OPINION BY TOPE FASUA: Before we destroy our democracy, we’d better study history | TheCable
There are a number of cognitive biases at play amongst us as a people. I have taken time to compile a few which are most concerning:The belief that yesterday is always better than today
We are wired to want the best, and want it now! We care little about how those things come to be. Young and old, we are infected by this disease. Young people I have met wonder why I use a Tecno Phone worth N120,000. I tell them so long as the thing works, I am fine. I am still in that space where I wonder and marvel at how these things are put together and will never take them for granted.
The rest of this article is presented as a short history of Presidential Democracy from the perspective of the world’s oldest mass democracy – United States of America. We have a lot to learn from that country but we should not expect them to force-feed us. We should try and debunk the myth that when you want to hide anything from a black person, you put it in a book.
September 28, 1868 – Opelousas Massacre begins. Over the course of about two weeks, White men in Opelousas, a city in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, killed around 250 people, mostly Black Americans. 1876 – Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately in 1877, they awarded the contested electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote.
1892 – Mississippi had cut the percentage of eligible Black men who were registered to vote from more than 90 percent to less than 6 percent. March 7, 1965 – Bloody Sunday. Up to 600 activists set out in Alabama to march from Selma to Montgomery to protest for Black voting rights. But when the marchers reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, they encountered White state troopers, who attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas.
July 27, 2006 – Most recent extension of the VRA. Republican President George W. Bush signed legislation extending the VRA for an additional 25 years, saying that “the right of ordinary men and women to determine their own political future lies at the heart of the American experiment.” Gerrymandering – the drawing of electoral districts by state legislatures in such a way as to dilute the voting power of members of a certain racial group or political party. This is done by packing specific races in one geographic zone, and then ‘cracking’ them by distributing their votes in many places where they cannot elect their choices. I want us to notice the sheer ingenuity involved in this manner of technical fraud, and understand that Nigeria is just learning.
Other tactics include the physical blocking of polling places by armed groups, as happened in several precincts in a contested South Carolina election in 1880. There was beating of black voters in the weeks before the election in an attempt to scare them out of trying to vote, as was ubiquitous in Louisiana. There were assassinations of local Republican politicians — black and white alike — as happened in Alabama in 1875.
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