By the time this column appears on Sunday, 16 August, the people of Osun would have voted. The ballot boxes would have closed, the votes would have been counted and the political gladiators will be facing democracy’s oldest instruction: someone wins; someone loses; both remain citizens. That simple democratic proposition has often struggled to survive the Nigerian political imagination.
The latest disturbance comes from Senator Francis Fadahunsi, whose viral campaign video has placed the words ‘kill them’ at the centre of the Osun electoral conversation. Reports attribute to the Senator a call to supporters to kill Accord Party members and an assertion that even if they came to the polling station with voter cards, ‘we won’t allow them to vote.’ The Senator has subsequently explained that he meant ‘kill Accord with votes, not violence.’ That explanation belongs to the record and should be considered alongside the original recording, its context and the full circumstances surrounding it. The National Human Rights Commission has nevertheless called for his suspension, arrest and investigation, while the matter has generated a formal demand for police action. The law must determine the legal consequences. WordMatters must examine the words. And these words cannot be understood adequately as an isolated outburst. They belong to a longer Nigerian continuum.
The first great drumbeat came from the ‘Wild Wild West’ of the First Republic. The Western Region crisis of 1965 transformed political rivalry into frightening physical violence. The period became associated with ‘Operation Wetie,’ a brutal campaign in which political opponents, homes and vehicles were doused with petrol and set ablaze. The lesson should have been permanently etched into the national memory: When political power becomes a matter of life and death, politics ceases to be politics. However, the vocabulary returned in another form. In 2007, the presidential election was described as a ‘do-or-die affair’. The expression entered the national political lexicon as shorthand for a contest in which defeat was rendered existential. A political contest had become a matter of survival.
Then came another mutation in 2022 when political supporters were admonished that political power was not served ‘a la carte;’ instead, they must fight for it and by all means, snatch and run with it. This political rhetoric doubled down recently with ‘All is fair in politics’ declaration! Again, the words matter as power ceased to sound like a public trust and begins to sound like booty. Now comes: ‘Kill them.’ The political opponent is no longer merely someone to defeat. He becomes someone to eliminate. That is the point at which the continuum becomes frightening. Mr. President’s exhortation to the Osun voters: ‘Go out to vote candidate of your choice on Saturday without fear’ represented a radical departure from the toxic drumbeats. Nonetheless, they reveal a persistent political imagination in which winning becomes progressively more important than preserving the legitimacy, safety and dignity of the opponent. That is where Governance Optimality Theory enters the conversation.
Optimality Theory (OT), developed by Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky in 1993, belongs to phonology, the study of the sound system of language. Its basic architecture is remarkably simple. GEN, the Generator, produces a range of possible candidates. Think of it as a linguistic workshop in which several possible forms can be made available. CON, the set of Constraints (Markedness and Faithfulness), ranks competing requirements. The first constraint says, ‘Make the output conform to what the system considers desirable, natural, simple or well-formed;’ the second says, ‘Don’t change the underlying input unnecessarily.’ There is a fundamental tension between Markedness and Faithfulness; wherein lies the genius of OT. One cannot always satisfy both; something has to give. The outcome depends on which constraints outrank the other. This explains why the ranking is hierarchical because some constraints matter more than others. EVAL, the Evaluator, compares the candidates against those ranked constraints and selects the candidate that best satisfies the higher-ranking constraints. That selected form is the ‘Optimal Candidate.’
Governance Optimality Theory (GOT), I derived from the OT to serve sociolinguistic purpose, takes this architecture from the world of ‘sounds’ and adapts it to the world of ‘governance’. The G-GEN (Governance Generator) takes a governance problem and generate alternative possible outcomes. The political system also generates candidates. For instance, a politician seeking victory can say: ‘Defeat them at the polls.’ ‘Outvote them.’ ‘Persuade their supporters.’ ‘Campaign harder.’ ‘Win the election.’ These are possible rhetorical candidates. But another vocabulary is also available: ‘Do or die.’ ‘Grab it.’ ‘Snatch it.’ ‘Run with it.’ ‘Kill them.’
The question GOT asks is not merely: Which expression is most powerful? It asks: Which rhetorical candidate best satisfies the highest-ranking constraints of democratic governance? In a healthy democratic system, the higher-ranking constraints (normative constraints – i.e., constraints that ought to govern a constitutional democracy) should be obvious: human life; peace; equal citizenship; free political participation; the right to vote; legitimate opposition; rule of law; accountability; religious and political tolerance. A political expression that violates those constraints should lose. That is how optimality ought to work. Nigeria, however, presents a more disturbing possibility. Nigerian system of democracy develops operative constraints, i.e., informal constraints that actually determine what survives: patronage, prebendalism, elite accommodation, state capture, violence; rigging; personalisation of power, cronyism, religious and ethnic mobilisation.
What happens when these operative constraints are ranked higher than the normative constraints by the corrupt system? The answer is the conceptual breakthrough that makes Governance Optimality Theory particularly useful for understanding Nigeria. The system may still produce an ‘Optimal Candidate’. It may still generate alternatives. It may still rank its constraints. It may still evaluate the candidates. It may still produce a winner. However, while the winner may not be the ‘best candidate,’ the winner may simply be the candidate that ‘best satisfies the highest-ranking constraints of a corrupted system. That distinction changes everything. In other words, G-EVAL evaluates the available candidates against the operative hierarchy of constraints. And here lies the central proposition of GOT. The governance output that emerges is the candidate that best satisfies the highest-ranked operative constraints; not necessarily the candidates that best satisfies the ideals of constitutional democracy.
