Category: Olatunji Ololade

This year, the general elections will be contested by deceptive personae: all the contenders are driven by delusions of sainthood and inflamed ego.

The career contenders, widely renowned as Wole Soyinka’s ‘Wasted Generation’ declare, with measured spunk and fire, their right to sustain their oligarchic tyranny. The new kids on the block, however, seek to illustrate a new fable; chanting the ‘Not Too Young To Run’ anthem, they wear naivete like a badge, and brandish ebullience as replacement for substance.

Together, they fulfill the purpose of a taxidermic decoy, like Spenser’s False Florimell.

They are out to incite and exploit the electorate’s frantic hopes in order to dash them. Like a changeling of fickle principles, passion and integrity are changeful in their wake.

The electorate must make its way past the fraud and extortion of these seasoned politicians and younger aspirants, who are out to lure the psyche into committing political capital (that is, electoral votes) to unsound judgements and investments.

But to achieve this, the Nigerian voter must begin to see the incumbent ruling class and current young aspirants as false messiahs and conmen. These range from the stark illiterates to the supposedly erudite contenders. The former justify their claim to power by their ill-gotten riches, army of thugs, assassins and a devious soul. The latter, equally validate their claim to power touting paper qualification, ill-gotten wealth, an army of thugs, assassins and deviousness.

How do illiterate voters avoid the snare of such conmen? The answer lies in the capacity of the politically literate amid the ranks of Nigeria’s electorate – comprising impoverished breadlines and the middle class – to sensitise their kind, to repel the scourge of predatory politicians.

But that is in the long-run; no degree of push-back could work against such political elements at the moment. Like every other constituent of the country’s electorate, the true patriot and politically literate, will watch helplessly, as familiar tricksters scuttle the electoral process via vote-buying, filthy propaganda, hooliganism, and wanton assassinations.

Whoever wins the 2019 elections, across all levels of government, the flawed systems will remain in place; the patrons of the systemic anomalies are too powerful to be challenged.

It’s time to look beyond the 2019 elections. The politically literate should create a dependable platform and start conversations by which the electorate can be sensitised to the urgency of looking beyond the current crop of politicians and self-appointed messiahs.

The average voter must understand, that, Nigeria’s most dangerous enemies are not Boko Haram, thieving bank chiefs, armed robbers, industrial monopolists, corrupt security operatives and government puppeteers in the corporate business sector, but the real enemies are the brains behind these maladies and the illiterate voter who would gladly pawn his vote for money and religious, ethnic bigotries.

The voter’s card thus becomes a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of such a voter.

Knowing this, the fraudulent contender plies prospective voters with bigotries and lies masked as truth.

The big truth however, subsists in the buried narratives: that fictions of growth have a hollow underside; that Nigeria and constituent states must ultimately learn to live within their means; that regional claims of marginalisation are have undertones of lies, religious and ethnic bigotries; that terrorism has its patrons in government and Nigeria’s wanton oligarchs; that government size and spending has to be surgically pruned; that Nigeria has to move from a consumer economy to a producer economy; that at the end, votes hardly count; that power is finite and voter apathy and ignorance, keep predators in public office, indefinitely.

The theme of the forthcoming elections, as advanced by the contenders, is that of salvation. Each candidate pronounces himself/herself as the virtuous of our world, by whose virtues Nigeria may attain salvation.

Too little supports what each candidate advances as his/her messianic, moral programme. For instance, of the platitudes issued by the contenders, no aspect progressively addresses the abysmal states of the health and education sectors.

There is no candidate with a heartfelt plan to truly commit, at least 30 per cent, of Nigeria’s annual budget to health and education – split at 15 per cent each. None of the candidates can do that. None will do that. None has ever done that.

Those who propose higher do so to amass political capital and ultimately, win votes.

Of all the contenders, none would agree to the surgical trimming of the nation’s legislature, while legislative work is reduced to part time assignment.

Yet several voters would dance and maim, bicker and kill, to guarantee their easy access to the nation’s public offices.

