters during elections, noting that the government that resulted from such kind of politics is characterised by a lack of accountability to citizens.
“When politicians get to power through vote buying, they do not think that they owe us, the citizens, any obligation. As a result, they have no business with us until the next elections. Fellow citizens, in 2023, we must reject political merchants and vote buyers,” he warned.
The clergyman, who canvassed for good politics and practitioners for the country, posited politicians who practise good politics talked to the people they intend to govern; by communicating, saying that by doing this, they allayed fears, restore hope, and assure the citizens.
According to him, “The practitioners of good politics are open to interrogation and they do not avoid debates or evade difficult questions. It is inclusive: good politics gives a sense of belonging to historically excluded or vulnerable groups, including women, young people, the elderly, and persons living with disabilities.”
Bakare, who noted that whichever choice Nigerians made at the coming polls, the country will still remain fragile, however, warned that the time was up for those practising bad politics in Nigeria, adding: “We cannot ignore the God factor and if you think everything is closed, there will be a new chapter.”
The cleric said over 50 years after the Civil War, the inclusion of the South East remained a strong imperative in Nigeria’s quest for nationhood, pointing out that the country was confronted currently
with regional and ethnic memory joggers.
He said the situation for the first time since the First and Second republics, the political process had thrown up three, rather than two, major contenders for the presidency as it was in the First and Second Republics, noting that each of the three had “his support base in one of the three main regions that constituted the geopolitical foundation of our country, namely the North, the West, and the East, mirroring the ethnic origin of each candidate.”
He said “with support bases largely regional and with drum beats of ethnic confrontations sounding loud and clear,” the country was faced with a stark reminder that it had “merely papered over the cracks of the regional and ethnic fault lines in our political history.”
On some religious leaders endorsing presidential candidates now in the race, Bakare took a swipe at them, accusing them of being divisive, adding that it was sad reminder of the lingering divisions clogging the wheels of Nigeria’s journey to nationhood.
“This divisive and illogical religious rhetoric also has its propagators among Muslim clerics who seek to rally their congregations in support of the Muslim-Muslim ticket of the All Progressives Congress, APC, simply because it gratifies their quest for the domination of one religion by another.
“Those who adopt such a retrogressive religious paradigm that relegates development and good governance to the background have failed to see the link between the massive poverty and underdevelopment in Northern Nigeria on the one hand and their brand of Islam on the other hand which is different from the type practised by forward-thinking nations like the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Indeed, the 2023 general election is coming 30 years after the June 12, 1993 elections that proved to be a watershed in our journey to nationhood.
“That election, thirty years ago, laid the foundation for our current democratic dispensation upon the sacrifice of Chief MKO Abiola. 30 years on, the Muslim-Muslim ticket of the APC has become a memory jogger reminding us of the intrigues of the 1993 election.
“Even as the candidacies of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, a Muslim, and his running mate, Senator Kashim Shettima, another Muslim, have heightened the religious tension in our polity, the annulled June 12, 1993 election has become a reference point for the ‘BATified’ who are defenders of the same-faith ticket. Meanwhile, their opponents are quick to remind them that 2023 is a generation away from 1993 and presents different circumstances,” he argued.
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