By Abdul Mahmud
There is a form of political injury which begins during election campaigns when politicians speak to citizens about the future with a confidence that often exceeds the evidence available to support what they promise. Roads will be repaired. Jobs will appear. Food will become affordable. Security will return. Hospitals will work. Wages will rise. A new country is placed before the voter in words, images and carefully rehearsed speeches, and the citizen is invited to believe that the distance between the country that exists and the country that ought to exist can be closed by placing a thumb on a ballot paper. This form of political injury occasioned by lies has provide no immediate remedy.
The lies which begin at the point they are told do not necessarily end when the votes are counted. So also are the consequences.
I call the phenomenon, The Political Promise Trauma, TPPT. The term, which isn’t intended as a clinical diagnosis, describes the psychological and civic injury that may follow when citizens invest hope in political promises and later discover that the future they were persuaded to expect will not arrive. The injury is more profound than ordinary disappointment because the promise concerns a person’s life. It can determine a child’s prospect of finding work, a family’s ability to eat properly, the safety of a community, an elderly parent’s access to medical treatment or the decision of a young graduate to remain in the country.
Political campaigns are exercises in the manufacture of expectations. Every serious promise creates a picture of tomorrow in the mind of the voter. The candidate does not merely ask for a vote; the candidate asks the citizen to imagine what life might become after the vote. That imagination is politically valuable because hope can mobilise people more effectively than statistics.
A citizen who believes that tomorrow will be better is prepared to endure the difficulties of today. The problem begins when political actors knowingly construct that expectation without the intention, capacity or political will to fulfil it. Nigeria has lived through enough electoral cycles to understand the pattern. Campaign season arrives with its vocabulary of transformation, renewal, recovery and prosperity. Citizens listen because they have little choice but to hope. Poverty makes promises attractive. Insecurity makes promises of safety compelling.
Unemployment makes every pledge of economic opportunity personal. A country in which millions struggle with the ordinary costs of living does not encounter political promises as mere propositions. It encounters them as possible exits from hardship. This is why the broken promise can become a source of injury.
A voter who believed that government would improve his circumstances may eventually discover that his circumstances have become worse; and the family that anticipated cheaper food may find the market increasingly beyond its reach. At that point, the political promise which acquires an afterlife survives in the memory of what people were told would happen and confronts them daily with what actually happened. The resulting emotion is not always anger. Shame can be more difficult to confront, particularly for those who defended their electoral choice before friends and relatives and must later live with the consequences of having persuaded others to believe in the same promise.
Resentment may be directed at those who made the promise, but the injury can travel further, reaching the citizen’s faith in politics itself. After repeated persuasion followed by repeated disappointment, a person may begin to doubt whether political participation can alter the conditions of his life at all. Cynicism then becomes a form of self-protection. Expecting nothing can feel safer than allowing hope to take hold again, only to watch it collapse.
This is where Political Promise Trauma becomes a civic problem rather than a private emotional experience. Democracy depends upon citizens believing that political speech has some relationship with political reality. The credibility of elections cannot be separated completely from the credibility of the promises surrounding them. Once citizens conclude that campaign language is simply an instrument for acquiring power, the damage extends beyond the politician who made the promise.
The credibility of democratic politics itself begins to erode. The problem is made worse by the difficulty of distinguishing an unfulfilled promise from a deliberately false one. Governments can encounter circumstances they did not anticipate, economic conditions can change, policies can fail despite honest intentions, and campaign promises can also be knowingly extravagant from the moment they are made. These are not identical situations. Political accountability requires that distinction to be maintained because failure is not necessarily deception.
Nevertheless, citizens are entitled to ask a harder question: what did the politician know when the promises were made?
This question takes us beyond the ordinary language of broken promises. A politician who makes an ambitious commitment in good faith and later fails is not in the same moral position as one who makes promises while knowing that they cannot realistically be fulfilled. The latter does not only mismanage expectation, he also manufactures it.
The consequences can endure for years. Children who grow up hearing that government is about to create opportunities may become an adult who regards every new promise with suspicion; and a young person who repeatedly watches political campaigns generate hope and government produce disappointment may begin to see public life as theatre. The damage is transmitted across electoral generations.
There is, consequently, a responsibility that belongs to political speech itself. Campaigns should not be treated as periods in which almost anything may be said because the immediate objective is victory. Promises made to a desperate population carry different weights from an ordinary political statement. The poorer the citizen, the more consequential the promises. The more insecure the community, the more dangerous the false assurance. Campaign lies do not end on election day. The psychological afterlife begins when citizens discover that the future they were persuaded to imagine was never going to arrive. Political Promise Trauma names that injury: the wound created when political hope is deliberately manufactured and subsequently abandoned.
Democracy cannot eliminate disappointments. No government can fulfil every expectation. But a republic should not make deception the price of renewed hope. Citizens can survive a difficult truth. What corrodes them is when they are persuaded to build their lives around a future that those who promised it never intended to construct in the first place.
I think I am suffering from TPPT, like you, dear reader.