The Nigerian voter thus creates a plenum, from which he/she would not escape for another four years. This would be blamed on ‘voter illiteracy’ at crunch time, when reality bites harder, and the frenzied, ignorant voter of today relapses in sober awareness tomorrow.

At the moment, there is no contest between President Muhammadu Buhari and his major rival, former Vice President, Atiku Abubakar; the latter, like a placebo, presents as false contrary to Buhari’s candidacy, while emerging to fulfill due process and validate the forthcoming elections with the seemliness of a fair contest.

This minute, the press has been contracted to clothe dross as gold, and ornament misgovernance as quintessential brass. This reinforces the failure of the media: more journalists have become praise-singers of the failed ruling class and common carriers of its propaganda. We’ve sort of given up being independent on our own, in order to survive.

Through these maladies, Buhari would win the forthcoming elections, but not because he has any magic formula to turn Nigeria’s fortune around, but because he and his deputy, Yemi Osinbajo, represent dignified statesmanship and the latent strength to facilitate the emergence of Nigeria’s extraordinary league of detribalised, patriot leaders, outside the folds of the prominent parties.

The latter would reinvigorate Nigeria’s comatose industries, eliminate terrorism, achieve 24-hour electricity supply, revivify substandard health and education sectors, and truly fight corruption.

But the task of finding them can’t be left to Buhari and Osinbajo, for they lack the will and purpose to actualise their emergence.

This year as all others, we pretended to have answers to everything. Did we? This year, we continued to spit words and eat them, like the dog that waddles back to gobble its vomit.

This year, we quoted Nietzsche, Plato, Disreali among others to garnish our columns while we did all we could, to silence true-born dissent on our news pages and news networks, lest we incur the ire of irate benefactors.

This is the year we ennobled the thieving statesman and denied the patriot the plaudits we save for noble compatriots. This is the year we celebrated underachievers as the best of overachievers.

This year, we celebrated the vanities of dim-witted celebrities on front-pages of our national newspapers.

Here goes the year we exhausted newsprint and priceless airtime to glamourise the shenanigans of “society bigwigs and small wigs” although we cannot tell and still cannot tell, the simplest manifestations of our news practice, on say, the vendor who markets the newspaper or the child-labourer to whom Universal Basic Education (UBE) remains an everlasting fantasy.

This is the year we feted the northern mafia, eastern cabal, western gerontocracy, and south-south uprising, as usual, even as they undermined our collective dreams and everything that nationhood and ambition had ever bestowed us.

Beyond our elegant words and brazen manifestations of high character, our practice is modelled after some greedy few’s cartography of citizenship, rather than by any internal dynamic of allegiances.

Hence our misinterpretation of the social contract between the Fourth Estate and every other estate charged with the administration and supervision of our nation-state.

Thus this year as all others, we hid behind interviews, ‘big interviews,’ to abdicate our responsibilities to the Nigerian public. This is the year we taught the public to feast and digest perversion because we believe it’s what they love to do best; because we know if we treat them to more depravity, they would become more willing participants, and we would get more adverts and keep smiling to the banks.

This year as all others, we turned a blind eye and conveniently lost our voice as creatures running the three arms of government squandered public fund to feed their gluttony.

This year, we watched unperturbed as most of our colleagues ennobled and defended with their lives, the rights of the ruling class to pilfer our chests and rob us silly because leaders of men like them deserve to eat and dwell like no ordinary man.

This year, the ruling class afflicted our lives with ineptitude and savagery. In response, we cried ourselves hoarse, twisting logic and lip service for and against our favourite public officer. Eventually, we lost our voices to bigotry and confusion.

This is the year in which our brothers in the north-east tirelessly blew to death, our mothers and daughters, sons and fathers, in the market place, schools, on the playground, in our bedrooms and houses of worship in the name of politics and religion.

This is the year in which our brothers in the south-east determinedly kidnapped our wives and daughters, mothers and fathers, sons and heirs apparent, for a ransom, in pursuit of unearned affluence.

