After a flurry of campaigning that took over campus, intense debates and one very long election scrutinizing process, the McMaster Students Union has chosen its next president-elect: Chukky Ibe.

Ibe won by a considerable margin, with at least 1,000 votes between him and each of his contenders. This year’s election saw a voter turnout of 9,327, meaning 41.6 per cent of the MSU population voted in this year’s election. This is slight decrease from last year, where 44.5 per cent of the MSU population voted.

Ibe, a fifth-year Political Sciences student, ran on a platform aiming to improve the lives of undergraduate students at every level, ranging from large-scale projects such as implementing better wifi to smaller projects like the MSYou, which will survey other candidates’ platforms to add popular projects from other platforms.

Ibe recalls Jan. 26, the last day of voting, as a calm day. Rather than linger over the election results all night, which were not released until 3:30 a.m. on Jan. 27, Ibe opted to decompress following the end of the campaigning period.

Rather than gather with his campaign team waiting for the election results, Ibe opted to take the evening for himself and wait until the morning to see the actual results of the election. Ibe turned off his phone and computer and went to bed early.

“I tell my friends it’s like ‘divine nonchalance’; you control the things you can control. Once it’s done, you just wait for whatever outcome it’ll be,” said Ibe.

Ibe missed the traditional call the new president-elect receives from the current MSU president, and did not find out he had won the election until much later that day when he finally felt comfortable checking social media.

“Helen [Zeng, Chief Returning Officer of the MSU Elections Department], woke me up. She came to me in my dream and she said, ‘Chukky, it’s okay to check your phone’. I checked my email, and I had gotten an email from this guy who helped me out with the campaign and he said congratulations on being the next MSU president,” said Ibe.

Ibe’s plans for the next few months before he takes office include finishing his degree and ensuring his suggestions for Welcome Week are implemented before planning ends in March.

While still in shock about his win, Ibe believes his platform truly represented the needs of the people and the election results reflect that. Ibe cites his experiences outside the MSU as well as his campaign team for his win.

“I’ve always been a part of many communities on campus, so when I say a thing [from my platform] it’s not coming from thin air. When I talked to people, it was less about my platform and more about what their concerns are,” said Ibe.

Ibe’s campaign team was on the smaller size, with about 13 core team members and about 115 volunteers. Ibe feels his team’s diversity is another aspect to why he won this election.

“We had a balance of people who had done things for a long time, and people who had no idea what a campaign team should look like. We also had people who were MSU bubble deep and people who give zero shits about the MSU,” Ibe said.

Ibe is ultimately excited to see what he can bring to the MSU in the coming months.

Every campaign season, behind every candidate, there is a diligent group of students who volunteer their time to help run the campaigns, who work just as tirelessly to secure their candidate the McMaster Students Union’s presidency.

One of these people is Kamini Persaud, a third-year Communications Studies student who has now been on three campaign teams, most recently as president-elect Chukky Ibe’s brand manager.

Persaud’s involvement and success as a core team member is impressive; she was the brand manager for John Tambakis in her first year and helped him clinch third place, and managed Sarah Jama’s tumultuous campaign last year, who not only had Jama’s disqualification repealed but also achieved second place.

Persaud has been involved with presidential elections since her first year, when Tambakis, one of her Welcome Week residence representatives, asked her if she wanted to get involved with his campaign.

“I went to my first meeting and there were five of us and he was like, ‘Okay. This is the core team,’ and I was like ‘I didn’t sign up to be on the core team.’ I just thought I was going to wear a button and hand out cookies,” said Persaud.

She was tasked with being Tambakis’ brand manager, where she worked with a team to manage his social media and image. Persaud was surprised to find that she had thoroughly enjoyed the process, and found it applicable to her future pursuits.

“I didn’t want it to end. I understand how students think, and I’ve taken a lot of classes on it because this is my program,” she said.

“It just kind of made sense that I kept doing this so I could apply what I was learning in class because sitting down learning in class for me was nothing. But when I was doing PR in the real world, I was like, ‘I get it now’.”

Persaud emphasized the amount of work and dedication that is put in into creating a successful campaign, most of which excludes the two-week campaigning period.

Persaud feels there are a few basic aspects to every successful campaign. She first cited having the right candidate, someone who exuded a calm charisma who students would feel comfortable getting behind.

She also explained the importance of appealing to the masses, as opposed to focusing on niche groups who already vote..

“It’s about narrowing down the demographics that don’t vote. That’s what Ehima [Osazuwa, MSU president 2015-2016] did; he got the people who don’t usually vote to vote, and that’s why he won,” Persaud said.

She also notes campaign teams focus too much on the presentation of the candidate as opposed to what their candidate is saying, and reliance on alienating language, which deters students from paying attention.

“Students do not care about businessmen or politics, they don’t care about jargon. They care about things that are relatable,” she said.

While Persaud does not plan on running for a public position herself, she has expressed interest in running another campaign, with a few conditions.

“I would only do it again if it were a candidate I believed in, and knew was going to win,” Persaud said.

But with Persaud on a high, it will not be long until she is asked again.

