Ólekú at The Town Hall – Takeaway from the NBA’s Parley and the Arise’s Abuja Town Hall Meeting -By Jimi Bickersteth

The Yoruba word Ólekú in the caption above entered the nation’s political lexicon and was made popular during and after the 1967/1970 hunt for the soul of the southwest. Hunt, yes! Both literally and metaphorically. Those of us that were opportune to live and survived that era of Nigeria’s politics had sorry tales to tell of that horrible phase of the nation’s life.

The ”Ólekú” phrase was used to describe the skirmishes that took place in Ọ̀rẹ̀ near Ondo, in the present Ondo State. The phrase typifies the essence of the recent battle for the soul and soup of the nation, as evidenced at the Arise tv powered town hall ‘dance of the marketplace’ towards the next political dispensation.

The trip towards the 2023 political drama series has begun and the nation began to count loudly. The takeaway of deluxe expletives with glee from the explosive NBA’s parley and the Arise tv’s town hall meetings both ending unpalatable and in fisticuffs were pieces of evidence of what to expect in the nation’s 2023 political calendar, and the pounding of our hearts kept pace with the counting, and anew political parties friction and unnecessary tensions.

The ‘mob reaction’ was Akin to that of the 2020 EndSARS that was the harbinger of arson, chaos and multiple deaths at the Fagba-Agege axis. If the reactions of the participants at the hall were to have taken place in a market square or political campaign rally, they’ll probably have used diabolical powers that would attract stinging bees for all to scamper to safety. Is that the picture of 2023 the nation deserves and looking forward to? I’ll leave that summation open.

The nation’s Politics – No vision, has become like an arcane ritual and or game. Such a silly game. A game in which one must be lucky. The card has to win or lose. How do you get good odds? Even at that, one must watch it so that one’s intuition is not defeated. Soon the nation would be soaked with sweat, tears and passion’s nectar.

It would be more like war with verbal weapons and combatants trying to overpower and destroy each other. The nation saw the preludes in the last NBA’s widely televised convention, and lately, the Arise’s town hall meeting, penultimate weekend. It is showcasing the nation’s democracy, elections and voting as one where nothing would be settled and nothing resolved.

But rather, Politics – treachery – scandal. Politicians make us all pawns in the greater game of history. But then, the political class often forget that no one can stand in the way of history. And, so bad these days that government with all its inherent and extant powers can’t frighten or intimidate, no more. A government is just a puppet these days, a symbolic representation. The beginning of tragedy, Goethe’s Faust.

I concluded in my mind that the country’s election season is one where and when ambitious persons surrender moral integrity to achieve power and success for a delimited term. I could hear the rustle of leaves against the window pane and the small noises of the house settling itself into sleep and darkness.

I settled down to watch the recap of the Arise tv theatrical Town hall meeting in technicolour brilliance as recorded by the DStv decoder and came away with an impression that appeared in the end like one of a petulant and temperamental Peter Obi’s little victories in his war against life on one hand, and his attempt to put the PDP spokesman, Dino in his place and also vaguely defending his newly found propensity for double-talk and wrong statistics. The other participants were more composed and well-comported.

One expected the Arise’s programme to have enough time and balls to unveil the truth, more truth – naked, raw, honest, uncompromising, unmasked truth about the nation’s political, economic and general administration. The truth – a torch – a bright, shining torch on a foggy night in a nation beclouded with lies, prejudices and stupidity. Touché!

The town hall meeting thus was like a soft yellow glow to the candlelight that cast quiet shadows on the nation, on the people’s faces, a people on whose minds political leaders often played solitaire and strange tricks. At the end of the recording, the public power supply went off.

The room came back into focus and oddly enough, while my mind had been far away, I had heard retained every line the moderator, the candidates on parade and the rowdy, maddening crowd had spoken my mind went spinning off on another tangent. Now, watching the burning logs crackle and blaze and threw off tiny little sparks.

A long time had gone by since the nation embarked on the democratic odyssey with all crops and shades of politicians. There was something about the whole bunch that attracted the people toward them. There was a tinge of adventure that seemed to cling to them. But there always was something that escaped one. A look in their eyes or on their faces that was asking for affection and attention.

On the politicians’ eyes and faces there is a look that makes one thinks sometimes they were laughing at you – at themselves or that they were having a great time playing with you and with life, and you never could be sure of what they think – only what they wanted you to know. Forever keeping you off balance, never giving you a chance to trust.