This is the year in which our brothers in the southwest habitually mortgaged our future on the altar of politics, personal and sectarian greed.

This year as all others, we refused to dissect these maladies, in the interest of our nation and thus helped the world to understand why we are regarded as the inheritors in whose hands the heritage dies and everything fails.

This year, we failed to actualise press freedom because it was socio-politically incorrect to do so. We failed to acknowledge that our survival or death as a nation is undeniably entwined with the tenor of practice and citizenship of the Nigerian press.

We are our worst enemies. In spite of everything, we choose to play god. That is why “dogs don’t eat dogs” in our Fourth Estate although it’s okay if we choose to eat the entrails of a few ordinary Nigerians and almighty benefactors, like the unfortunate adulterer caught pants down, even as we ignore the thieving bankers stealing from wretched folk to enrich Nigeria’s richest billionaires.

I hope we find the courage to report; “The Rot in the Media.” I hope we find the courage to report that for every kobo looted by government, in our public and private sectors, the press gets to have its share however meager it is. Dateline: media parleys, press conferences and breakfasts with governors.

Were we humane enough to improve our welfare and conditions of service, wouldn’t the journalist be dignified and our practice nobler?

It’s about time we asked: “Who is a journalist?” and aspire to an untainted definition of it. Shall we redefine, in 2019, what level of knowledge, qualification and professionalism is expected of a journalist?

Shall we, from 2019 henceforth, refuse to humour society that treats us as disposable pawns in its grand scheme of themes? Come 2019, shall we continue to service the depravity of folk for whom our pens write maladies at the expense of melodies impoverished folk would die to have us write about, that they might fare better?

Will 2019 mutate like today and our immediate past? Shall we remain intellectual hit men of every hoodlum with deep pocket? Shall we become cliff-hangers to take the portrait of every celebrity looter and simpleton with a promising smile?

Shall we remain the media managers that pay poorly even as we label expatriate firms, slave-drivers?

Next year, will the masses stare at our cover pages resignedly, knowing they would neither feel nor hear, the infinitesimal clangour of freed hope, because we are, as usual, an aberration of their desperate circumstances?

Shall we continue to speak from both sides of the mouth? Shall we continue to eat like idiots at the feast of the one who calls us “idiot?”

What do politicians think at death’s door? How much money they could hoard into their caskets perhaps. What would you think at death’s door? You, the unbidden offering on the politician’s altar of greed?

Greed, weaving its tissues of lust, wraps us in her shroud at birth. We grow out of the mould, startled by a pat, into a larger frame of the world’s excesses. Until we become society; and society flips us by the senses, moulding us from infancy into feral, garish cruciform.

The newborn grows into crucifixion in the house of the impoverished. He evolves through systolic throbbing of the heart at birth, oscillating between poverty and pain, power and weaknesses, ethics and amorality – vortices of a life foredoomed to a historical gyre of gloom and death.

The lucky child, however, extinguishes at birth, in the home of the poor. Thus he is spared death in macabre warrens, like Ogun State’s dirt roads and dysfunctional hospitals. He is spared gruesome expiration as a bone sliver, blood spatter and brain fragments, in Borno’s theatre of war and death.

If he doesn’t extinguish to lack of oxygen in the hospital labour ward or alagbo omo (traditional midwife)’s matted lab, he risks growing up to become a street-urchin, cult killer, armed robber, menial worker, prostitute, assassin, forever amenable to plots of the criminal ruling class.

At the backdrop of his grisly narrative, his privileged peer grows into lush, ornate extravagance; the latter, born into the aristocratic divide is, however, feted by affluence and ravaged by wealth.

He grows reprobate and unfeeling, weaned to extrude his savage lusts to the detriment of impoverished peer amid starving electorate – his parents’ meal ticket or family’s hound-meat if you like.

