En route to the 2023 elections, some presidential aspirants have presented with their manhood in flight; flaunting a juvenile skittishness, they leapfrog from mood to mood, from cloying fib to the ugliest lie, seeking to enchant dubious galleries.
Others have flaunted the privilege of incumbency, frantically playing to more sterile herds.
But the one Nigeria needs as her leader must be visionary, pragmatic, brilliant, and unflinchingly humane. He must flaunt a brilliant track record, glowing and fruitful, like a blooming orchard.
He is a true patriot, the type that wears altruism on his heart’s sleeves. Demagogues promise glory without sweat, success without sudor, and get significant segments of the citizenry, mostly youth, hung up on the fantasy of a world without hardship.
That is not the kind of leader that we need. If there is a cautionary tale in Nigerian politics, it is in the tension between the politician and voter. Both schemers, their hostility echoes the proverbial race between the fox and tortoise. The fox, for all its brawn and trickery, meets his match in the tortoise, whose cunning eventually wins the race. Thus goes the ethically-correct narrative.
The fable, however, dissembles in the Nigerian wild. Ultimately, it manifests in reverse: picture the politician as the fox, the electorate as the tortoise, and the political arena as the wild. The fox beats the tortoise silly thus winning the race time and over again.
At the forthcoming general elections, the foxes will carry the day. It’s a given. The race had always been rigged in the interest of the foxes.
Thus this year as all others, Nigeria reels at the borderline between republic and empire. The electorate’s bent, however, will determine if the country would re-emerge as a republic of free people, from the 2023 elections.
At the moment, the indices are clear, and all the aspects manifest the actuality of the country as an oligarchic empire. The oligarchy that corrupted Nigeria’s politics, has been on song and its manipulative best en route to the 2023 elections.
The most affluent of the coven assign public offices by whim and lottery thus affirming the grim unreality of the electoral process.
In a bid to perpetuate themselves in power, formidable oligarchs assign national tracts and public offices to their children and political godsons – quoting phantom egalitarianism.
To their stooges, they assign power, lucrative contracts, and public offices with cautious benevolence and a disdainful smile.
They expect their child and protégé to enter the power elite, infinitely beholden to them – often through a rigged process. Of course, the recipients of such tarnished benevolence accept to play ball.
On assumption of office, they attempt a perfect interpretation of the script handed out to them, in a political high drama, in which they alternate the roles of deity and minion as the circumstances dictate.
They will scorn the poesies of democracy, likewise the humaneness and progress they hitherto promised the electorate en route to the polls.
They will embrace moral nihilism and so doing, perpetuate a radical evil sustainable by the collaboration of a timid, confused electorate, a system of propaganda and mass media that offers strictly spectacle and amusement in lieu of news, and an educational system incapable of transmitting transcendent values and nurturing the capacity for individual conscience.
If the electorate ignores the societal play of forces operating beneath current political platforms, Nigeria will once again, bear the curse of pitiless forms of governance through all tiers of government.
It doesn’t matter who wins the election, the political complex, established and presided over by predators, will subsist but the electorate would remain compliant and endure the bestial system foisted on them, often turning impatiently, to seek a cosy place within its crannies.
The prospective ruling class, like its predecessors, will set out to diminish the individual and crush his or her capacity for moral resistance thus ushering him into a seemingly harmonious collective.
This warped realism has previously manifested through spells of bad governance and tokenism inflicted on long-suffering communities across the country.
Each human fragment of the electorate knows what issues and inadequacies require urgent resolution as it relates to him and his community but most would rather stay quiet irrespective of their afflictions.
The persistent lack of electricity supply, bad roads, substandard health care, insecurity, unfavourable business clime, and an economy rigged in the interest of thievish bank chiefs, giant corporate thieves, and political class, remain the bane of Nigeria’s micro and macro development since independence.
The victors at the 2023 polls mustn’t maintain the status quo. Unlike previous governments, they must shun lifeboat solutions as responses to the country’s towering adversities.
Politicians take but statesmen give. The latter actualise good governance and progressive rebirth to earn honour. Politicians, however, fight and grab their way to identity and power, amassing fortune to leave to their heirs, and their repute.
The heir inherits by default hence he has no value to transact for worth, except the name, exploits, and privileges of his father, which are sooner squandered and declined.
Reality, however, reveals many an heir of a famous father as an alcoholic, drug addict, sexuality mutant, and dilettante, among others.
It is not by accident but just desserts that several heirs to Nigeria’s greatest political dynasties incandescence, albeit briefly in their fathers’ infamy or repute before they burn out.
But Nigeria’s ruling class forever takes care of its own thus the preponderance of political heirs foisted across the country’s civil service and corridors of power.
We need leaders with a practicable plan to end the charade and discourage pilferage of the federal and states’ treasuries. Come 2023, Nigeria must elect men and women incapable of stealing money meant to build schools, hospitals, and rehabilitate crucial infrastructure into their private accounts at home and abroad.
The resistance to predatory oligarchs is, however, impossible because large segments of the electorate lack the enlightenment and introspection required to articulate dissent at ballot time.
This minute, frantic idealists and erratic pundits are ornamenting politics and the media space with unrealistic fantasies of progress via monetised columns, television, and internet soapboxes.
Call them journalists, if you like. In truth, they are out to further confuse an already confounded electorate, and so doing, persuade all to reason and speak as a harmonious herd.
The actual controllers of the herd, however, are the political and business classes in the shades: those who own and control the press. The press is relegated to the lower rung, where it plays herdsman, driving the citizenry, like cattle, through thickets of sentiments and outrageous bigotries, onto their principals’ preferred paths.
At the backdrop of these, we face a far more difficult problem: the affliction of youths nurtured on bigotries and savage materialism. The youths, emerging from two societal extremes: the haves and have-nots, coalesce in ghastly pursuits inimical to the Nigeria project.
How do we counsel them to be prudent, honest, and just in their dealings? How do we teach them that toxic politics requires extreme sacrifice and that the bigot, in fulfilling his role as a virulent, gelded being, must silence his mind?
How do we raise youth by the belief that politics should never be about accumulating obscene, illegitimate wealth to show off, but the passion to live life more fully and engage more expansively, the progressive possibilities of human existence?