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The recent televised debates, and the general excitement that have accompanied them amidst sections of the Nigerian public, have made me wonder about what it might be like to have a business card that said: ‘political strategist.’ Have we got ‘strategists’ in Nigeria; who do such things as crunch numbers and data, divide up the electorate into ‘catchment areas’, and devise campaign plans to reach all those segments?

Do we have, in the engine rooms of our political parties, people obsessed with polling as a means of understanding the electorate? (In the first place, is polling feasible in the Nigerian system; can it ever be considered credible enough to depend on as a mechanism for electoral planning?) We are witnesses to how the revelation, from INEC, that the largest numbers of voters lie in the north-west and south-west, have shaped the ongoing presidential campaigns. In the absence of such basic statistics, how is a candidate supposed to prioritise and allocate scarce campaign resources?

Or are Nigerian elections meant to be driven solely by the crudeness we have come to associate with them – noisy campaigns full of cursing your opponents and remixing gospel songs; sharing biscuits, cash and bags of rice; and the use of plain old voter intimidation before and during the voting?

One of the big words in the Nigerian political lexicon is “masses” aka “grassroots” (often used in a rather condescending manner). It is common these days for people to speak scornfully of social networking tools, and dismiss them as places where youthful noisemakers gather, oblivious of the fact that the ‘grassroots’ – who supposedly determine election outcomes – are somewhere out there, far away from the Internet.

You can’t but wonder what people mean when they use that term “grassroots” – do they mean the poor, or those living in rural areas, far away from campaign jingles and television debates? Or do they mean the illiterate – with whom Nigeria, Giant of Africa, is richly blessed? If they mean the illiterate – how do you reach that class with ideas originally conceived in English? How many are these “grassroots”, where are they based, what informs the political choices they make? Think of those millions of Nigerians who will vote for a candidate simply because he is their kinsman. Is it possible for an opposition politician to sway their allegiances?

Related to campaign strategising is the task of creating the ideas around which good governance ought to revolve. Watching the NN24 debates, and listening to the pronouncements of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates, I found myself hoping that what they said was actually the product of thoughtful deliberations away from the limelight and bustle of campaign grounds.

I assume that they are all surrounded by teams of technocrats, policy-makers and speechwriters who advise and tutor them; and help them craft coherent and detailed, yet easy to communicate manifestoes.

I would like to believe that behind the public speeches and promises, some level of brainstorming is going on.
We tend to forget that while politics (i.e. the showy, public aspects of it) may often be compelled to revolve around individuals, proper governance itself ought to be about teams and alliances and collaboration.

Behind every (successful) politician should be an assemblage of smart, savvy aides, advising, strategising and evaluating. When we talk of the successes of the Obasanjo years, it is mostly due to the visionary work of a team of brilliant technocrats who drafted and implemented policies in due process, budget management, foreign debt management, anti-corruption work, privatisation, pension reform, etc.

Obasanjo as president was merely the public face – and godfather perhaps – of this team; giving them his blessings as well as the confidence to proceed in the face of opposition from those bent on maintaining status quo.

That is how politics should work – the president or governor as public face; the one on whose table the buck stops, the one whose duty it is to ensure that the government is staffed with the right set of people in the right places, and who gives them all the support they need to achieve.

Presidents and aspiring presidents must be ‘big-picture’ people, curious, eager to learn, able to process large amounts of information, and able to synthesize coherent ideas from complicated and often conflicting pieces of advice. They should be able to assemble and rely on the work of value-adding teams of thinkers and advisers; and confident enough to acknowledge their dependence on those people. With the above in mind, I guess the question we should all be asking ourselves is this: how can we ensure that ideas – and not rigging strategies and empty politicking – rule our politics? Should our elections be elevated into a game of ‘survival of the fittest ideas’; or should we simply forget about that and allow cash and violence and trickery to carry the day – as always?