On Senator Abaribe and the South-East caucus: My thoughts, by Tope Popoola
In any parliament or legislative assembly globally, negotiations happen all the time. It is called lobbying. This is why lobbyists/negotiators are supposed to be in the engine room of legislative office.
Life itself is an entire series of negotiations. As a certified Mediator/Negotiator and Arbitrator, I know how negotiation rules every part of our lives. Life doesn’t always give you what you deserve but mostly what you negotiate. This is why every successful person you see traded something. The difference is in what each person traded. Do not express hate or admiration for anyone until you know what they traded to get to where they are. Wars are avoided, ended or escalated depending on what happens at the negotiation table. In life, you negotiate ALL, but be ready to lose some and win some. But the more skilled you are at negotiation, the more you’ll get people to do things for you.
Before you aspire to anything, always find out what the tradeoffs are. It makes your trajectory faster when you eventually begin the pursuit.
Throwing tantrums, playing victim, walking out of parliamentary sessions are to me, signs of badly done parliamentary homework. What is transparent to you may be opaque to another. Wherever you find yourself, no matter how smart you are, build bridges. Some of the people you look down on today may save your neck someday. In time, friends can become foes and foes can become veritable and dependable allies. Politics should teach you that.
Bills IN ANY PARLIAMENT globally, are not passed because of the brilliance of presentation or merit of content but in the ability of the proponents to do the necessary background work of hard, sometimes punishing work of lobbying for the support of a significant number of members. This, rather than the merit or quality of a bill, is what makes the difference in the number of “Ayes” or “Nays” in Parliament.
Senator Abaribe has been in the Senate long enough to know that this is the norm. Making his colleagues look bad by staging a walkout and throwing tantrums over a rejected bill does not accord credit to his long sojourn in the chamber.
Emotional intelligence matters a lot in these matters. Belligerent bellicosity only alienates you from those who could have favored your cause! Even the real hero of June 12, MKO Abiola, who won that election, was not immortalized until 25 years after! But it happened with consistency of discourse and behind the scene negotiations with successive administrations until 2018!
But what do I know? After all, I am neither a Senator nor a politician.
–Rev Popoola is an arbitrator based in United States
