There is the temptation to make the tragic sense of things the touchstone of Nigerian politics. This desire to daub life dire, has for a long while, defined the tide of political partisanship and the transience of hope as a national ideal.
In the fracas of faith and filth, the negligible attains significance while the essential gets consigned to the fringes of awareness.
The moral and ethical issues of misgovernance, predatory corporatism, treasury looting, the toxic assets amassed by politicians and civil servants, to vulturine lending, to self-serving legislation, to anti-growth economic policies, insecurity and sky-rocketing inflation appear to be irrelevant in the arena of public discourse en route to the 2023 elections.
Instead, the partisan press, in fulfillment of its role as courtier, unfurls to the ungloved palm of doubtful patriots and dubious ethicists, hurling rant about which candidate may contest the presidency or not. Amid the noise, barely any news medium examines the aspirants for other political offices.
Consequently, the latter enjoy a free ride to power, heedless of the electorate’s wishes, and markedly detached from the sense of purpose and responsibility attached to the public offices they occupy.
As rival parties campaign across the country, politics gets intense as the major actors flout the rules and skirt around ethical tropes. Arise TV’s frantic broadcast of Bola Tinubu’s rumoured disqualification by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and its subsequent retraction few minutes afterward, on the same day, is incantatory of its partisan mind and nature.
It’s subsequent apology to Tinubu and the N2 million fine handed out to it by the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), however, resound like a pat on the wrist to many a supporter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate.
But this piece is hardly about Arise TV’s curious practice but more about the tenor of engagement in Nigeria’s heated political space. The scalding rhetoric and venomous attacks on political personae exemplify the tragic sense of things in our heated spaces.
This tragic sense of things is a response to the Nigerian experience and it manifests in the electorate’s detachment from patriotic endeavour. As we approach the 2023 polls, the electorate must unlearn the apathy of the herd reengage progressively in the ongoing transition. They must ask the crucial questions.
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Of the prospective candidates, whose politics echo our heartbeats? To what do they owe our reverence of them? By their citizenship, do they furnish pathways to empower disillusioned, jobless youths of Umukegwu, Akokwa, Urualla, Borno, Apongbon, Idumota, Agege, Agbor, Sango Ota, Sankwala, to mention a few?
Do they teach the youth to abhor greed, selfishness, god complex? Do they impress that, in the end, only Nigerians get to choose what becomes of Nigeria, not a coalition of shady friends from abroad and black ops-activated humanitarian agencies?
The answer resonates in each candidate’s utterances and deeds. Transcendent moments and deeds are manifestations of an exalted intelligence. Who among the candidates possesses the loftiest acumen? Whose antecedents in private or public office – or both – elicits the passionate tribute of a cheer? Whose past and present exploits incite the passing tribute of a sigh?
Despite the youths’ dissatisfaction with the status quo, do they project the moral character, strength, political literacy and intelligence required to make the right choice?
The ongoing jostle for political spoils is overtly ritualistic. Duplicitous analysts and the political class relentlessly pursue their selfish interests amid widespread suffering and bloodshed.
Even the self-appointed progressives have shunned the lilies and languors of virtue for the raptures and roses of vice, as Dolores would say. Amid our suffering, they reconstruct Nigeria into a narrow commune, beholden to their selfish interpretations of power and political office.
Their virtues are short, and their vices extensive and implacable. Their lips, full of lust and laughter, attach to the country’s bosom like curled serpents that are fed from the breast. Every dispensation, they press with fanged lips where their reptilian predecessors have suckled.
Nigeria thus becomes the doomed Cleopatra giving suck to their asps. When kicked out of office, they grudgingly recoil – but never quitting the corridors of power – to accord Nigeria the affliction of deadlier asps in the successive administration. Nigeria would never be rid of them until we set our grief’s needlepoint astride the prick of pain.
Of the aspirants, I see a true progressive, a patriot, and misunderstood titan. I see men enslaved to power and god complex. I see voyagers hampered by baggage from a past and present that would forever haunt them. Even the ‘new kids on the block’ come forged as minnows and bathetic ogres.
I see a colossus whose handlers paint a ravishing portrait of him even as critics dismiss him as yet another genome of leadership, dastardly and base like the Casanova lost in the folds of the bearded meat.
I see an electorate wrought of two extremes: cynical and apathetic. Very few candidates excite passion and hope, save the dangerous fits thrown by their pawns and puppets on the social media.
It’s about time we identified the contender jostling to handle our heartfelt yearnings as his tuberous burden. Who among the candidates is best equipped to resolve Nigeria’s economic woes and most pressing conflicts?
Many Nigerians are probably living through one of the worst decade of their lives. They read of bloody genocides at dawn, poverty and strife in the next city – many more live through such. And as usual, an economy patched with foreign loans, fleeting growth and duplicity.
It took a perfect gathering of bad leadership to get to this moment. It would take an imperfect cannonball of a man to lead us through, to survival. Who, among the candidates is wrought of such fibre?
What we should be interested in is a president-elect capable of fostering the type of education and skilled force Nigeria needs to power her industry. We have no need of a big and egocentric President in hard times; what we need is a humble man of great depth.
We need a president who would be forever indebted to Nigerians, for giving him the opportunity to serve. We need one now as today is spitting out monsters and tomorrow portends the birth of a thousand trolls.
We are done believing in the dignified duplicity of treacherous men. We need a president who acknowledges that today, everything is broken, and that the very system that produced him needs to be fixed in a way that wouldn’t make deity of him and sacrificial lambs of the Nigerian people.
We need a president capable of speaking gently and intelligently too. A president who listens. Nigeria deserves a man who internalises the citizenry’s griefs in order to end them.
We may identify such a leader by his antecedents and present conduct. Let us seek the candidate who would become the blank screen, on which Nigerians of vastly different stripes may rally and project their agonies and wants. And he wouldn’t lose his head.
The president we seek believes in justice, equality and the rule of law. He is pious without being self-righteous. He is responsible, tolerant, and in many ways, more evolved.
We need such a character to drive a practicable and all-inclusive plan of national rebirth; a proposal of shared targets and intentions with broad based support and the moral and political will to implement its mechanisms and ends with profound understanding of law, governance methods, economics and social organisation of humane statehood.