Today, we relive the infernal crud of the Nigerian personae. The political animal, the apolitical pacifist, hyperbolic ‘influencer,’ and the data-fabulous millennial ‘netizen’ scud to shore national consciousness on the worldwide web, in support of one presidential candidate or the other.
Ultimately they cuddle one candidate and cringe from the other, as their vanities dictate. They’d call it value-based politics, however. Yet, this minute, cyberspace becomes a spectacle. In this virtual arena, citizens clash in defense and furtherance of random bigotries.
In this public space, everybody is a political wilding: folk trade bitter realism, infantile whim, pseudo idealism, rancid wit with alarming gusto. They claim to do this for the culture. If Nigerian politics had a culture.
The internet has become a monument to pseudo-realities and events. It is a place where stereotypes are propagated as reality. The guts and sinews of every pigeonhole, theme-park hatred, and sentimentality, however, hold the same as its professors seek validation in mind-numbing sloganeering, toxic bigotries, sophistry, and outright lies.
A casual visit to Facebook, Twitter manifests as a pilgrimage of sort; the esplanades of public discourse pander and unfurl to a sordid, cutout version of anarchic thinking, replete with the affliction of ethnic and religious bigotry, and the hassle of incomprehensible logic. Then there are the strange movements and morbid ideologies – all fostered and marshalled from bizarre platforms.
In this public wilderness, everybody pontificates. Everyone mutates from philosopher to savage pawn and vice versa; they all speak impressive and atrocious lingo. Call it our patois of rebuke and immoderate assemblies.
Here you encounter Nigerians of vast mental stripes: the BATIFIED, ATIKULATE, AND OBIDIENT. Once you get past the facade of slogans and artifice, it’s mostly the same defiant, virulent passion driving the mob.
As the bickering persists, we see the savage mutations of the political Nigerian: persons of presumed higher learning, persons afflicted by poverty, persons of affluence, authority, and high glamour. The lambent complexion turns muddy; the aura vanishes. Integrity is innately borne and espoused as a kernel of character but respect is a gift under no one’s control. It peaks and ebbs as spectator mood at a crunch soccer tie.
A familiar decline from admiration to disillusion, hope to disenchantment festers in the citizenry’s public engagement with each other and their elected representatives
But our greatest undoing would be our inability to douse the flames of bigotries and hatred incited by our utterances and cutthroat politics.
As we approach the 2023 polls, for instance, our politics must be rid of rancour. There is no excuse for maligning an individual, group, or social divide for its political choices and preferred candidates.
Where such mayhem subsists, everybody gets burnt: the ruling class, opposition parties, the entitled elite, and the rich upper class. At the bottom of the cauldron, however, roasts the incorrigible hordes of the boondocks, or the electorate if you like.
Through the inferno and chaos, we seek a redefinition of the Nigerian patriot. Strikeout patriot; it’s about time we redefined the Nigerian. Nigerian – a clownish, simple creature, at times even enchanting within its limitations but ultimately foredoomed to fulfill a prophecy of blind pride, insatiable lust, and suicide?
It is never my wish to subject anyone to seemingly reckless deprecation but even as you read, the random ‘netizen’ perfects innumerable plots to self-destruct. Behind those suicidal plots lurks a postscript, and predictably, regret – that emotive shingle that often succeeds disreputable nature.
Yet we stand ignorant and proud, like a half-conscious mutter of men, craving the essence of humanity and freedom, only to forsake it for a token or fleeting sentiment at election time. Just like we did at the last general elections.
This is the tangle of witlessness and resignation that requires us all to become better patriots and rejuvenators of the Nigerian dream. If we look carefully inwards, we will find that beneath our toxicity, selective morality and utter cowardice stirs gruesome airs and a quest for self-preservation.
Time and over again, a few critics and self-appointed leaders of thought have decried our ethical fraudulence, cutthroat politics, and lack of guts; such curious kinks of the Nigerian electorate, unfortunately, do exist at a grievous price and must be reckoned with. Yet these shameful twists to our psyches make us even more vulnerable as fair game to gangs of the predatory ruling class.
The latter cannot be wished away or successfully weeded out by violence or bloodshed even if we tried. Yet the surest way to deny them continual access to leadership and power is for us to engage constructively in the ongoing transition process.
We must shun the urge to emerge grisly manifestations of the Nigerian factor; we must quit personifying the monstrosities standing on our path to humane civilization, progress, and common decency.
It’s about time Nigeria’s youth stopped personifying such frantic manifestations and chart their path to freedom from toxic politicking.
Education is the key out of this mental and moral jail cell. A different kind of education borne of critical faculties and divorced from the high-priced occupational training by which the modern university turns several youths into mindless certificate-seeking machines.
While violence and terrorism are often part of revolutions, the fundamental tool of any successful revolt is the non-violent conversion of the forces deployed by the oppressors or the state to hoodwink and enforce dominance, on the side of the rebels. Most successful revolutions are, for this reason, fundamentally non-violent.
Revolutionary measures, however, fail in Nigeria, because the arrowheads of the movements continually cloak their measures and homilies in hostilities and platitudinous chant, that hackneyed dialect that is a barrier to development and communication.
It is the same dialect adopted by the political and corporate con-artists to bait the electorate and reel in their votes; only to hoodwink them afterward, and rig the political process and financial system in the obscure, cryptic language coined by their elite psyops and propaganda labs.
To strip the incumbent ruling class of power, a new class of political leadership must emerge to assert the mental and moral freedom of the citizenry by communicating in a language comprehensible to the common man.
This can’t be achieved via the 2023 elections. Now is a good time to start, however. We must begin to teach the Nigerian voter: graduate and undergrad, street urchin, trader, commercial transporter, the armed forces, and unemployed, the benefits of restraint and self-sacrifice, critical and realistic thinking.
We need not bury the lessons and the process in obscure or esoteric lingo. Teach them to scorn vote seekers who only visit the electorate to share corn meals and hold town-hall meetings at the dawn of general elections.
Teach them to scorn the presidential aspirant scudding to acclaim on a sea of lies, sophistry, and half-truths. Teach them to scorn the legislative representatives, who commit crumbs of their constituency allowances to empower their constituents with wheelbarrows, machetes, sachet water, and pepper grinding machines, among others.
Teach them to ask their elected representatives, why they must blindly support the latter’s battles with perceived political detractors or opposition. After all, we are one Nigeria. Teach them to scorn violence, vote-selling, and hooliganism.
Help them understand that a loss at the polls should never translate to bitterness and withdrawal from the Nigerian enterprise; political violence and hooliganism are never acceptable resorts in nation-building.
Better tomorrow can only be achieved via humane, visionary politics tailored for the collective good.