Price of partisan politics
It would be weird to harbour the idea that affiliations made to ‘political parties’ are inane. Everyone has a particular party he’s committed to; either politics, social clubs, or a religious organisation.
That said, ever since politics, in particular, started grazing on our fertile land, its exploits and staunchest members have made the prospects of our land marginalised, thereby making their season more seemingly evil than good.
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Political apparatchiks are eagerly swift to buttress any unjustifiable fact stemming from their camps. They could pontificate all day in their submissions just to tell another lie. Unfortunately, that weans them off being analytically outstanding.
Prior to the advent of their political careers most of them were visionaries, promising analysts, and persons with good competences. Their traits were worth emulating. After they got baptised by politics and started dining with their political gods whose concerns were not to make the land they were grazing cultivable to its right custodians again, they stooped to partisan politics, that deadly disease.
Now let’s look around, evidently before us are the adverse effects of partisan politics. If not mediocrity, then it’s the fast-growing rate of culture of silence, decline of politicians not holding the trust reposed in them, and the loss of patriotism and pan-Africanism in the citizenry.
While philanthropists like Dr Osei Kwame Despite are busily erecting social amenities and making society a better place, these party guards are running from television to radio stations just to cast innuendos and sow seeds of discord between each other and the populace.
Sometimes, it’s laughable when they attempt to paint something black, albeit it’s glaringly white and, would sheepishly ask: “I hope you understand?" Meanwhile they know they’re not making any better input with their submission.
They aren’t chagrined if their potbellies protrude while the average citizen struggles with keeping their heads above water. As long as it’s their party, then they have to win, any other thing is secondary.
This is how far partisan politics has brought Africans. But should we die so hard for political parties, if it is not to the betterment of the populace at large? Are we partisans first before citizens?
It is high time we became enlightened enough to know that partisan politics is running faster than the economic growth of Africa. This price we really wouldn’t want to pay.
Or maybe Dr Chuba Akadigbo was right when he said: “If you’re so emotionally attached to your tribe, religion or political leaning to the point that truth and justice become a secondary considerations to you, your education is senseless. Your exposure is useless. And If you can’t reason beyond petty sentiments, you’re a liability to mankind.”
The writer is a socio-political commentator
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