In classical OT, ‘optimal’ has a technical meaning. It does not necessarily mean morally perfect.
It means the candidate that wins under the hierarchy of constraints. GOT retains that meaning. Consequently, if Nigerian politics has elevated electoral fraud, religious and ethnic arithmetic, patronage and impunity above peaceful competition, equal citizenship and the rule of law, the candidate who is most adept at satisfying those conditions may emerge as the system’s Optimal Candidate. But that is not democratic success. It is ‘optimised failure’. The system has not failed to optimise; it has optimised successfully for the wrong things. That is the Nigerian paradox.
This is where the ‘Broken Mortar and Rotten Palm-Nut’ (Mkp?k?r? Ikwe n? ?kw? Reburu ?n?) metaphor becomes more than a colourful image. Imagine a housewife mashing palm nuts in a mortar. The mortar is broken. The palm nuts are rotten. Still, the mashing continues. The process may be vigorous and efficient. The operator may even be exceptionally skilled. But the output cannot be wholesome. The problem lies deeper than the mashing. The instrument is defective. So are the material and the hierarchy of the process. Nigeria’s political system can therefore produce an electoral winner while simultaneously producing a governance failure. The candidate may have won. The process may have optimised but the result may still be rotten; hence the OPTIMISED FAILURES. That is the Nigerian extension of GOT.
The significance of Fadahunsi’s rhetoric becomes clearer within this framework. Suppose the objective is to defeat Accord. GEN supplies several possible rhetorical candidates: Persuade them.
Outvote them. Defeat them. Crush them politically. Kill them. G-CON then asks which constraints matter most. In a healthy democratic order, peace, life, citizenship and the right to vote would outrank partisan victory. ‘Kill them’ would therefore be eliminated. But imagine a corrupted hierarchy in which winning at all costs outranks the life and political rights of the opponent. The outcome changes. The violent candidate, having out-ranked the peaceful candidate, eventually emerges victorious as the optimal candidate! The danger is not merely the presence of violent words. It is the possibility that the political system has learned to reward the people who speak them most effectively. A rhetoric of violence becomes a political resource. Intimidation becomes campaign capital. Fear becomes mobilisation. Vote buying becomes strategy. Religious division becomes arithmetic. Impunity becomes confidence. And the broken mortar sustains the futile process of mashing rotten palm nuts.
The reported statement credited to Senator Fadahunsi concerning voter cards makes the matter even more serious. A voter card is a small piece of plastic carrying a large democratic idea: I have the right to participate. The reported response – ‘we won’t allow them to vote’ – represents the opposite idea: Our political power determines whether your political right survives. That is not merely aggressive campaign language. It attacks the very principle that makes an election what it is. The political opponent may be defeated. His vote cannot be defeated before it is cast. He may be persuaded. He cannot be silenced. He may lose. He cannot be rendered politically nonexistent.
Also, his imperial directive to supporters, ‘I authorise you to kill them’ adds another disturbing dimension. A Senator’s authority is not personal property. It is constitutional authority entrusted for public purposes. A Senator may legislate, investigate, represent, and may mobilise voters; however, he cannot convert public office into a rhetorical licence for violence. The word ‘authorise’ therefore deserves special attention. It transforms an expression of anger into an apparent grant of permission. The distinction is profound. ‘Vote against them’ is democratic mobilisation. ‘Defeat them’ is democratic competition. ‘Kill them’ is violent elimination. ‘I authorise you to kill them’ turns political authority into permission for violence. That is a governance constraint that should never be allowed to rank below partisan victory.
Saturday’s Osun election therefore represents more than another gubernatorial contest. It is a test of whether Nigeria can distinguish political combat from political warfare. By Sunday, one candidate will have more votes than the others. The losing candidate will still have supporters. Those supporters will still be citizens. The winning candidate will inherit a state containing people who did not vote for him. That is the discipline of democracy. The winner does not inherit the right to silence the loser. They inherit the responsibility to govern them. And here lies the profound irony of GOT.
The Optimal Candidate that emerges from an electoral system is not automatically the candidate Nigeria needs. If the constraints have been corrupted, the system can produce an Optimised Failure. That is why the Nigerian democratic project requires more than changing candidates. It requires re-ranking the constraints. Human life must rank above partisan victory. The right to vote must rank above political intimidation. Peace must rank above power accumulation. Equal citizenship must rank above religious arithmetic. Rule of law must rank above impunity. Public trust must rank above patronage. Only then does the Optimal Candidate begin to approximate the Best Candidate. Until then, Nigeria may continue to pound ‘?kw? reburu ?n?’ (rotten palm nuts) in a broken mortar (mkp?k?r? ikwe) and congratulate itself each time the system produces another ‘winner’ The output is called victory snatched and grabbed through the instrumentality of informal constraints. Alan and Smolensky’s theory calls it optimality. WordMatters calls it what it is: Optimised Failure. Word, as always, matters.