Every year, we hear the same sentiments about the McMaster Students Union presidential election: “why does this matter? The president doesn’t do anything anyway.”

The criticism is unfair, but the sentiment is understandable. The majority of undergraduate students are just beginning to really engage with politics beyond that silly Grade 10 civics course, and they are starting to see how politicians will fail to deliver on their promises.

As I noted in an editorial a couple weeks ago, presidents gone by have struggled to complete their platforms. It has turned some off student politics because they don’t trust the system. These people don’t believe that presidents will ever reach their goals.

I wonder if the 2017 election will only feed the narrative.

Through our critiques and during the debates, we found that president-elect Chukky Ibe’s platform had a number of ideas that were created with little to no consultation of relevant groups, meaning the feasibility of these projects is questionable.

Here’s an example: at the Silhouette’s debate, Ibe struggled to give a clear answer of where he would find the money to fund the expansion of services, saying he would “repurpose” money within the MSU. When pressed on where specifically the money would come from, Ibe gave an answer for the childcare platform point: repurposing the existing MSU emergency grants, a program designed to help full-time students in times of financial need. The MSU allotted $10,000 this past year for emergency grants.

In Ontario, child care costs over $1,000 over a month, meaning changing this fund would not help many students and also disadvantage those students who were claiming the fund before.

There may be other ways to fund this idea through repurposing, but the plan proposed isn’t a solid one. These are the scenarios that discourage people from getting involved.

And still, there is an opportunity. Ibe has a lot of work to do to achieve his ambitious platform; that’s a challenge, not a condemnation. By all accounts, Ibe is passionate and hard working.

If he can pull off the majority of his platform points, it should inspire people who don’t vote to get involved. The MSU has always been capable of real change and maybe Ibe can be the person to highlight that by completing a number of projects.

I stand by our reporting that found a number of significant roadblocks to success, so I’m not betting on it.

But yes, I’m saying there’s a chance.

With over 23 projects, Chukky Ibe’s platform is one packed with ideas that require the aid of multiple groups, ranging from the McMaster Students Union to the university provost to city hall itself. When considering a platform as large as his, it is imperative that thorough, preliminary consultation is done to ensure its feasibility. But certain aspects of his platform lack such consultation.

Consider Ibe’s point concerning expanding the MSU Underground Media + Design, which students use to print various assignments and projects. Aiming to improve infrastructure, Ibe’s platform seeks to cut lines at the Undergrounds by implementing a Smart Serve service which would allow students to pay for their printing online and pick up their assignments at their leisure. Additionally, Ibe hopes to create a satellite site on the other side of campus, near the engineering lecture halls.

It is clear that Ibe did not consult with the Underground when developing this platform point; if he had, he would have discovered the fundamental problems with it. His current platform would only increase student cost for little benefit, which contradicts Ibe’s stance on lowering student cost. What he is proposing is undeniably expensive, as it would require the purchasing of new technology and rental space, and according to research done by the Underground’s full-time staff, would only cause confusion and likely not shorten lines.

It should also be noted that the university already offers online printing at all libraries and a few other buildings through a service called PrintSmart, which also costs $0.06 per black and white page.

The Underground platform is indicative of a larger issue with Ibe’s campaign: the lack of comprehensive research. A simple email to one of the Underground’s full-time staff would have shown the logistical issues with his proposal, and such an issue can be found in other parts of his platform.

For example, Ibe wishes to mandate that Creating Leadership Amongst Youth conference to make it “effective to the needs of the city”. He did not consult with anyone on the current or past CLAY executive team, who are taking a different approach to reaching out to youth in Hamilton this year. While CLAY is excited to work with Ibe on this platform point, a simple consultation would have allowed for a greater dialogue and made sure that there were no redundancies.

In addition, Ibe did not consult any of the part-time service managers from MSU Diversity Services, the Student Health Education Centre or the Women and Gender Equity Network on his platform about clustering MSU clubs and MSU services and all noted the naturally-occurring relationship they already have with the pertinent clubs. All three services currently hold events with clubs with similar goals, making this point largely moot. It should also be noted that MSU clubs and MSU services fulfill very different niches within the McMaster community: clubs are meant to join students of a similar interest together, while services are meant to fill a gap within the McMaster university that may not be fulfilling. While these two are not mutually exclusive, this would only target clubs that deal with social causes who most likely already have a good relationship with their complementary MSU service.

Ibe also failed to consult the MSU Child Care Centre when formulating his platform point about expanding the centre to accommodate student parents. To his credit, Ibe does recognize the difficulty of such a platform point and has expressed this in past interviews, but without a proper consultation and discussion with the childcare director, the actual feasibility of this point remains up in the air.

A presidential candidate is expected to run on a platform that has already been thoroughly researched and already consulted with the necessary groups on campus. While it is true that the presidential candidate runs on a vision rather than a succinct plan, it is not fair to students to vote in a certain platform that is not feasible or already in the works. Although Ibe did consult with groups such as the Student Success Centre and the office of Ward 1 councillor Aidan Johnson, his failure to consult various groups on campus makes it difficult to trust his expansive platform.