ENGAGEMENTS with Chidi Amuta, e-mail: chidi.amuta@gmail.com
We are dealing with an expansive all- dominating industry. It is a manpower dominant industry, employing a huge army of people with their own extended family of hangers on. It is equally an influence pervasive industry. Most importantly, this is an industry that controls every other industry, regulating the environment in which others practice, thrive or wither.
Yet somehow, politics has managed to disguise its industrial scope and status by focusing public attention on the myth and ritual of democracy decorated with the rhetoric of representative government and public service. Sometimes, politicians have focused attention on the game aspect of politics, playing it more like a vicious but unserious sport.
This is precisely because the main unofficial activity of the political industry is rent seeking and rent sharing. This is a complement to the allocation of pork as well as the privatization of constituency benefits. In Nigeria, political office holders tend to be state officials in the day and rent seekers and pork administrators at night. Due to the preoccupation with rents, a political city like Abuja is easily the most expensive piece of real estate anywhere on the African soil.
Yet another governor has insisted that citizens of his land locked state need no Covid-19 tests since his all-knowing government has launched an App to determine their health status by remote sensing! Another one has insisted that his state is under divine immunity from the virus as it is the only one whose name appears severally in the Bible.
On paper, our political industry may not be as unregulated as I have sounded. After all, every democracy has checks and balances that deter political leaders from gulping absolute power. We expect the legislature, judiciary, the media and civil society to weigh in against the absolutist promptings of an ambitious executive branch.
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