. The Concourse
By Soney Antai, serial award-winning columnist
When the 19th-century Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard remarked that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards,” he was, as I understand it, saying, among other things, that whatever we do or plan today for the future can only be properly understood when the day on which we conceived and executed those plans becomes yesterday.
Yes, he was suggesting that it is only in retrospect that we gain a better understanding of what lies behind us. He implied that our present knowledge, actions and inactions are better understood when today fades away, tomorrow becomes today, and we look back with the benefit of hindsight to assess what we did when we called a particular day today. Complicated, isn’t it?
Put another way, whenever we wring our hands and lament, “If only I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have done what I did,” we are making a critical assertion about our present knowledge, judging it to be better, higher and deeper than what we merely assumed we knew yesterday.
Why? The emotions and thoughts that influenced our actions or inactions may have waned, intensified or disappeared altogether. The circumstances may have changed; death may have occurred; partners may have switched loyalties; and we may have reconsidered our positions. We may not see all these changes happening in a physical sense, but they do occur in the philosophical realm.
Now, our partisan politics has entered a critical stage: a season in which the desire to win, the expectations of what victory promises, and the fears and pains associated with losing in a zero-sum political ecosystem are driving emotions to fever pitch.
Most of the gladiators have effectively deleted failure from their political lexicon. There is no room for their opponents to win. The philosophy of I, me and myself takes centre stage, and the stakes are sky-high. They may mouth public platitudes on the campaign trail and make the usual promises they hardly intend to keep, but they do not appear to believe they can win honourably. Yet win they must, by whatever means necessary.
So, what do they do? They resort to a menu of electoral malpractices: vote-buying, ballot-box stuffing, manipulation of figures, thuggery, kidnapping, killings and other forms of electoral violence.
This column is not making things up. Nigerians have lived through all of this. While the conscientious among us call these acts cheating, illegality and reprehensible behaviour, the gladiators and their goons regard them as winning strategies and means of achieving their goals. The objective is simple: win at all costs. After all, as one of them reportedly said recently, all is fair in politics.
If it means smashing, grabbing and scrambling away with your electoral loot, just do it. What a despicably dangerous political philosophy! But there is an even more troubling dimension to this desperation.
In their determination to seize power by whatever means necessary, our politicians have shown themselves to be poor students of history. It is as though the only lesson they have learnt from history is that they have learnt nothing. Yet they need to be reminded that every political victory of today carries consequences for the victors, their followers and society when that today recedes into yesterday.
Political power, like everything else in life, is temporary. The greatest and the weakest among us must eventually confront the reality that no earthly wealth, power or fame lasts forever. That truth becomes a lived reality when today becomes yesterday.
Our politicians, therefore, should stop threatening Nigerians with expulsion from their localities, as the political figure in Abuja reportedly did, or threatening to shoot those who refuse to vote for them, as the motor park figure in Edo State reportedly did. There’s life beyond power. You may still the old friends you ignored when in power when your day in power becomes yesterday. You never can say what will become of you then. The world is not round only in the geographical sense, but also in the sense of circumstances changing our situations in life.
Whatever anyone thinks of themselves today, and no matter where they stand in the world today, one truth remains constant: we are all birds of passage on this earth. Sooner or later, our today will become yesterday, and we will have to face the consequences of our actions. By then, we may have no opportunity to undo what we have done.
Blessed, indeed, are those who can look back at their yesterday and honestly say they have nothing to regret.