Political promises: Between intentions, actions

There is a fever in the land. It is frustration borne out of dashed dreams everywhere. It echoes from so many failed promises made by our politicians, which only remain items on a forgotten plan.

You can see it in the weary and teary eyes of citizens struggling to eke out a living daily the average families who have to provide their own power, water, and even clinics to survive, while government officials tout billion-Naira public initiatives across all sectors.

Healthcare, education, power, agriculture, housing, public works, etc, none is spared. In contemporary Nigeria, the most dangerous distance is not measured in kilometres, but in the vast, yawning gap between intention and action. Our leaders are master weavers of beautiful tomorrows, yet their hands, once in power, often work to stitch pockets, not progress.

This is more than political failure; it is a cultural and systemic malady. The 2023 elections echoed with symphonies of “Renewed Hope,” but for many citizens, the ensuing melody has been a familiar dirge of deferred dreams. We operate in an economy of intentions, where the promise itself is treated as a form of currency, spent freely during campaigns but rarely redeemed.

The populace, once bonded to its leaders by trust, now navigates a relationship frayed by betrayal. That trust, like a delicate calabash, has been dropped too many times.

The scandals of fraud and embezzlement are in unending piles across government levels and officials, gender (the women are fast catching up with the men), and across ministries and agencies, with trillions unaccounted for! Yet, Nigeria moves on like nothing happened or is happening! Nigeria, we truly hail thee”! A nation numbed by corruption.

A nation with the few scandalously rich and the too numerous scandalously poor, and a government in between them! A nation where stated intentions sound noble, but the callousness of the misaligned action is nothing but a wicked slap on the face of traumatised and helpless citizenry. Yet, this pattern is endemic. It speaks to a twisted cultural nuance where excuses for non performance is the common valedictory rating.

This excusing syndrome now permeates beyond politics. It is the contractor who uses substandard materials for collapsed buildings, and the government official who fails to deliver, yet is promoted ignobly to a higher office! What a society! We have inadvertently created a society that prioritises the why over the what, forgiving the destructive action if the stated intention was sound. The result is a permissive ecosystem of impunity, where accountability is as scarce as stable electricity. The consequences are not passive disappointment; they are active, boiling frustration, the type revealed in the last #EndSARS movement.

While triggered by police brutality, it was fundamentally a roaring rejection of this very gap between the government’s constitutional intention to protect and its violent actions on the streets. The youth, armed with smartphones and a ruthless clarity, declared that good intentions are no longer a valid receipt for bad deeds.

They demanded the stick of accountability. That demand is still valid today, unfortunately, so many years hence.

Moving forward, if the emergent nationwide frustration is to be healed, it requires dismantling the palace of impunity and building a new house with tools of transparency and accountability.

The media must begin to really act as the fourth estate that it is supposed to be by being more duty-bound to aggressive investigative journalism that these times demand of them, failing which posterity must render their conspiratorial betrayal forever indelible in Nigerian history.

Nigerians need responsible journalists prioritizing work tracing contract malfeasance, following the trails of diverted funds, and the like, to set the needed pace and provide the needed oxygen for public accountability.

The citizenry, too, must arm itself with new tools, better and more intentional utilisation of social media as the vibrant agitational town square, such as creating more civic technology platforms like BudgIT, for example, to demystify government spending and engender accountability down the line to the very grassroots.

The crucial fundamental work, however, is cultural: reinstating the value of Omoluabi, the person of character whose word and deed are one. This must be woven into the fabric of our education, our homes, and our national dialogue.

Ultimately, Nigeria stands at a familiar crossroads, yet the path forward is clear. We must move from an economy of intentions to a democracy of actions. The future we seek will not be built on the shifting sand of eloquent promises, but on the solid rock of tangible, accountable deeds.

The time for accepting beautiful speeches is over. Now is the season for demanding visible, verifiable results. It is long past time we judge our leaders not by the poetry of their campaigns, but by the prose of their governance. The nation is watching, and it is no longer asleep. TheConscienceChronicler