So Sad That We, The Electorates, Still Beg For More Of What Ruined Us -By Isaac Asabor

There is a peculiar form of political amnesia that afflicts democracies, particularly those where patronage trumps policy and loyalty is mistaken for virtue. It is a condition that defies logic, scoffs at evidence, and turns the ballot box into a theatre of the absurd. I refer, of course, to the baffling phenomenon where a politician performs so catastrophically in his first tenure, marked by economic stagnation, infrastructural decay, and a masterclass in broken promises, that the very people he disappointed begin to clamor for his return. Not a second chance, mind you, but a second term of what they already know to be poison. And as if that were not enough, when term limits finally spare them, these same citizens turn around and reward failed governors, men who underperformed not once but twice, with a promotion to the Senate.

This is not democracy. This is a collective death wish dressed in voting kit. Let us first address the absurdity of the returning failure. Imagine a surgeon who botches a routine appendectomy, leaves a sponge inside your abdomen, and sends you home with a fever. You survive, barely, after months of corrective surgery. Then, two years later, the same surgeon announces he is running for Chief of Surgery again, and you, the very patient he nearly killed, organize a rally in his honor. You chant his name. You will buy him a new stethoscope. This is the political reality in too many nations, from the world’s oldest democracies to its youngest. Voters have developed a perverse nostalgia for failure, mistaking familiarity for competence.

We see it clearly in the arithmetic of governance. A first-term president or governor inherits a nation or state. He blames every pothole, every power outage, every hospital without drugs on his predecessor. This excuse works for roughly eighteen months. But by year three, the ledger is his own. When GDP shrinks, when unemployment balloons, when the currency loses half its value and farmers cannot afford fertilizer, that is his report card. And yet, when election season rolls around, the same electorate that cursed his name over breakfast now wears his face on a T-shirt. Why?

The answer is uncomfortable, and it lies not in the politician’s merit but in the voter’s desperation. In environments where political alternatives are either nearly identical or perceived as worse, voters engage in what behavioral economists call “loss aversion squared.” They calculate: “I know this man is a thief, but at least he steals at a predictable pace. The other might steal everything and set my house on fire.” This is the logic of the abused spouse who stays because the devil she knows is less terrifying than the devil she does not know. It is tragic, yes, but it is also an indictment of the opposition’s failure to offer a credible alternative. When your choice is between cholera and dysentery, you do not celebrate, you expire.

Then there is the even more bewildering sequel: the two-term failure who, having proven himself incompetent for eight full years, is hailed as a senatorial savior. The mathematics here is genuinely infuriating. If a governor could not fix primary education in a single state over two terms, what possible wisdom will he bring to the Senate, where national policy is forged? If he left the state’s debt profile in tatters and workers unpaid for months, why would anyone trust him with federal appropriation bills? The Senate, in theory, is the chamber of elders, of sober reflection, of constitutional oversight. In practice, it has become a retirement home for failed executives, a golden parachute for those who turned state capitals into monuments to mediocrity.

Consider the typical trajectory. A moneybags politician buys the governorship. He spends four years fighting with the legislature, ignoring civil servants, commissioning flyovers he never inspects, and cutting ribbons on hospitals that have no doctors. He runs for re-election on the slogan “Continuity and Experience,” even though the continuity is of suffering and the experience is of failure. He wins again because the opposition fields a candidate who once forgot to file his tax returns and has the charisma of a damp napkin. Two more years of decay have passed. When he finally leaves office, with the state’s credit rating in intensive care, he does not retire in shame. Instead, he lunches with party elders, donates money, every now and then, in the ward congresses, and picks up a senatorial ticket like a consolation prize. And the people? They cheer.

This is the part that breaks the rational mind. The very citizens who complained for eight years that the governor never fixed the water supply now argue that he “deserves to be senator because he knows the system.” But knowing the system is precisely the problem. He knows how to loot it. He knows how to delay salaries. He knows how to award contracts to his cousins. That is not experience; it is a criminal record of incompetence.

We must name the mechanisms that enable this tragedy. First, political godfatherism. In many party structures, the candidate is not chosen by the people but imposed by a few powerful figures who own the party machinery. The voter is left with a rubber stamp. Second, ethnic and religious sentimentality. In too many constituencies, a politician is judged not by his performance but by his surname, his place of birth, or the deity he prays to. A governor could turn the state into a failed entity, but if he is “our son” and sits in “our pew,” he is forgiven. Third, and most damningly, a culture of short memory. We are societies that mourn a collapsed bridge for one news cycle and then forget it once the funeral is over. The politician counts on this. He knows that by election day, the dam that burst and drowned twenty villages will be ancient history, drowned itself by fresh campaign cash and sacks of rice handed out at rallies.

What is to be done? The cynical answer is nothing. The optimistic answer requires a revolution in civic consciousness. First, voters must keep a scorecard. Not a mental note, but a documented, shared, verifiable record of promises versus performance. If a governor promised 10,000 jobs and created 200, that number should follow him to every campaign rally. Second, we must abolish the sentimental second term. If a leader fails in year one, year two, and year three, there is no magical transformation in year four. The only rational response is to fire him and bar him from ever holding a broom, let alone a senate seat. Third, the media must stop normalizing failure. When a two-term governor runs for Senate, the headline should not read “Veteran Administrator Seeks Higher Office.” It should read “Man Who Broke the State Now Wants to Break the Country.”

Ultimately, this is not a story about bad politicians. Bad politicians are a constant, like rain or mosquitoes. The real story is about the voters who enable them. We are not victims of our leaders; we are accomplices. Every time we re-elect a failure, we are not being hopeful. We are foolish. Every time we promote a failed governor to the Senate, we are not broadening his experience. We are deepening our own misery.

The philosopher, George Santayana, famously wrote that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But what of those who remember the past perfectly well, the potholes, the unpaid pensions, the hospital queues, the broken school roofs, and still vote the same way? They are not condemned to repeat the past. They are actively choosing to re-live it. And until we cure ourselves of this masochistic mandate, we will keep getting the leaders we deserve, not the ones we need. And that, dear reader, is the most heartbreaking tragedy of all. To say it in few words, it is so sad that we, the electorates, still beg for more of what ruined us.