Okello Oculi canvasses sanctions against election campaigns deliberately meant to deceive the people
Candidate Bill Clinton once became alarmed about candidates paying brilliant psychologists to design television advertisements for manipulating voters in American elections. Accordingly, there were severe declines in people casting their votes.
Nigeria’s Independent National Election Commission reported on 31st December, 2022 that two million people had not collected their Voter Cards in Lagos State alone. In a previous election in Anambra State only 10 per cent of registered voters had voted.
Clinton’s “It’s the Economy Stupid’’ shaped what American voters should worry about. He played a saxophone inside a club to draw out those alienated from voting.
He also passionately embraced Ms LOWINSKY during a campaign beat. His focus on the economy touched hearts and minds of many who were not raking millions out of the American economy. They gave him their votes.
In African politics, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere focused on how the economic benefit of common citizens by creating ‘’UJAMAA VILLAGES’’. Rural households were assembled to enable them share access roads, boreholes, health clinics, fertilizers, and schools. They pooled their labour and sweat to create common large farms and earn higher incomes.
Socialist critics from Sweden and Norway accused the scheme for not being a ‘’SOCIALIST’’. Nyerere’s retort was contemptuous. Colonialism, he said, did NOT build industries similar to what created Britain’s capitalists and millions of productive angry ‘’proletariat’’ revolting and capturing a capitalist economy from a selfish ‘’bourgeoisie’’.
Germany and Britain had treated Tanganyika’s peasant farmer with genocidal brutalities and exploitation. It was angry villagers who voted his political party into power; and deserved to be rewarded.
Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana alarmed British and American diplomats by sending to East Germany, Hungary and other Communist countries thousands of youth graduates from Primary and Secondary Schools.
They learnt vital skills, including: painting houses; tailoring; furniture-making; motor mechanics and fabrication. They would not be like the few graduates of Engineering who cannot repair a mechanical fault in a car or truck.
Nkrumah probably wished to follow Japan’s road of FABRICATING machines they import from Euro-America; Ghana’s economy evolving from a market to becoming a competitor. Politically, the youth would NOT become angry swamps of unemployed youths.
In Tunisia under Habib Bourguiba focused on taking economic resources to the masses by reversing Europe’s model of a majority of the population working inside urban-based industries, urban services, while a minority worked in large farms which feed urban populations and factories. Government helped rural cooperatives to fabricate and invent machines for processing their farm products for export to urban and foreign markets.
Nyerere and Bourguiba remained highly popular. They believed in, and practiced open discussion with the people in CREATIVE speech about policy choices. Bourguiba persuaded religious leaders to proclaim that any educated person who chose to be a French citizen would not be buried according to Islamic rites. He won women’s right to education; and that it was against national development to weaken Tunisians with Ramadan FASTING while Europeans are working with full strength.
Cuba shows a rich example of a poor post-colonial and highly exploited country exciting his people into patriotic creativity. With speeches which lasted over FIVE HOURS, he built creative public resistance to America’s military, economic, political and propaganda hostilities. With voluntary community cleanup activities, they collectively eliminated MALARIA from their country without reliance on chemical poisons to eliminate mosquitoes. Their scientists are constantly inventing vaccines and pharmaceutical medicines due to calls to defend Cuba’s freedom against a real enemy 90 km away.
President Mobutu Sese Seko adopted Fidel Castro’s marathon speeches around the country to build hope, pride, self-reliance and creativity among people who had suffered from civil wars from independence on June 30, 1960 to mid-1970s. His people’s music chased Euro-American pop music out of Africa. The inventive creativity of woman was capped by an invention of mechanical traffic police gadget.
The United States continues to use speech to sustain a culture of INVENTION; joining in VOLUNTARY community activities, to fight over racial discrimination and economic inequalities.
Hollow campaign speeches poison political culture by showing voters that politicians regard them as ignorant, helpless and gullible idiots.
In Uganda’s 2020 elections, President Museveni’s tactic of blaming Member of Parliament from constituencies in Buganda for lack of government services in constituencies did not prevent Bobby Wine’s party from sweeping polls in the region. Nigeria’s media should educate politicians about this tradition of building nations under difficult condition.
Hollow election campaign speeches have corrupted electoral culture and induced ‘’vote selling’’. Kenya outlawed ‘’Hate Speech’’. Hollow election campaign speeches deserve similar legislation.
