When a president’s child dies, ‘it’s a tragedy.’ If a governor, lawmaker or minister, loses his child, ‘it’s heartbreaking.’ And God forbid that a politician dies a ‘shameful death’ that’s ‘well-deserved’ or he expires for a reason that the media is too timid or compromised to reveal, ‘Nigeria mourns’ all the same.
Nobody mourns the death of the masses. Except the bereaved. Thousands are hacked to death in the northeast by politically-sponsored Boko Haram; hundreds are murdered in cold blood by vicious herdsmen rampaging through Benue, Oyo, Ogun and Bassa, Plateau States; their deaths are inconsequential in the scheme of things.
Indeed, a single death is a tragedy while a million murders becomes mere statistic. Apology to Stalin.
Today, we become the tragic nuance of Africa’s psyche; no thanks to machinations of rich, spoilt governors, lawmakers and a presidency to whom electorate deaths resound as spirited waltz in a bloody, never-ending political rite.
“Politicians are at the root of ill. They are the cause of everything,” a fair-weather friend of mine would always say. There is truth in his relative truth. Nigerians’ acquiescence to politicians’ bloodlust is eternally confounding.
What is it that gets to us? Their poetry of citizenship? Their wrongness of style? Perhaps their variable truths, half-truths, unpardonable lies and eccentricities that pierce like shears in the hands of a flesh gardener – or serial killer if you like.
Every politician is complicit. None is worthy of the benefit of doubt. If your favourite politician or benefactor in public office do not have an army of thugs or assassins at his beck and call, he or she fulfils the role of a slayer.
Every politician is an executioner of lives and extinguisher of hopes save the ones that do not loot public coffers or divert public fund for personal use – remember, diverted funds lead to multiple deaths on bad roads and substandard hospitals. Do we have any such politician or public officer alive?
Even the ones that posed as the people’s champions until their election, have learnt to keep their mouths shut in the National Assembly, presidential cabinet and State Houses. It’s called ‘Table Manners.’ Indeed, “When you are eating you don’t talk.
Odi, Okija, Bakassi, Maroko, Gbaramatu, Ijegun, Makoko, Borno, Yobe, Adamawa, Plateau, Kano, Katsina,; where do our factories of misery and death resound?
How do we evade this sorry pass? By whose leadership shall we triumph against the odds? Come 2019, in whose manifesto should we believe? Whose humaneness runs deeper than the madness we fete as life’s truths? Atiku Abubakar? Muhammadu Buhari? In which candidate does the spirit that restores the land to productive order reside? None.
In whose possession does power reside? The predatory ruling class or the masses bartering their strength for a quarter bag of rice, N500-bribe or worse?
We still find sport in the tragedy that our lives have become and we still do nothing save our persistent rant and idle talk over the weekends in our courtyards, while we devour relative truths on the pages of barely dependable newspapers.
The politicians are still in control and they have grown more devious. While we indulge in idle talk and futile debates in our soapbox circuits, they incite the jobless and impoverished among us to terrorism, interminable bigotry and mass murders – think herdsmen-farmers bloodlust, the carnage in Borno among others.
Talking grief amounts to nought. Aren’t revolutions born because patriots decide to react? Then it spreads like wildfire in harmattan to incite the guts of latent spirits.
On the bread lines, below our poverty lines, our talk is of struggle. Our struggle is of class. Would I like Marx enthuse the incense of the muse, I would pen brilliant chapters to illumine the agonies of the working class. Would I like Engels excite the whims of scholarship, I would espouse the philosophy of the millennium and analyse the workings of materialism, its benevolence to the lucky few, and its malevolence to the underdog.
Like Russell, I could make a case for Socialism. Like Rand, I could prescribe the virtues of selfishness. Yesterday, I bandied Nietzsche-speak like our salvation depended on it. Today, I know better; misfortune won’t flee our portals just because we desire to be great. There should be more to end our grief than the greatness of extraordinary folk.
Perhaps I should propose a Soviet-styled uprising and incite the downtrodden to arms. Like the Bolsheviks, I could incite the working class to power, united around the mantra, ‘Bread, land, peace.’
Oftentimes, I visualize the success of a mass revolution, the triumph of the electorate and the re-emerging middle class. I wonder if compatriots might be consciously inspired not by the ideas of Marx or the contemplations of Nietzsche, but by the Nigerian reality.
The earliest insurgencies occurred in climes different from our ‘liberal democracies.’ Now we have democracy but despite its touted advantages, our lives are hardly better.
I think we should take more active part in our politics. Our problems can never be solved by rant or idle cynicism. Nor can we survive self-destruct by ideals much better than those our modern prophets extract from volatile arsenals of misinterpreted scriptures.
Nigerians should never vote for any All Progressives Congress (APC) or People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate again except they intend to commit political and socioeconomic suicide.
Most APC and PDP candidates are likable to vultures jostling for carrion meat at the crossroads. They are birds of a feather – after all, APC is currently teeming with established rogues, looters and thieves recycled from the PDP and associated parties.
Nigerians should seek out candidates whose politics ignite the lush fragment of history that was once our lives.
They are not in the APC or PDP. Not at the moment. It’s time for a new movement. A new party. But unlike Obasanjo’s Third Force.
