*PVC Fatigue Syndrome*

 

At the rate people are being literally forced to go and collect their PVC, I do hope that it would not lead to what I call PVC-Fatigue-Syndrome, which would have unintended consequences for the 2023 general elections.

By nature, humans do not like to be coerced to do something even if it is in their best interest. It's common knowledge that the elections would take place next year, so, those who are being pressured constantly to go and collect their PVC are most likely to develop the fatigue syndrome since they didn't obtain their PVC voluntarily. They are more likely to become physically and mentally exhausted to look for their PVC when the time comes to go to the polling units to vote. 

 The bulk of those kinds of voters would not be enthusiastic to go out to vote because they do not have a preferred candidate except if they are induced to do so. By inducement I do not necessarily mean pecuniary, but whatever anyone else does to motivate them to leave their comfort zones to go and vote for the person’s preferred candidate. It is instructive to note that any action, which anyone undertakes to influence another person to skew the election in favor of his or her preferred candidate amounts to rigging just like vote-buying.

At the end of the day, the fatigue syndrome would result in a situation where those who were compelled to go and collect their PVC so that they can vote for the preferred candidate of their influencers might turn out to vote for the candidate of whoever induces them the most. Such an unintended turn of events would be beneficiary to a candidate who is prepared for vote-buying which appears to be the most appealing manner of rigging elections in the country today. 

Those who are campaigning against vote-buying are doing a fantastic job but if they understand how endemic it has become they would appreciate the fact that it can not be uprooted in one electoral cycle. As empirical evidence in older democracies has demonstrated, we would need decades of sustained political education and social engineering to be able to vitiate or blight that kind of political culture. It is not a walk in the park. It is a tedious but gradual marathon because those who are benefiting from the subsisting 

political culture would do everything possible to sustain the status quo. They won't just give up without a fight. 

For  such a struggle to succeed it should be championed by Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), now collectively referred to as Non-State Actors, and not by a candidate who is contesting the presidential election on a political party platform. This is because the candidate is most likely to chicken out from the struggle to enthrone a new political culture if he loses the election.  

That way, the  struggle to uproot the obnoxious political culture would fail woefully. This explains why we earnestly need CSOs who are perceived as neutral to lead and sustain the struggle to get the buy-in of all the citizenry irrespective of ethnicity, religion, gender, or political affiliations. If the struggle is sustained off-and-on electoral cycles, in schools, churches, mosques, and on all media, it would impact voters' registration and PVC collection positively without the need to overtly coerce the electorates to do so.

*Felix Akpan Ph.D.*

lixzito@yahoo.co.uk