At election time, he glistens the news pages in family portraits and carefully orchestrated political media campaigns. He is the darling child whose testimonial for ‘daddy,’ ‘secret philanthropy’ and ‘very Nigerian’ fashion sense, arouses the wonder and goodwill of ‘poor, silly, sentimental electorate’ as his father would say.

As you read, he uploads in careless abandon, pictures of his wild cavorting aboard parents’ private jet bought with pilfered State funds. He throws the wildest parties at home, where boondocks daughters become fair game to him and friends.

This minute, he is ramming into unsuspecting motorists and bystanders as they wait their turn to buy scarce PMS, made unaffordable by his ruling-class parents’ savage thrusts; next minute, he is uploading pictures of the dent made on his father’s car at the densely populated filling station, by his victims’ splintered bones.

The privileged child, like the fabled palace troll, mutates into tyrant royalty. Having assimilated the ethical decay of his forebears, he blossoms in cruelty and procedural violence. He illustrates his class’ ferocious passions in the ways and pattern of licentious Rome.

Each sadistic exertion by him establishes portents of his underprivileged peers’ future torment, by the venal occult ruling class.

Nigeria thrives by this macabre rite. Thus while youthful electorate clamour for the ‘#nottooyoungtorun’ bill, the ruling class, comprising the All Progressives Congress (APC) and People’s Democratic Party (PDP), lend voice to the clamour, although at varying decibels and with vicious intent.

The ruling class plans to recycle itself in power courtesy their rich, spoilt wards. Thus they snigger at the youthful electorate, ranting about “taking over.”

The herd may vie for power but only patrician creatures and spawns, comprising drug addicts, sex perverts, trainee looters and Ivy League crooks among others will enjoy such privilege.

The votes our parents’ cast put us in such bind. The votes we cast puts our children in a worse bind, which beggars the question: ‘For whom do we cast our votes in 2019? Whose constitution rejects our tragic ironies?’

In 2019, will you vote for the APC or PDP candidate promising a prosperous future, by the lure of money, and bigoted, poisonous politics?

We face a far more difficult problem at our moment in history: the affliction by youth weaned on ferocious ill and savage materialism. Twisted youth from two societal extremes, haves and have-nots, coalesce in ghastly pursuits inimical to the Nigerian project.

What do you promise youth that had been told that they can have anything they want without shedding sweat for it? How do you give them a new vision to deal with bitter reality? Which candidate projects a promising story of the future, a grand vision of possibilities that Nigerians may believe?

How do we breed youth on the belief that success should never be about accumulating obscene wealth to show off, but the right to live fully and engage more expansively, the elemental possibilities of human existence?

There is no gainsaying Nigerian politicians worship money and feed the youths’ mad lust for affluence. Brings to mind the story of the conqueror King: Alexander, after conquering many kingdoms, allegedly fell ill on his way home. On his deathbed, he realized how his legendary conquests and wealth were of no consequence. He longed for the little moment that amounted to life’s essence: to see his mother’s face and bid her bye. But sinking health would not permit him.

In his last three wishes to his generals, he said his first desire is that his physicians alone must carry his coffin that people might realize that no doctor on earth can really cure anybody.

Second, he requested that the path leading to the graveyard be strewn with gold, silver and precious stones which he collected in his treasury that people should know that “not even a fraction of gold will come with me.”

“My third and last wish,” he said, “is that both my hands be kept dangling out of my coffin. I wish people to know that I came empty handed into this world and empty handed I go out of this world.” He died afterward.

Dear governor, senator, president, you will die in common hours. And you don’t amount to a third of Alexander. Remember when death comes in your spittle.

This minute, the International School Ibadan (ISI) elevates bullying to inconceivable heights. The school’s management immerses in a cycle of turbulent energies: fleeing and swearing, chasing and villifying minors on its watch.

The management’s decision to end its morning assembly, abruptly, on sighting hijab-wearing students, for instance, betrays deeper managerial afflictions.

On November 12, Muslim parents distributed hijabs to their wards in the school’s car park, three days after writing to notify the school of their decision to enable their children’s fundamental human right to don the hijab.

