“When blood spills, it spills on memory. Let that memory become a warning, rather than a weapon. Let political rivalry yield to constitutionalism.”
The Osun State governorship election ought not to be consigned to the political archives as another electoral contest in which one candidate triumphed, another was vanquished and the electorate proceeded to resume the quotidian business of survival. Such a treatment would be both facile and morally inadequate.
The election deserves a more searching interrogation: a clinical examination of the circumstances that produced it; the violence that preceded it; the lives that were lost; the passions that were inflamed and the implications for the future of democratic governance in Osun State and Nigeria.
An election is ordinarily an instrument of peaceful political succession. It is the mechanism through which citizens confer a temporary mandate upon those who seek the stewardship of public power. It should never become a theatre of bloodletting in which political ambition is purchased at the price of human life.
When blood spills…memory of Osun governorship election
Yet Osun has, once again, been compelled to confront the grim spectre of electoral violence.
Reports of killings, intimidation, clashes and other violent incidents associated with the electoral process should trouble every conscientious citizen.
The precise casualty figures reported by different monitoring organisations may vary according to methodology and reporting periods, but the moral proposition remains immutable: even one life lost to political violence is one life too many.
This is not merely a matter of statistics. Behind every casualty figure stands a human being; behind every human being stands a family; and behind every family is a story of grief that does not terminate when the Returning Officer declares a winner.
This is where the political class must pause and look into the mirror.
For the politician, an election has a beginning and an end. For the bereaved family, however, death has no electoral timetable. A candidate can lose today and contest tomorrow.
A political party can suffer defeat and reorganise. A governor can complete his tenure and retire. But the citizen whose life has been extinguished in the heat of political rivalry receives no second ballot paper.
When blood is spilled, it does not simply disappear into the soil, it is deposited in memory. It enters the family album, the empty chair at the dinner table, the silence of the bereaved mother and the childhood of the orphan. It becomes part of the collective memory of a community.
Political leaders may eventually reconcile, embrace one another at public functions and proceed to another electoral contest, but the families of those who died cannot so easily participate in the amnesia of politics.
This is why electoral violence must cease to be treated as an unfortunate but inevitable appendage of Nigerian politics. It is neither inevitable, nor culturally-ordained.
It is the consequence of political irresponsibility, institutional weakness, impunity and, in some instances, the deliberate manipulation of human passions.
The first imperative, therefore, is to disentangle political competition from political warfare.
A political opponent is not an enemy combatant. A rival candidate is not an existential threat. A party supporter does not become a legitimate target merely because he subscribes to a different political philosophy.
Elections are contests for the temporary administration of public power; they are not wars of annihilation.
Unfortunately, political rhetoric in Nigeria has too frequently assumed a martial complexion. Politicians speak of crushing, destroying and annihilating opponents, while their supporters sometimes interpret such metaphors with alarming literalism.
Words uttered from political platforms can acquire a life of their own when amplified by partisan networks and social media.
Those who command political followership must therefore understand the awesome responsibility attached to their words. The tongue of a political leader can become the matchstick in a room already saturated with petrol.
The second issue requiring urgent reflection is the internal culture of political parties. Electoral violence does not emerge from a vacuum. It is often the external manifestation of tensions generated within political organisations by exclusion, manipulation, factional rivalry and the arbitrary suppression of legitimate ambition.
Where political parties conduct opaque primaries, disqualify aspirants without convincing explanations, elevate factional loyalty above competence and treat political structures as the private inheritance of a few individuals, resentment inevitably accumulates.
If that resentment is not resolved through credible internal mechanisms, it may eventually escape the party’s walls and contaminate the wider electoral environment.
The Osun State experience provides an instructive warning. Political parties must abandon the mentality that the party belongs to its most influential elders or financiers.
No political organisation can sustainably flourish when a handful of political grandees arrogate to themselves the power to determine who may rise, who must decline and whose ambition should be strangulated before it acquires political oxygen.
A political tree deliberately prevented from growing may eventually become the very shade under which the party itself can no longer find shelter.
The third imperative is the separation of political memory from political vengeance.
Osun’s political history is replete with old rivalries, defections, betrayals, alliances and counter alliances. Political actors have long memories, and there is nothing inherently wrong with remembering the past.
What becomes dangerous is when political memory is transformed into a perpetual vendetta. One generation must not bequeath its political quarrels to another. The children of political opponents should not inherit the animosities of their parents.
Communities should not be permanently divided into camps because politicians who once disagreed have decided that their followers must continue fighting decades after the original dispute has lost its relevance.
