Ten Lessons From Nigeria’s Presidential Election -By Kehinde Oluwatosin Babatunde

After being shifted from the previously scheduled date 16 February, 2019 , the presidential election was finally held on the 23 February, 2019. The following were  the lessons learnt :

(1) OUR CAVALIER NATURE :

It was on a Saturday morning I quickly made an alternative arrangements for my radio knowing there would not be light for television, however to my biggest surprise, flipping the dial over four radio frequencies it was either able God or Gbe bodi e that consistently trickled into my waiting ears. It was a shameful reality for me to behold that on the most important day of our nation’s history our cavalier attitude was open for all to see, it was music with reckless abandon. Our demystification of all that is supposed to be held sacred is one of the reasons we rather not join a political party but rather gallivant over being informed over mundane things like a music act buying a car for his girlfriend. That is why when the Nigerian broadcasting Commision ban songs, there are often no power figures to speak on behalf of music arts. Our Cavalier nature to important matters is legendary. Sioooo! 

(2) THE NIGERIAN ELECTORATES.

I put up a short submission sometimes last year when Fela Durotoye’s fever was catching all and sundry, I put up a satirical comment that those who prefer Olamide’s ‘Awon omo science students’ to Bez ‘There is a fire suddenly wants Fela Durotoye to become the president, what a show of double standards?  Over the years we have become a people who prefer noise to substance and it’s obvious in our voting patterns. The two major political arts have free money to go round and every one is willing to share including our so called civilized.

(3) A O MERIN JOBA: 

As part of my mother’s late night tale as a kid,  she narrated an anecdote that involved the elephant and a group of other animals in the animal kingdom who  never liked the elephant but rather became sycophants for the fear of the elephant’s size. The entire animal kingdom perfunctorily admitted that the elephant was king only for the animals to create a dunghill with a veneer that has a throne on it and the entire animal kingdom trot behind the elephant and chorused ‘a o merin joba, ewe ku ewele’ the elephant rejoiced in ecstasy not knowing it was a death trap. The Nigerian electorates repeated the elephant’s anecdote on Saturday by giving certain candidates false hope only for them to vote the candidates of their choice,this was hugely prominent in Kwara state. In Nigeria’s political terrain you cannot be sure who is with you.

(4) FREE AND FAIR ELECTION

Free and fair elections is one of the most abused cliches in our colloquial history. However we miss the point that a free and fair elections does not guarantee good leadership. Nigerians who also collected money as inducement to vote are just hypocrite to reiterate such rhetorics. How can an election not be free and fair when the incumbent is the recipient of the fairness using voters as a vehicle? You will collect money in 2019 only for you to complain when your children go on strike and study in muribond lecture halls in 2021, eje beru olorun!

(5) A MATTER OF TIME:

One of the selling points of many of the rookie candidates in Nigeria’s political terrain is the promise of shaking up the establishment, the promise to reduce the cost of governance, to cut law makers salaries and all other forms of sugar licking promises. I often take most of these promises by words of mouth only without any imperative of legality. I understood the Nigerian sociology and her nature to be rather loud than reflective. It is only a matter of time before the shakers of establishment would become part of the establishment. Without any form of disrespect, the Nigerian citizen is largely the same just like her politicians.

(6) AWON ASE IBAJE: 

One of our nature as a people is to disdain those who reprove us, we see them as a herd of ‘holier than thou’ people trying to spoil our fun. I have once boarded a bus where the passenger left angrily because the driver insisted  the passenger cannot sit on the arm rest of the seat. The typical Nigerian takes impunity to high heavens, and this was right on display during the election. On the eve of elections a party chieftain drove into his compound two bullion vans of money and justified such travesty on the grounds that “it’s my money” Those who went to collect the money from him would still die of meningitis in 2019 and they will go back to God who never took part of such share of national cake and ask him to cure diseases that basic health facilities would have cured. Nigeria is poor as an entity yet her individuals are richer than the country.

(7) NIGERIA EXIST ONLY FOR ELECTIONS: 

On Thursday the 21 February, 2019 the federal government gave a press release that all federal government workers be paid to enable them go home for election duties. Prior to that release all trucks on Lagos bridge were cleared for the president’s campaign visit. One cannot but ponder on why lines only falls in pleasant places in Nigeria only during elections. After the elections the winner would use six months for honeymoon and fixing the cabinets, two years for governance and the remaining one and half years for mapping out strategies to either remain in power, anoint a stoogy successor, or form an alliance and so the vicious cycle never stops.

(8) AN ELECTION OF SORROW, TEARS AND BLOOD: 

The legendary Afro music crooner Fela Kuti made a commonplace the vocabulary progression of sorrow, tears and blood as the Nigeria’s political class trademark. Aside from sorrow, tears and blood defining the Nigerian reality at the time of writing the song, each part of the vocabulary comes with a more intensed notion of pain than the previous, it’s sorrow that often precedes tears and after you can’t handle the two blood and death beckons. The 2019 elections will go down in history as the elections that claimed needlessly the most lives in Nigeria. On the eve of the election  60 helpless Nigerians were killed for fun in Kaduna, INEC office was burnt in Osun State and on Saturday of election, killings almost every where in the country and at the time of writing the killing is yet to abate. It’s clear that the Nigerian aspirants especially the protagonist in the political plots are liars to tell us they want to serve us, you can’t be prepared to serve a people and also superintendent the killing of such people.

(9) WE ARE A DIVIDED PEOPLE: 

One of the errors of Nigeria’s rookie candidates is the reductionist assumptions of Nigeria’s huge complexities. Nigeria is a complicated nation and most of the new cats hardly know. Through out the campaign for 2019 no issues based discourse was brought to the fore, a candidate said he was going to sell NNPC and my question was how does that translate into economic prosperity for Nigeria and Nigerians as a whole? Rather than discuss issue based politics the polity has been about tribal and religious sentiment. One of the aspirants said if we vote for his party it would automatically guaranty the igbo’s ascendance to power in the next election, the same aspirant repeated the same line addressing a crowd of Yoruba people. His submission reminds me of Lagos typical omo onile who sells one land to three people.

(10) ECOLOGICAL SUCCESION:

As I prepare to put finishing touches on the ten lessons from Nigeria’s presidential elections ecological succession a subject in biology was what my instinct chose to study. Ecological succession is a phenomenon or process by which an ecological community undergoes more or less orderly and predictable changes following a disturbance or the initial colonization of a new habitat. One of the consequences of living or rather an evidence that one lived is the sometimes subtle and sometimes overt alteration of one’s own environment. The two major political actors in the 2019 elections are 74 and 70 years respectively, yet they did not leave or rather prepare to leave a Nigeria that leaps in joy, a Nigeria that immortalises them in posterity. Oma se oooo!

Kehinde Oluwatosin Babatunde is a prolific writer and public speaker based in Lagos.
Email: Kehindeobabatunde@gmail.com