Besides ending the assembly, the school was virtually shut for two days, and on resumption, the hijab-donning minors were denied access to classes. Subsequently, they were locked in the library, abused, and turned back at the gates.

It is horrific to note that the bestial treatment was meted to the students by an adult management that owes them duty of care and education, among others. What quality of enlightenment has ISI given the teenagers by its assault?

The school, in truth, is no different from the random tumble-down structure in the shanty corner, known for misappropriating ‘international status,’ among other lusts. Any school claiming international status, would humanely welcome and appreciate human diversity in its student population. By villifying its hijab-donning minors, ISI renounces its ‘international’ status, and reduces it to a trite moniker. It also abdicates its constructive, enlightenment roles, and takes hostility to civilisation farther than medieval savages. Locking students up in the library for wearing hijab, for instance, reveals a dark, terrifying monstrosity in the school’s leadership.

All along, ISI had pretended to be just and evolved but the school only allowed Islamic Studies after 43 years in its 55 years of existence whereas Bible knowledge had been taught from inception. Even at that, the University of Ibadan Muslim community reportedly paid the salaries of the Islamic Studies teachers for two years.

How much should we expect from ISI as an educational institution? How poorly should it deliver before it receives the knocks?

A school like ISI thrives and sustains its notoriety in a clime where the media, afflicted by innate perversions, is infinitely unmoored from its statutory role as the society’s conscience, uncompromising critic and moral compass.

Schools like ISI persist in notoriety, goaded by feral notions of their invincibility having placed the media on a leash of tokenism via puppet squads, personified by education reporters/editors turned publicity and PR puns – this, however, is discussion for another day.

The current ISI management is split by a terrible contradiction; it claims to detach education from religious constraints, but it also wishes to demean the essence of one of its recognised religions, Islam, as an acceptable faith and reality of segments of its student population.

However, ISI is not a secular school but a multi-religious institution. A secular school would not teach or recognise any religious faith or creed whereas ISI claims to recognise Islam alongside Christianity.

At the school’s attempt to enforce its awry brand of political correctness, it runs smack into bigotry’s dark embrace, thus manifesting as a grand arena of intolerance, instability, delinquent authority and foetal adults.

Post hijab-war critics seeking to rescue ISI from infamy and self-inflicted chaos, tend to ignore or downplay its troublesome moral and managerial ambiguities. And parties rooting for and against the school’s manic attack on its teenage hijab-wearers, brandish “ the school’s constitution” and “political correctness” as justification and weaponry in the theatrical conflict.

The womblike walls of ISI are too tender for such acrid drama. Schools are meant to foster in the student, a sterling character and appreciable individuality, but at ISI, the notion becomes unseemly.

The school’s shenanigans are barbarous. Its required roles as a reformer and moulder of character and enlightenment becomes sterile within its bigoted complex; by scorning civilisation, the school reflects enlightenment of the wild.

It’s exaggerated crusade against what it terms the hijab-lovers’ unruliness portrays its perverse, split morality – much like a symphony of frost and angel dust. Thus at ISI, religious bigotry and terrorism is masqueraded as a sense of order.

The management lacks the wisdom and maturity that should accompany dispensers of scholarly knowledge. In handling the issue, ISI authorities present like the vixen-governess, obsessed hierarch in Blake’s Turn of the Screw, who projects sexual sophistication upon a minor, who dies an exhausted prisoner of her febrile imagination.

If great care is not taken, the victimised girls may forever lose their voice and suffer asphyxiation of self, in the vicious grip of their educators-turned-smotherers.

As ISI regresses to bestiality in thought and conduct, we see its management’s fiendish rout across the threshold of humaneness into savage being; it assaults the girls with sadistic ferocity, drawing applause from Christian parents and politically-correct Muslims and commentators, who for curious reasons, believe that hijab-wearing teenagers would suddenly disrupt scholarship at ISI, Islamise fellow students and Nigeria.