Politicians truly have so many different sides to them, you never know which side is the real one. I know one thing for sure though, and that is, when politicians, misfits, who redefine the word ‘dysfunctional’, pursue an agenda for selfish reasons the people will eventually see their true motives. It doesn’t make sense, well, neither does politics.

The race for 2023 was indeed on and with it, the cheapness and shoddiness of characters and their furtive, secretly filthy manner, seeing the world from a porthole and complicated when you expect politicians to be the essence of direct simplicity and tact combined with trigger-quick intelligence. A mystery to the people. A feeling of being alone came over me, like millions of our dear compatriots – a feeling of being lost, abandoned without hope.

It is said, to be great is just not to stir without great argument, but greatly to find quarrel in a straw when honour’s at stake. Atiku, Asíwájú and his running mate were all absentees at the Arise tv meet, but that did not take away from them the fact that they had moved and tossed and bargained hard to win their political parties ticket looking like the cat that stole the cream. Mother nature watching us all with an expression of supreme disgusts on our face.

Nigerians! Cowards! Politics was our mistress and we give ourselves up to the pleasure of the moment and let the future take care of itself. The nation’s on the horns of a dilemma. As the distance between the gulf of reality and truth and lie widened the nation’s burden of confusion and doubt begin to double. But the future would certainly resolve itself.

In the search for good governance, freedom, liberty, equity and justice were all we, want. At this point, I began to wonder fleetingly about how politics could be the tools of destruction and devastation one moment and a saving source of money, profligacy, warmth and comfort the next. It would have been a good moment for a glorious prima donna rage for the nation’s political system churning out a list of ‘corrupt’ men. A sick system it was, a pampered potentate.

The sky was a vast gleaming canopy of stars in a country that had been festering on the edge of a precipice. My mind raced back to the situation in the PDP and everywhere else where the APC conducted its NWC’s programmed primaries, hiccups and hangovers and all one could see were everything the nation had been led to expect, and worse.

Today, after the political parties’ campaigns, the muddy streets after the relentless rains confronted all, and, were jammed with hopeful prospectors, willing to sell their souls for a shovel or a spade, or even a coil of rope for another four-year tenure. Inspired, fanatical believers in anything, restructuring inclusive. People were made nervous by the selfish opportunism of the politicians. None of them would have been so impressed if they know how the nation came to this sordid pass.

The people should acknowledge that beyond the lip service paid to ‘restructuring’ by the political class, the nation needs an intelligent, efficient planner, not this perverted 5k$ per delegate ‘grant’, so to speak from men that have grown fat on the troubles on the land and who probably had stolen from their fellowmen to boot.

The eyes of cheats.These fumbling and gambling politicians with their Knaves of hearts, distraught, dishonest wolves in politics one would have thought in a game of politics every player would be honest, on every game, every card. One’s sympathy goes out to the poor Nigerians, it was just their bad luck to have fallen in love with the politicians when they were at their worst, possessed by such passionate fury that hovers over the most hideous and desolate terrain.

Of course, the ‘success’ or otherwise, of the NBA’s and the Arise’s tv Abuja town hall meetings on television was due largely to the Asíwájú’s or running mate’s dazzling absence, an absence that was not strong enough to intimidate the Waziri Adamawa’s team led by Okowa and the rest of the gang. At that television parley and its shameful denouement, a few ‘children’ thronged forward with their fisticuffs, waving and shouting. They were mostly the offspring or children and wards of peasants and the downtrodden. Mostly children of two worlds who belonged to neither. Boys and girls who had defied everyone, society and family and who badly need the nation’s help.

Asíwájú, Abubakar Atiku, Peter Obi, Kwankwaso, and Kola Abiola were the ones gunning for the nation’s jugular, and all were eminently qualified, but, you’ll ask, why allow the cool cruise of television appearance – a simple, civil exercise turn an imbroglio and, consequently, veer off course and out of ‘control’; which implied that the nation’s transition from transition was merely anticipatory and forever in incubation mode. Of course, I’ve known all of them for a long time. They are like opposite sides of the same coin: one fair, the other dark: one kind, the other hard. Light and shadow. Good- and evil. Time Will tell. It was going to be a classic confrontation.

