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.

For those enthralled with the placebo aspirant, the 2023 elections will end in a splash of spittle and a curl of the tongue inwards.

Yet en route to the polls, Nigerians fondle splinters of fury into fragile fictions of change. Many a placebo seeker reenact the parable of the frantic electorate who would burn Nigeria to charred rubble to birth nirvana out of rage.

Their passion connotes spurious purpose. What Paglia would liken to the still heart of a geode rimmed with crystalline teeth. Their bromidic chant resounds as a soothing lullaby; it’s akin to rubbing a lantern to make a genie appear.

Amid the racket, dreams of progress bloom like a fictitious retreat. An emotive simplicity. It’s a  Nabokovian invention of rarefied detail, as Gardner would say.

Incensed by the fiery mantras: “Sustain the Change!” and “Change the Change!,” citizens march to both real and taught indignation. At the 2019 polls, many submitted their mandate to a leash of cash, bigotries, and incoherent sound bites. Three years on, they are still howling from dawn through dusk, threatening tumult atop soapboxes of rage, forgetting that the storms they incite consume Nigeria’s bliss.

Some make good their threats, anyway, deploying hate speech, kidnap for ransom, armed banditry, internet thuggery, and terrorism, while the press sensationalises the tragedies they incite in reportage that stretch beyond the photographs of trodden deaths.

It’s all part of a recurrent script. Some would call it the Naija-theory of things. I would call it the therapy of the mob; the deputation of evil from one social class to the other.

The heathen dialectic of Nigerian politics depicts the electorate’s mind and nature en route to the 2023 polls. Many Nigerians will vote for tribes, money, and random bigotries. Many would vote to actualise established and latent hostilities, using their voter’s cards as a weapon to torment a rival ethnic group or religious divide. 

Both the 2015 and 2019 general elections fulfilled such horrid stereotypes. The electorate, severely divided along ethnoreligious divides, voted for Muhammadu Buhari and Goodluck Jonathan, and then Muhammadu Buhari and Atiku Abubakar respectively, in fulfillment of the ugliest sentimentality.

Few voters could convincingly articulate their reasons for choosing their candidates. True, a depressed economy, sky-rocketing inflation, and embarrassing corruption across tiers of government substantiated the debate for and against each contender.

For most voters, however, the decisive factor was the religious affiliation and ethnic root of the contestants. The malady subsists to date. As Nigeria prepares for the 2023 polls, the electorate separates into two factions, spawned by ethnic and religious bigotries. Whatever their frantic narratives, they are inmates of familiar mental jail cells.

Education is the key out of such captivity. Such enlightenment must, however, be tempered by native intelligence, knowing that intelligence could be morally neutral. It can be used to further the exploitation of the electorate by predatory leadership, or it can be used to defeat the forces of oppression.

Where intelligence is docile, the educated man evolves like a bitch; a scrawny, sheeplike mutt, led only by wild instincts and subservience to a crafty, self-seeking shepherd. Political tyranny is bodacious and corruptive of intellect thus the unstated ethic of sheepish intelligentsia to amass a fortune while justifying the dominance of their oligarch masters.

Come 2023, Nigeria must elect competent leadership or resume foraging in the desert end of our green pasture. At the moment, youthful segments of the electorate display political illiteracy that is embarrassingly far-flung and sentimental. In response, rival parties re-invent a political devil in each other, to exploit voter ignorance and intolerance.

The youth rant that they have been excluded from power at the state and federal levels even though they have populated Nigerian politics for 62 years as rhetoricians, thugs, murderers, arsonists, vote buyers, and sellers.

There is an urgent need for the country’s enlightened youths and elder statesmen to seek each other out in wisdom and coalesce into more definitive roles. True change can only be driven by true patriots vying on dependable platforms. Platforms matter as much as the candidates. Failure to get this right has often foisted on the electorate, limited choices.

Our situation demands urgent, proactive steps by progressive change-makers. Nigeria must choose the candidate with the most visionary and realistic manifesto. The one whose candidacy furnishes a foundation for the unity of ideas; the one whose social agenda strengthens the ideals of progressive enlightenment, common progress, commonwealth, and moral autonomy.

Nigerians must shun the placebo aspirant. Like the fictional child character of  James Barrie’s 2015 fantasy film, “Pan,” his passion is borne of illusion, cunning, and pixie dust. Nigeria must shun such a fantasist because no matter the tenor of his rhetoric, he is impervious to authentic humane experience. He is an emotional cripple whose passion to serve is driven by frantic delusions of self-worth and an overvalued realism of his grandiloquence.

In truth, he weaponises a dark sentiment, luring the masses into a dark cycle of duplicity. His exaggerated gestures and confessions of love are an assertion of dubious lust. He moots no self-sacrifice, only refinements of domination.

Beneath his artifice subsists a frantic hankering for unearned privileges and spoils of power. He is the manipulative candidate using ethnic bigots and embittered segments of the electorate as pawns. The latter by default are inclined to furnish his pseudo patriotism by playing the role of a systems manager.

Revolutionary movements fail in Nigeria because the arrowheads continually cloak their measures and homilies in hostilities and platitudinous rants – such hackneyed dialect is a barrier to effective communication and progress.

It is the same dialect adopted by political, and corporate players to cheat the electorate of their votes and rig the financial system in the obscure, cryptic language coined by their propaganda labs.

Education, I reiterate, is the key out of such a mental jail cell; more realistic learning divorced from the pricey occupational training by which tertiary schools turn several youths into mindless certificate-seeking machines.

If the ongoing transition has revealed anything, it is that vast segments of Nigeria’s youths share kindred spirits with the political class whose oppressive leadership they seek to unseat.

It’s commendable, however, that they have summoned the courage to demand better leadership and a higher quality of governance. Yet constraints of savage origins hatch into their midst courtesy of the demons within and outside.

As Nigeria approaches another definitive moment in her history – the February 2023 general elections – the electorate should be wary of ideals that are deemed beneficial simply because they allow them to defy established power.

Such misappropriated sentiment is currently being weaponised by separatists turned accidental patriots; many of whom have adopted their presidential candidate on the strength of his cunning and predisposition to tell lies for applause.

Through the mayhem, the privileged are perfecting their Plan B to ‘Jakpa’ or relocate abroad. Thus this message is for the millions without the luxury of an overseas refuge: it is about time we cautioned our youths to desist from inflaming the polity be it as internet warmongers or cannon fodder for physical carnage.

We need a peaceful country to successfully fight and defeat corruption, governance failure, power outage, infrastructure collapse, and substandard health, and education among others.

If we truly seek change, we must achieve a unity of mind and common purpose by constructive participation in the political process.