Its mortifying to read and listen to bigotry advanced in defence of the school’s inhumaneness. A cantankerous scholar recently held that the ISI teens were too young to adopt the hijab as an expression of piety and faith.

But she exuberantly applauds 15-year-old Leah Sharibu, for refusing to humour her bloodthirsty Boko Haram captors. In her warped idealism, despite being a minor, Sharibu is not too young to hold tenaciously to her Christian faith in the face of death, but her peers at ISI are too young to decide, if they should adopt an article of clothing as part of their religious and social identity.

Of course, I expect men and women of mischief, to raise a ruckus over my reference to Sharibu. Such characters would scorn the true import of my words and scream that I have made light of Sharibu’s predicament. To this rabid band, this writer pitifully remonstrates, that they evolve in mind and conduct before their twilight, lest they die as bigots and foetal adults.

A notable politician dismisses fear of backlash, over his persistent rape and impregnation of minors. He brags to a friend in Diaspora, that, “The news is dead on delivery,” because he has journalism’s shining lights on a leash of cash.

As the mongrel dares extremities for a gift of bone, so do his ‘boys’ in the media, he claimed.

Predictably, the most senior media aide in the culprit’s pack of hounds spread the cash and killed news of his sex crimes.

It is only fair that the aide watches helplessly as randy, power-drunk politicians rape his daughters and infect them with gonorrhea, like his principal’s underage victims. By Edumare’s retributive grace. That he might understand agonies of his principal’s victims and their families.

The media aide is neither conflicted nor appalled. A passion for truth and ethics could never spur him to imperil his job – which he considers his ‘out’ from bleak, thankless Journalism.

The life of a journalist-turned-media-aide is a parody in which honour plays no part. Unlike other members of his principal’s court, he enjoys no prideful place. He sits on his haunch, like a dog on its paws outside its master’s court.

Like the hound, he is forever waiting to lunge, with a kill-cry and bare fangs, at perceived ‘detractors’ of his principal, the dog owner.

‘Ki lo ma nse awon boys yii naa?’ (What’s wrong with these boys?), he drones irritably, whenever his former colleagues in the media, subject his principal to harsh scrutiny and objective criticism. He assures his principal – who could be the president, senate president, a state governor, legislative speaker or local government chairman – that the press can be bought over.

Media aides wrongly assume every journalist to be manipulable by cash, a foreign trip, a gallon of vegetable oil, Christmas/Ileya ram or a bag of rice. Thus he gets a generous budget to silence the ‘boys’ and inspire them to ignore the ineptitude and corruption of his principal.

Of the bribe allotment, he siphons 70 per cent to his personal account, and splits the remainder among the ‘boys.’ It never gets old to see so-called ‘press boys’ scurry for residue of the bribe with dark delight.

Rebels against the rot are daubed unfairly aggressive, biased, sanctimonious or driven by questionable animosity because they have been ‘left out.’

There is a difference between ‘press boys’ and ‘Gentlemen of the Press.’ The press boy forever prowls, lobbying along the corridors of power in frantic quest to become media aide. A ‘Gentleman of the Press’ however, is a true ethical native. And he exists.

He understands that the work of a media aide connotes the soul’s struggle against the body. Thus he rejects the role, knowing that as media aide, he would suffer the affliction of languid ethics, insatiable lusts and poisonous glamour; like a courtesan haunted in post-orgasmic flush by relentless spasms of lust for riches and unearned pleasure. Like fabled Tantalus, his thirst is never quenched.

Media aides get confused too. Mcenteer calls this condition occupational hazard for those who move from journalism into government, or vice versa. They experience confusion of professionalism and their evolving identities.

Several media aides of note, venerated critics celebrated at home and abroad suffer irredeemable descent as justifiers of ineptitude and political trifles as Special Adviser to governors and the Nigerian President. Their apologists, however, justify their indiscretions claiming, “What are they supposed to do? Would you quit if it were you?”