The man Atiku has shown for the umpteenth time that he’s running for national office and his launching pad was the presumed sympathetic to the causes that the South East and South-South consider important. He’s pretending to be an Igbo president, I doubt if that was what the people of the Igbo extraction were looking for. In any case, I know the APC would try and run him out of town at the electioneering campaigns with their objectivity, superior and well-articulated arguments and posture on restructuring. May the better candidate win.

Nonetheless, ‘We the people’ must save the country from the political parties or more accurately save the country from the parties. The country is all we have. Hmpf! But then people would have to choose where they wanted to go, and no one had ever bothered to train them how. The funny part was that the press wasn’t given the real meat of the matter.

In the absence of a veritable third force, planning to become a president in Africa’s largest, most and biggest democracy is not a two-year plan, and in that sense, the two most prominent contestants, BAT of the present ruling party and veteran Atiku Abubakar are equally ‘good’, equally strong and gracefully sure of themselves. Fortunately, I thought they are not equal in other things, and that makes the choice easy.

My inner mind went back to the conditions in and outside the city capitals, conditions there were unspeakably squalid. I remembered that I passed a line of cribs earlier in the day (and I’m sure all the presidential candidates did too) which were just mean sheds where the lowest grade of prostitute worked for virtually nothing. I compared the sheer opulence and grandeur of the FCT Abuja with what I had just seen. It hardly seemed fair.

Who is going to preach about social responsibility to our politicians? No one. That is why I was so unhappy with the governors. So upset at the shape things were taking, that I could hardly bring myself. It wasn’t fair to the civil servants and pensioners to forget to pay their salaries and pensions or Afu (half) it.

Politicians are people who were expected, instinctively perhaps, of the circumstances and conditions the people were in, and with the extreme gentleness of the really simple and without trying to make them uncomfortable, offered help by providing the dividends of democracy to the larger society. This confirmed my ideas. Everything had an angle. All you had to do was look for it.

Meanwhile, tempers were being frayed, and the latent savagery in people was being stirred. The whole mess was being stirred, as if by some master hand that stopped every minute, to add a little bit of seasoning, hatred, suspicion, calumny, and insinuations, while the nation was working and walking in the miserable darkness of uncertainty, in a world enshrouded in darkness, sorrow, trial and need.

The word “reckon” is an accounting term, meaning, “to put to one’s account”. Having considered all things, with all the variables; and having made their calculations and arithmetic. The nation is on the March again! Those who consider that politicians brought insanity and its troubles, should consider that over the years, greed, allied with timid, vacillating administrators has already brought the world into disrepute and on the brink of destruction.

To move the nation forward goes beyond grandstanding and television shows and appearances. The nation should grasp no straws at the reality, we have the character and the charm, but we should have an economic drive and make special efforts to avoid waste, leakages and wrong use of resources, even as we must begin to find it easy to do the difficult things.

Putting the nation on sound footing as we attempt to find a way out of its present dark, dreary and depressing serial soap and movies, needs concerted efforts. The elements are saying clearly that amidst looming economic doom, tragedies, and this embarrassment of immense proportion, Nigeria may find its true purpose, even as it can no longer be shushed on the issues of life, provisions of which are the primary duties and for which government in saner climes are soppy about, which are always, in a curious blend of sophistication are ignored here, and close the ever-widening vast chasm separating the rich and poor.

In the desire to holistically free up resources, the political environment should be insulated from the network of inconsistencies and public bureaucracy. To the youths clamouring for…” Takeover Lagos”, and or” have Nigeria back”, most millionaires are made during and right after a recession; yes! recessions are no licences to hunger but productivity and creativity.

The nation’s population is becoming more and more cumbersome, and many would still procreate, hence, to be sedentary, passive or quiet, is a chevron on the road to progress and development. To march with the rest of the world into the new economic order, the nation needs:
i. birth/population control,
ii. an uninterrupted power supply and new energy levels,
iii. prepare a blueprint for a tariff regime that would protect local investors, entrepreneurs, and Nigerians would have the full right to participate in their welfare and to take advantage of ownership opportunities in a free and fair competitive environment,
iv. the nation overall requires and deserves increased political will to ensure there is a boost in its economy. These facts should not be rocket science, but a pursuit that would provide an avenue to wealth creation.

I stared hard at the three fat goldfish in the aquarium in the sitting room, lucky creatures who didn’t have a care in the world. In contrast, it’s as if the politicians have put a brand on the people’s – hearts. Unfortunately, our people take their illusions about the politicians and good governance to the grave.

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Jimi Bickersteth is a super blogger and writer.
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