Elections worsen racial and religious tensions, according to Bakare

According to Dr. Tunde Bakare, the presiding pastor of Citadel Global Community Church, the 2023 presidential election would serve as a reminder to Nigerians that they have not yet repaired the political history’s gaps caused by regional and ethnic fault lines.

He said that this occurred as a result of conflicts between the three major presidential contenders’ supporters, who are drawn from the nation’s three key geographical regions.

When giving his State of the Union speech at his Lagos church on Sunday, the clergyman made these remarks.

Bridging the Gap Between Politics and Governance was the service’s topic.

The preacher said that the “Emi lokan” kind of politics would only satisfy long-term desire. He also made fun of the All Progressives Congress’ Asiwaju Bola Tinubu.

Bakare emphasized that “entitlement politics,” like the “emi lo kan” politics that insist on one’s turn even when circumstances are not favorable, are harmful, even if he omitted mentioning the politician by name.

“Politics of entitlement also emerges as a recurring candidacy, not with the goal to serve but to satiate long-standing personal desires,” he stated.

It might also take the form of a person’s insistence on holding a certain political position as compensation for what they see as a lifetime of service to the country. Politicians who feel entitled avoid political disputes and don’t think it’s important to interact with the public.

He forewarned that the rise of entitlement politics would result in an imperial president that would be removed from the people and devoid of any sense of accountability or duty to them.

Such imperial rule will inevitably devolve into a dictatorship and be intolerable of opposition.

He said, “Entitlement politicians present molehills as mountains of success when they get to power and establish low-performance goals for themselves.”

Bakare said that the first step in creating a great country is to put the past behind us and heal the wounds that, more than 60 years into our journey as an independent country, some of which have persisted in festering.

The priest said, “We are faced with memory joggers that bring us face to face with the residual impacts of these and other tragic episodes of our history as we prepare ourselves for the 2023 elections.

When one closely examines the presidential contest, one cannot help but notice how the opposing forces that have shaped our pathways have come together as if to warn us that the nation’s foundations still need to be fixed.

First, for the first time since the First and Second Republics, we are faced with religious and ethnic memory joggers. As a result, our political process has produced three rather than two prominent candidates for the president.

“Each of the three has a support base in one of the three major geographical areas that made up the basis of our nation, namely the North, the West, and the East, which are reflected in the racial backgrounds of each contender. Our bases of support are mostly regional, and our drumbeats of interethnic conflict are audible to everyone.

We are confronted with a sobering reminder that throughout our political past, we have only patched over the breaches caused by regional and racial fault lines.

“Second, even as the real political inclusion of the South East remains a major necessity in our search for nationhood, unaddressed concerns concerning our national reintegration continue to stare us in the face,” the author writes.

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