Nobody is asking them to quit. Yet it is instructive that men of immense wisdom and worth, are reduced to political ‘bingos’ on a leash of cash.

Their difficulties vary in character and severity but are classifiable as problems of ethics, irony, conflict, confusion and blur. What if they had vied for their principals’ offices? This couldn’t be preposterous given their once luscious reputation as a thought moulders, managers of men and resources.

Sadly, they mutate from glowing works of self-sculpture, into political statuettes and every gadfly’s unfinished model.

Similar ethical dilemma afflict journalists across the seas. Charles Royer suffered unpleasant, public, irony at his election to Seattle City Hall. Before he became American Mayor, Royer attained fame for his nightly 60 to 90-second political commentaries on KING-TV.

In 1976, his half-hour documentary, “The Bucks Stop Here,” exposed improper use of special-interest money in the state legislature.

The programme earned him two national journalism awards. When he became Mayor in 1977, Royer decided to share valuable information with his former press colleagues in off-the-record sessions. But TV crews wanted to bring their cameras into the meetings, against his wishes. Royer eventually showed up on TV and newspaper front pages, shoving TV cameras out. He will forever remember the headline with the photo: “TV Commentator turned Mayor shuts out TV.”

Another poignant example is Edward R. Murrow, respected radio and TV journalist’s alleged bid to prevent the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)  from airing “Harvest of Shame” soon after he became the head of United States Information Agency. It was one of Murrow’s final documentaries for the CBS network and it revealed the terrible living and working conditions of migrant farm laborers in Florida.

His attempt however, failed, but leaked to the press thus embarrassing the novice bureaucrat. “Murrow, the government propaganda chief, had tried to censor Murrow, the muckraking journalist,” notes Mcenteer.

Despite their shortcomings Royer and Murrow served in ennobling circumstances. Not as glorified errand boys or attack hounds. It’s about time Nigerian journalists turned media aide played heaven’s advocate to their principals’ innate demons.

They could start by offering constructive criticisms, from patriotic and envisaged media perspective, of their principals’ intended policies or actions before they are made public.

If it is their principals’ wish to transform Nigeria into a heaven on earth, media aides should help them understand that in heaven, saints don’t become ‘God’ and an angel is nobody in particular.

The year, 2018, presented as the umpteenth scene of Nigeria’s grotesque political drama. January unfurled grotesquely, cloaked in blood and sadism of clashing tribal characters. Herdsmen plundered subsistence farms up-north, crossing the middle-belt into Nigeria’s south-lands, to steal from and murder impoverished families, tilling the soil to eke a meal.

They maimed rural fathers, murdered and raped mothers and daughters in righteous rage a la Boko Haram. The latter, characteristically, continued its campaign of violence and death in the north-east. Despite the formidable exploits of the armed forces, the massacre persisted in real time. It persists even as you read.

Thus at the start of the year, the dominance of despair seemed so complete and insurmountable, as usual. Government habitually played dumb, issuing excuses and clueless ripostes to critics and opposition’s wanton diatribes. As the carnage persists, the government is unruffled and the governed stays inert.

The government knows the governed (electorate) through sadistic plowing. Nailing the latter down by a leash of cash and manipulative sentiments, the government, like a bloodthirsty cult, catches their shrieks in a metaphoric calabash. The vessel is chillingly archetypal, reflective of indigenous cults’ demonic bloodfest.

The government’s gourd vine connotes its egoistic self-preservation: career politicians desperately seek re-election or a change of public office hence the insolence of outgoing governors dying to become senators, even in states where the electorate dies by their ineptness and brazen pillage.

The latter’s metaphoric calabashes are their exaggerated pride and incestuous self-idolatry. A poisoned chalice. Like the Biblical whore of Babylon, they hold their gourds scummy with lusts and amorality; one governor, following eight years of his maladministration and impoverishment of the state and electorate, seeks to install his son-in-law as governor to continue his pauperisation legacy; another with a curious kink for risible caps, fights to install his “chosen wizkid” as his successor in a badly governed state, where the electorate is dying to escape his asphyxiating tenure.

