There is always an opportunity to make things right and politically speaking we as masses always have the opportunity to make things right after 4 years. But, it seems we always make the same mistake and some of us always refuse to vote when it is time to vote because we believe history will always repeat itself. I listen to the radio and hear people saying all of them are thieves. We are gradually becoming passive towards our faith in making the politics of our country or state better by choosing the right people to lead us.
But it is always good to see behind the fear anger, frustration to take time to evaluate what we have been doing wrong. We have tend towards certain factors to determine who leads us and those factors are wrong from all perspectives. We do not need to warn ourselves that politicians are smart and out to play the game of win and so, several platforms are used to get what they want.
Another tenure is about to start and we have to get it right if we are tired of paying our children’s school fees late, tired of getting our salary late or tired of not getting paid at all, if we are tired of poor services, we need to get a different approach to getting the right people.
To get the right person will not be so hard if we thrive to be rational in decision making. Research has it that the popular political party wins every poll in most cases because the media platform is strong and reliable to all of them, and this is because an average citizen of the country listens to radio everyday. So, a political party that airs an advert every 30 minutes on radio will get the attention of the citizen than those that come on air just once a day.
Also, we like to wear political shirts and face caps, don’t get me wrong it is good, but it is not the prerogative to vote the right person. If a politician is generous enough to share rice, shirts, face caps, share money and all that, those are just side attractions to bring you out to vote for that particular party’s vest you are wearing. But we simply need more than that now.
Now what we need is someone who has done something within the state or country that we can see or read about. Let us ask if the individual contesting has a good name, if the person has an establishment within the country or state, if the individual can statistically back up his manifesto, not just coming to tell us he will provide roads, social amenities, employment without statistically telling us how he will use the revenue within his reach to provide these things. Such a person needs to do this so that one, we will know he has a clue about political system and not just in our face because he has money to buy a form from his political party or just had an opportunity to contest, we need such information to also know the real things to expect we can no longer work with promises, it has failed us countless of times. Therefore, manifestos needs to be more concrete with analysis. We want to hear “the state has a yearly budget of 1.2 million and so, we will use 200 thousand naira for social amenities in the Akoko area…” And so on, so that we will be able to point to where they said work will start and we are yet to see anything. This will keep them on their toes and help us to know how these people are using our money.
The reason for these majorly is that we need to stop complaining about politicians looting our money and we don’t know how they are doing that. We now want to know how they are looting the money, question projects that is not being done and why and also address such issues before they say their tenure is over. Ondo state needs to apply these method as soon as possible so also every political position that will be filled this year.