There must be a point at which political actors declare, the contest is over, the state remains. That principle ought to become the lodestar of Osun’s political conduct.
The state is greater than any political party. The citizen is greater than any politician. The Constitution is greater than the ambition of any individual. Above all, human life is infinitely more valuable than the political office.
The fourth imperative is accountability.
Where deaths have occurred in connection with an election, there must be a credible investigation capable of establishing what happened, identifying those responsible and determining whether there were failures of intelligence, policing or political leadership.
Such an inquiry must not become a charade designed merely to placate public outrage until the news cycle changes. There must be no selective justice.
If the victim was an APC supporter, justice must be pursued. If the victim supported Accord or another party, justice must equally be pursued. If the deceased was an innocent bystander who had no partisan affiliation whatsoever, the state owes that person exactly the same duty. The political affiliation of the victim must never determine the seriousness with which the state investigates his or her death. Nor should accountability stop with the immediate perpetrators.
The machinery behind political violence deserves scrutiny, those who finance it, procure weapons mobilise thugs, provide logistical support, issue inflammatory instructions or otherwise create the environment in which violence flourishes.
To prosecute only the foot soldiers while leaving the political paymasters untouched is to prune the branches while nourishing the roots. Justice must therefore be accompanied by deterrence.
The fifth lesson concerns the security architecture surrounding elections. The mere deployment of thousands of security personnel does not necessarily constitute effective security.
What matters is whether intelligence was gathered and acted upon, whether known flashpoints were identified, whether vulnerable communities were protected, whether security agencies remained impartial and whether credible mechanisms existed for responding rapidly to emerging threats.
Election security must be preventive, rather than merely reactive. It must protect citizens without becoming an instrument of partisan intimidation.
The sixth and, perhaps, most consequential lesson is that citizens themselves must become vigilant custodians of democracy.
The defence of the ballot cannot be outsourced entirely to INEC, political parties, security agencies or international observers. Citizens must understand the electoral process, monitor proceedings, insist upon transparent counting, preserve lawful evidence and challenge irregularities through constitutionally established mechanisms.
But there is an essential distinction between vigilance and vigilantism…A citizen who documents an irregularity strengthens democracy. A citizen who assaults an opponent destroys it.
That distinction must be systematically taught, particularly to young Nigerians who are frequently recruited as instruments of political violence by those who themselves remain comfortably insulated from its consequences.
Civil society organisations, religious institutions, schools, traditional institutions, the media and political parties should therefore intensify civic education long before the next election.
Political tolerance must become part of democratic instruction. Young people must understand that political disagreement is neither treason nor warfare.
The media, too, bears considerable responsibility. Political reporting should expose wrongdoing without becoming an accelerant of communal hostility. Social media users must equally recognise that fabricated allegations, manipulated videos and inflammatory messages can transform suspicion into violence within minutes.
The Osun experience should consequently become an opportunity for institutional reform. There should be a permanent mechanism for monitoring electoral violence and identifying emerging flashpoints.
Political parties should adopt enforceable codes of conduct. Security agencies should strengthen early warning and rapid-response systems.
Civil society should maintain independent records of electoral incidents. Victims and their families should not be abandoned once the political excitement has subsided.
Above all, perpetrators must understand that political affiliation offers no immunity from the law.
The objective should not be revenge.
It should be prevention.
For the greatest tragedy would be to mourn the dead today and reproduce the circumstances that killed them tomorrow.
Osun must therefore resist the seductive but ruinous politics of blood. Politicians must remember that the citizens they mobilise against one another today are the same citizens they will seek to govern tomorrow.
One cannot set fire to the house during an election and thereafter demand that its occupants assist in rebuilding it.
The electoral result will eventually become a historical footnote. The victorious candidate will govern; the defeated parties will regroup; political alliances will mutate and another election will arrive with its own promises and intrigues.
But the graves will remain. The bereaved will remember. And history will retain the names of those who were lost.
That is why Osun must now hold the mirror firmly before itself. It must examine not merely who won or lost, but what the election revealed about the moral condition of its politics.
The noblest memorial to those who lost their lives is not another rally, another speech or another partisan accusation. It is a political culture in which no Nigerian is ever again required to pay for the ambition of a politician with his or her life.
When blood spills, it spills on memory. Let that memory become a warning rather than a weapon. Let political rivalry yield to constitutionalism.
Let ambition bow before human life.
Let justice remain blind to party affiliation.
And let every political leader understand that no office in Osun State and, indeed, no political office anywhere in Nigeria, is sufficiently exalted to justify the shedding of a single citizen’s blood.