The insolence persists across the country and political platforms; politicians pant to the venom of serpents interred in their possessed spirits.

We have seen how such individuals and their bungling parties sadistically mauled sound to sight, sighs, and cries to streaming blood.

It’s about time the Nigerian electorate divested the country’s battered chests and earth of their murderous forms. Lest we end up as tissues and blood in their gourds.

Yet the monstrous ruling class reflect our decadence back to us. They actuate rather than constrain our perversions.

Boorstin would call it the mirror effect. The ruling class’ administrative hearse becomes the realistic carriage of our death-tending impulses. On their watch, insecurity persists: terrorism, kidnap for ransom and armed robbery fluorishes.

Fraud, embezzlement of public funds persist in this government as its predecessors, though in tidier proportions.

Public officers afflicted with inferioritycomplex, god-complex, inordinate greed, among other esteem issues, subject the citizenry interminable miseries occasioned by deadly, cratered highways, declining health and education institutions, a depressed economy, gory, methodical massacre of the citizenry by bloodthirsty herdsmen and political thugs.

Notwithstanding the ruling class’ failings, the electorate is poised to return them to power, come 2019.

In a few months, Nigerian voters will once again, fall victim to an ageless ruse repeatedly weaponised by the ruling class. Every politician seeking public office understands that the political arena is a theatre, where the most essential skill required is artifice.

But that is simply one way to look at it. The Nigerian political arena equally unfurls like a red light district, an expansive brothel, where electorate bodies are the stringed instruments hysterically plucked by politician-patrons.

The governed, or electorate if you like, are sometimes mauled by career rapists cum sadomasochists in a frenzy, as is reflective in the imagery of Nigeria’s badly governed states.

In this decadent theatre, politicians emerge as master harpists, making dark melody to the electorate’s torment, and for their guilty pleasures. In their anguish, the electorate gains identity as Nigeria’s faceless natives; bleeding saps for whom the ruling class’ utopia manifests as infernal dystopia.

The discerning sees through the ruling class’ artifice. They know the pleading candidate’s smile masks a scowl. They know that incumbent public officers and the opposition seeking to usurp power from them are birds of a feather, criminals on flipsides of the divide, using the media, among other tools of mass propaganda, to create a sense of faux intimacy with citizens.

The incumbent ruling class sustains its vice grip on power and public office by weaponising tokenism and politically compromised media. Deploying such instruments, they know they do not need to be competent, sincere or honest to earn trust, win votes and elections, they only need to appear to have these qualities.

More importantly, they know they must be adept at creating and establishing a false narrative of their sainthood and the opposition’s villainy. The consistency and emotionality of the story are paramount.

And the story must be entertaining and wildly infused with absurd drama. Thus the scandalous affairs of paedophile, bribe-taking and machete-wielding governors, and a threesome-loving lawmaker caught pants-down, are inconsequential in considerations of their suitability for re-election. Rather than make them pariahs, it earns them empathy and votes.

The sad fate of 12 teenagers gruesomely crushed to death by a steel container in an accident caused by government negligence of Ogun State’s death roads becomes irrelevant in electoral considerations, as the parlous infrastructure dotting Nigeria’s emerging dystopia.

As medieval royalty deployed court drama and conspiracies to divert the attention of their subjects from daily miseries, so do the ruling class and opposition divert electorate attention from the real issues as another election year approaches.

It’s about time the electorate devised the plot of Nigeria’s political theatre; the real issues aren’t what the ruling class narrate to us. The real narrative is in everything they would rather not tell us.

What is the nature of government expenditure on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and the result of such spending? What is the real impact of the anti-corruption fight? Of government spending, how much is truly committed to education and health financing? Does the government still pay itself outrageous salaries?

What has the incumbent government done differently from its predecessors, beyond the bounds of its statutory responsibilities? Do Nigeria’s two most prominent parties deserve a single vote? Why?