This minute presents with the umpteenth scare in Nigeria’s grisly drama perhaps. The recent being the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency’s (NDLEA)’s indictment of Nigeria’s embattled ‘super cop,’ suspended Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), Abba Kyari, as a kingpin of an international drug ring operating the Brazil-Nigeria-Ethiopia route.
The NDLEA’s disclosure, though mired in melodrama, stunned widespread segments of the country. It is best appreciated by its import for the country’s anti-drug trafficking campaign.
A few weeks earlier, in the first three weeks of last month (January) to be precise, at least 486 people, mostly unarmed civilians, were reportedly killed by terrorists across Nigeria – an average of 22 people a day, according to Premium Times.
Over 80 percent of the killings were carried out by terror groups in the North-west and North-central zones while about 50 percent of the total killings occurred in Niger State, North-central Nigeria.
The Niger State Governor, Sani Bello, announced that at least 220 people were killed in his state between January 1 and 17.
Thus January unfurled cloaked in blood and sadism of murderous characters. The terrorists maimed rural Nigeria, they murdered fathers, raped and abducted mothers and daughters, leaving Nigeria cringing in anticipation of the next grisly attack.
Thus at the start of the year, the dominance of despair seemed so complete and insurmountable, but the political class, split along party lines, issued habitual excuses and ripostes to criticism.
Through the carnage of the previous year, shady separatists emerged from the woodwork, killing unarmed civilians and law enforcers; they chanted bloody banality to the politicians’ insensate bromides. And Nigeria yielded to hysteria.
As 2022 records more funeral pyres, the political class hustle for spoils en route to the 2023 general elections. Politicians know the electorate through sadistic plowing; nailing them down by spikes of cash and bigotries, they catch their shrieks in a metaphoric calabash.
The vessel is chillingly archetypal. The gourd vine connotes pathologic self-preservation. The ruling class’ metaphoric calabash sheaths its exaggerated pride and self-idolatry. A poisoned chalice.
Like the Biblical bawds of Babylon, they hold their gourds scummy with lust and amorality. At a previous general election, one governor, at the end of his eight-year maladministration and impoverishment of the state, sought to install his son-in-law as his successor, to continue his pauperisation legacy. Another with a curious kink for risible caps fought to install his “chosen wiz kid” as his successor in a badly governed state, where the electorate fought to escape his asphyxiating tenure.
The insolence persists across political platforms; shady politicians pant to serpents interred in their possessed spirits. We have seen such individuals and their bungling parties sadistically maul tenet to wile and policies to streaming blood. Nonetheless, they reflect our degeneracy back to us. They actuate rather than constrain our perversions.
It’s about time the electorate divested the country of their cancerous forms. Lest we end up as tissues and blood in their gourds. Nonetheless, the ruling class reflects our degeneracy back to us. They actuate rather than constrain our perversions.
Boorstin would call this the mirror effect. The political class’ administrative hearse becomes the railcar of our death-tending impulses: terrorism, kidnap for ransom, and armed robbery flourishes. Fraud, embezzlement of public funds persist in public and private corporations.
The maladies persist through dispensations. In a few months, voters will once again, fall victim to their lusts and 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 political arena equally unfurls like a red-light district, an expansive brothel, where electorate bodies are the stringed instruments hysterically plucked by politician-patrons.
In this decadent theatre, politicians emerge as master harpists, making dark melodies to the electorate’s torment. In anguish, the latter gains identity as faceless natives: bleeding sap condemned to infernal dystopia.
The discerning see through the artifice. They know the pleading candidate’s smile masks a scowl. They understand that the incumbent power divide and the opposition seeking to usurp power from it are birds of a feather, who use the media, among other tools of mass propaganda, to create faux intimacy with the citizenry.
Politicians know they do not need to be competent, sincere, or honest to 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 narrative must be entertaining and wildly infused with absurd drama. Thus such scandalous affairs involving the paedophile, bribe-taking, or machete-wielding governors were inconsequential in considerations of their suitability for re-election. Rather than make them pariahs, it earned them empathy and votes.
How do illiterate voters avoid the snare of such con men in 2023? The answer lies in the capacity of the politically literate to enlighten the ignorant masses. Yet the platforms for achieving such goals are non-existent.
The electorate must make its way past the fraud and extortion of the seasoned politicians and younger aspirants who are out to lure the psyche into committing political capital – that is, electoral votes – to unsound judgment and investment.
But to achieve this, the Nigerian voter must learn to identify the false messiah from the true patriot, the self-seeking candidate from the altruist. As medieval royalty deployed court drama and conspiracies to divert the attention of their subjects from daily miseries, so do the ruling class divert attention from the real issues at the approach of the next general elections.
It’s about time the electorate devised the plot of Nigeria’s political theatre; the real issues aren’t what the ruling class narrates to us. The real narrative is in everything they would rather not discuss.
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? Why does the government still pay itself outrageous salaries?
What has President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration done differently from its predecessors, beyond the bounds of its statutory responsibilities? Do Nigeria’s two most prominent parties deserve a single vote? Why?
The theme of the forthcoming elections, as advanced by contenders in previous ones, would be ‘salvation.’ Each candidate would profess to be the most competent and visionary of our world.
Yet there isn’t a candidate with a plan to commit, at least 40 percent, of Nigeria’s annual budget to health and education – split at 20 percent each. Can any of the candidates do that? Does any possess such courage and vision?
Of the contenders, would any agree to the surgical trimming of the National Assembly to a unicameral legislature, while legislative work is reduced to a part-time assignment?
And even if the politics of their preferred candidate, exude the stink of the night soil man, several voters would dance and sing, bicker and kill, to guarantee him or her easy access to public office.
So doing, the Nigerian voter creates a plenum from which he 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 to sober awareness.