Infant lust flaunts deceptive grandeur. It imbues many a man with false sense of self-worth. It goads the ‘worthy,’ leading him by the ego, through providence’s unforgiving labium, till he drowns in pridefulness’ treacherous fount.
Infant lust has derisory simplicity. En route the last general elections, it corrupted the young aspirant’s rousing chorus.
It tarnished, for instance, supposedly promising candidate, Kingsley Moghalu’s clarion call; pitching it, like Theodore Roethke’s ‘Elegy for Jane,’ where the bear-like poet, with petrifying, thunderous zest, approaches a delicate being in dangerous nearness.
Picture Moghalu as the bard, and Nigeria as the ill-fated subject and object of his lust.
Few weeks ago, Moghalu waxed poetic, faux lyrical if you like, bemoaning Nigeria’s blooming dystopia.
“There is little to convince anyone that Nigeria values life. If it is not communal clashes, it is tankers and trailers. If it is not malaria, it is cholera…If it is not armed robbers, it is Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS),” he lamented to applause, at the TEDx forum in Maitama, Abuja.
Fast forward to the end of the presidential elections, and the hitherto swashbuckling aspirant of the Young Progressive Party (YPP) and former Deputy Governor (DG) of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) came 14th, polling a measly 21,886 votes against familiar contenders, Muhammadu Buhari’s 15.2 million and Atiku Abubakar’s 11.2 million votes.
Moghalu is distraught. If he would fail, it shouldn’t be by such ridiculous margin. After all, he was elite-Nigeria’s chosen child, the face of a new, progressive Nigeria.
Speaking with Arise News TV, recently, he said: “The biggest disappointment was with the youths. The youth vote was absent. They make a lot of noise, they rant and rail but you will not see them on the voting day. And when they vote, they don’t vote in line with their rhetoric.”
Consequently, Moghalu announced his withdrawal from partisan politics, in order to commit to a movement called, To Build A Nation (TBAN), “a citizens’ movement that will campaign for electoral reform and engage in voter education. Those are the two things this democracy needs if it is to survive,” he said.
His touted panacea hardly addresses Nigeria’s major afflictions. It smacks of common aspirants’ over-exploited lifeboat solutions.
As Nigeria careens dangerously by policy failure, lax regulations, insecurity and inadequate investment in the comatose education and health sectors, Moghalu could only knock sweetened banality against the ruling party, APC and its arch rival, PDP’s washed-out bromides on national unity, a vibrant economy, privatisation of the NNPC and security.
Throughout his campaign, he focused on the political and business elite, students, churchgoers, and supposedly evolved segments of the youth divide. Then his candidacy, presumably, received a remarkable fillip at his endorsement by Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka’s Citizens’ Forum.
But endorsements alone, do not win elections, he would learn. Of course, like other candidates, he enjoys the inalienable right to vie for elective office, but he has no right of entitlement to any public office beyond that granted him by the privilege of popular votes.
What did he expect? A YPP walkover? About 10-12 million watertight votes in the kitty?
Like too many cub aspirants, and the PACT collective, Moghalu nursed a fantasy of disrupting the status quo but that was all it was, a futile dream.
His weaponisation of dejection at his loss, however, manifests ominously; his attack on the youths reveals unheralded aspects of his character. The presidency isn’t a ripe carrot at the end of a stick, nor is it some reward to be earned at the end of a task. Moghalu lusted for the presidential seat but he didn’t earn it.
His candidacy manifested as an emotive caress, on random youth segments. Even Nobel Laureate, Soyinka, was smitten by his swagger.
Of course, his party and supporters knew he stood no chance against the devilry and spending power of the big parties, but they idealised his candidacy and romanticised the likelihood of his victory all the same.
While canvassing for votes, he boasted that he would achieve a lot in four years “largely with the mechanism of four offices: the office of national strategy, the national office of risk management, the office of performance management and the office of human capital development…We’ll run Nigeria like a corporation. I’ll smash a lot of toes. If your toe is stopping progress in this country, I’m going to be your enemy,” he said.
Yet Moghalu could not articulate, convincingly, what positive impact his ‘four offices’ would have on riverine poetry in the Delta, and the impoverished communities of Sankwala; he couldn’t assert what relief it would bring to terror-stricken, displaced, and orphaned children of Bama and Doron Baga, beyond lyricism and lip-service.
Of course, he ‘made great sense’ to his elite patrons and endorsers but did he make as much sense to the cart-pusher, the commercial sex worker, peasant farmer, commercial bus conductor, unemployed youth, political hooligan and market woman of the sidewalk?
He squandered a rare chance to connect across social strata. While the big parties engaged in familiar, cut-throat, monetised politics, Moghalu failed to seize his big opportunity, to establish his presence across Nigeria’s boondocks and suburbs, in order to get the votes that would count, come 2023 polls.
Instead, he retreated into esoteric enclaves, bandying platitudinous chant to the applause of a fawning crowd.
If he had won the election, he would have emerged as a pawn and associate of a corporate power structure that he had never been taught to question. He would have ascended as a president capable of looking down, with thinly veiled contempt, on sprawling segments of an illiterate populace irreconcilable to the ‘superior’ mechanisms of his ‘four’ special ‘offices.’
Moghalu should quit blaming the youths for his abysmal failure at the polls. It’s about time he owned his flaws. Like Hedges’ delusive elites, he chanted a private dialect that manifested as noise to large segments of the youth divide.
Next time out, he may ditch that cloistered dialect, to achieve a synergy of boondocks lingo and his elevated accent of the elites. An exclusive resort to the latter, would only earn him avertable defeat, come 2023, if he still has the stamina to compete.
Moghalu should avoid the company and endorsements of corporate con artists and economists, who, having rigged our financial system and industry to serve their selfish interests, laboured to repel Buhari’s anti-corruption drive.
Yea, Buharism isn’t perfect; the more reason why Nigeria needs the likes of Moghalu to march in virtual lock-step with him in policies and ideology, offering constructive criticisms, uncompromisingly, and with clinical depth.
The organised dialect of the rostrum reinforces the elitism’s narrow education. It seeks to preserve the predatory nouveau riche raring to usurp power and privileges from Nigeria’s calcified, sit-tight oligarchs.
It’s about time Moghalu and his ilk jumped into the trenches, to feel and see through electorate skin and eyes. So doing, they may unlearn elite bias, and attain reality’s higher learning.