In A Mobocracy, The Winner Takes It All

Mobocracy is simply the government of the majority, for the majority against the minority. This is how it will look like when constituencies that did not give sufficient votes to the president or any governor for that matter, are given less while the surplus, so to speak, goes to benefit those who voted massively in favour of any incumbent ruler.
The statement credited to President Buhari that the constituencies that “gave five percent votes” should not expect to get as much attention in some areas as those that “voted 97 percent” must trigger our inquest into the true and healthy meaning of democracy and the essence of voting. If justice means giving more to those who gave more votes, then there can be no real justice unless the “few” (in the low vote areas) that voted for the incumbent are sifted and isolated from their “intransigent constituencies” and given the goodies they have “earned”, just as their compatriots in “massive votes” constituencies.
Beyond this, the mentality that suggests a winner-takes-all situation is that same mentality that professes the philosophy of sharing the national cake, with little or no thinking of baking such cake. Doctrinaire political thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau insist that the ultimate objective in politics is the attainment and the application of the general will in governance. The general will is not the sum total of the will of the people or the will of the majority, but that which is in the best interest of the entire people or at least the majority of the people.

Rousseau’s philosophy of the general will suggests that the will of the majority may not always be in the best interest of the people even when the people so will, as may be indicated by their vote patterns. This is to say that the majority will may not be in the best interest of the majority. The question now is how do we find the general will? The act of voting and its dynamics indeed answers Russeau’s general will question.
When we vote, the result of the exercise clearly shows the direction of the will of the majority. Now since this “majority will” is not the general will, then the only way we can arrive at what is in the best interest of the people (the general will) is to identify the value of dissenting votes and subsequently applying such value. It is typically some sort of symbiotic process between the thesis (majority will) and the antithesis (minority will) to produce the synthesis (general will).
In actual fact, votes of dissent are the first salvo of constructive criticism any government that is formed from an election can get. They show that there are some aspects of the manifesto of the emerging government that are not approved by some people or at least need some fine tuning. What any government that wants to succeed with the people must do is certainly not to shortchange dissenting voices. Rather it will seek to identify and understand why there is such dissension.
When this is done, the government formulates ways to reach out to the dissenting constituencies through their opinion champions. Through such outreach, it becomes easier for the government to identifying grey areas in its scheme of things, its programmes or its manifesto and subsequently easier to address them. A government that sufficiently adopts an approach as this stands a better chance of success.
In terms of the allocation of resources, the only credible and justifiable way to do it is to follow the law on resource allocation and not by the quantum of votes that come from each constituency or region. Under fiscal federalism every beneficiary be it local governments, state governments or the central government has specific amounts attached to it under the law. This is irrespective of the fact that a particular local government voted majorly in favour of the incumbent government or even totally refused to vote.
In the same token under derivation, states where different resources are obtained are entitled to specific amounts measured as percentages of such revenues collected. The law does not say in any way that such state would not get its due where it votes in a particular direction or refuses to vote in a particular direction.
When allocating semi tangible and intangible resources, there is the doctrine of federal character which is even backed up by law. By this doctrine allocation of positions and other less tangible benefits are to be done in such a way as to engender a fair measure of even development and sense of belonging among the federating units of the union. The principle of federal character, even though seen as retrogressive in some quarters, does not give such conditions as “voting rightly” or “voting wrongly”.
All in all, we must understand that the essence of voting is not for the determination of who gets what and under what conditions. Rather voting is the most effective instrument of determining the “Rousseauian” general will. This is by first establishing the majority will and then using the minority will to fine tune the will of the majority. Both wills are expressed by voting. And even though the details of dissention are obtainable from champions of public opinion, it is the patterns of voting that provide the basis to the extant government, for asking the right questions.
Governments, be they federal, state or local must understand the use of voting in an election in all its ramifications, particularly voting patterns that express dissention. Unless we explore, discover and apply the positive value inherent in dissenting votes rather than use the latter as an instrument for resource allocation, we will be practicing mobocracy ultimately deny ourselves the beautiful system of government inherent in democracy.