In the process of staying in the open air overnight, these marketmen and women are exposed not only to inclement weather but also to all manner of insect bites, including mosquitoes, which make them vulnerable to catching cold, pneumonia, malaria and other ailments. Unfortunately, their oppressors are never available after the election to cater for them, with the ultimate consequential effect of death in some instances.

This comes as the aftermath of the deprivation of their democratic right of free choice. Because they need to survive, they succumb to this demand of their oppressors and lose their lives in the process. Who bothers when the market is shut or the recalcitrant trader is evicted? Nobody.

This, again, is where the relevancy of the civil societies and other pressure groups comes, not only in defending the vulnerable groups in the exercise of their freedom of choice but in defending them against strangulation by their oppressors. The society owes them this duty, if we desire a credible electoral process. My appeal to this group is also to be willing and ready to be liberated from this shackle. It is one thing to be ready  to liberate them while it is another thing for them to be willing to be liberated. It is certainly not in your interest and that of the society at large that you are continuously deprived the joy of electoral choice.

Another group of the electorate that constitutes danger to the electoral process and, by extension, the society at large comprises those who consider their votes as merchandise and, therefore, offer them for sale to the highest bidder. They are the vote-hawkers who see the votes as products to be disposed of. Beyond voting on the strength of money, they even, at times, sell their permanent voters’ cards. This class often forgets that, by so doing, they are selling and mortgaging their future and that of their children for paltry sums.

The vote-hawkers need to evaluate their lives since they started this illicit trade and examine if it has bettered their lives and those of their children. Politicians take advantage of you by giving you a piece of your natural entitlement as democratic dividends in order to enslave you perpetually. Most times, it is your stolen wealth that is recycled to you in crumbs. As aptly captured by Prof. Charles Soludo, the Anambra State Governor-elect, in a recent speech titled THE PURPOSE AND PRICE OF DISTRUPTIVE CHANGE, at the graduation of the School of Politics, Policy and Governance,  established by Mrs. Obiageli Ezekwesili, on January 29, 2022, “Politics has become a big business. Appointment or election into public office is seen largely as an opportunity to ‘eat’ rather than a call to selfless service. There is an army of rich (big men) who have never worked or done any productive work in their life and believe that it is their right to expect something for nothing. The tiny, less than 1 per cent, elite have a stranglehold on the public purse, sprinkling occasional crumbs to the citizens as ‘dividends of democracy.’ The citizens themselves, either out of helplessness or acquiescence, join the party, expecting the politicians to dole out pittance out of public treasury as charity. The citizens actually clap for such phantom ‘charity.’ Politicians who refuse to do so are deemed as ‘stingy’ or ‘wicked,’ and the circus goes on.”

To the extent that any politician even offers you such money, to the same extent you must, as electorate, be wary and be on your guard, for whoever wants to serve you would not offer money to enslave you. It certainly implies such person does not have any plan for you and your children. As soon as you collect such sum, expect no democratic dividend until the next four years when you are offered another slice of bread for a cycle of poverty.

If, however, you must eat from such dustbin as I see it, still proceed to vote your conscience and liberate yourself from the shackles of enslavement. You do not have to take such paltry sum offered as sufficient consideration for your eternal impoverishment.

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You, as the electorate, must not be led by your stomachs but by your brains. The whole essence of stomach infrastructure as a political device is to enslave you in perpetuity. The resultant effect is mass impoverishment, which robs you as electorate of your self-worth and commercialization of your votes during the elections. Stomach infrastructure certainly has a short life span. Detest it in all ways.

For those who offer their services as thugs to rig elections, you must realise that politicians do not use their children as thugs for elections. While their children are in the comfort of Ivy League schools acquiring quality certificates to equip them for the future to dominate your children in perpetuity, you are here terrorizing your fellow citizens in order to enthrone a conscienceless ruler on your own people. You have forgotten that where you are killed in the course of rigging elections by rival cult gangs serving your leader’s opponent, your so-called leader will not mourn you beyond a minute and your family are the ones to bear the loss of your life. Where a politician solicits your service to kill or maim for him to attain a political office, you must realise that such a person is not out for any altruistic service to you and your people. Again, you as a political thug must also know that you and your children remain where you are due to the act or omission of these politicians. If anybody must be ‘harassed’, it must be these agents of deformity that have placed you in the ignoble position you are in. 

Most political thugs are not only children of the electorate and the masses but they are known to most of you, the electorate. They are not ghosts and neither did they drop from heaven. We need to tame them by challenging them in whatever way possible. Beyond attacking their conscience, lodging anonymous complaints against them where you are not courageous enough to be visible, you can even physically resist them with your numbers. I can tell you without equivocation that they are too negligible in terms of population compared to you, the sane electorate. Remember how they fizzled out during the #EndSARS protest! That shows the mightiness of our strength where, collectively, we resolve to challenge them. This is what played out in 2014 in Osun during the governorship election of that year. The masses came out en masse ready to defend their votes. The federal might with all the soldiers, policemen, men of the secret service, aided by political thugs, could not succeed in rigging the election to favour their preferred candidate. Where the people are ready to defend their votes and mandate, no amount of intimidation, threat or actual unleashing of violence can prevail in subverting the collective decision of the people. Your vigilance is also required on the election day in terms of monitoring the progress of the election, the entering of results and defending your mandates. At this last level, thugs and other miscreants are deployed to harass you, the electorate, so that they can mutilate the result sheets and tamper with genuine outcomes of the elections. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. You must be ready to defend your votes. 

Furthermore, and as indicated earlier, it is important, as the electorate, that you acquaint yourselves with the pedigree and competence of the prospective candidates. Apart from taking interest in their profiles, organise or find a forum in your community where you can interrogate their competencies. Ask them questions and check their profiles. This is the commencement of a journey to reach a safe and meaningful destination. That forum is the opportunity to demand and agree with them on our expectations; the failure of performance of which could earn them and their families’ curses. An ancillary to this is the need for the informed electorate and enlightened voters to help in dissemination of  right information to the illiterate and other vulnerable voters. Nigeria is at a crossroads and earnestly yearning for change, the electorate cannot afford to vote out of ignorance,  parochial sentiments or sell their votes again. I am sure your suffering has crossed the threshold of resilience. You are already crumbling and awaiting death.

As electorate, you need to be vigilant in several areas of the electoral processes. The first is that concerning registration, where rigging of elections starts from. As electorate in our areas, we need to ensure that fictitious names are not included in the register of voters. People also must be active in the verification exercise during the display of the register before elections. Here again we can assist in ensuring the purging of the register of fictitious and duplicated names, or those names featuring on the register but whom we know are deceased or have relocated from the addresses specified against their names. Beyond voting, please let us remain around the polling booths until the votes are counted and transmitted. This is a veritable way of guaranteeing that your votes count. It is foolishness to stay away on the pretext that votes don’t count. You, as electorate, can make it count through your vigilance. The other area of focus is the ascertainment of your polling booths prior to the election day. Ensure that your names remain in the Register through verification, within the period close to the election day.

From my experience, politicians often connive with unscrupulous Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) officials to remove voters’ names from the register before the date of the election; this is mostly done in areas of their weaknesses. Don’t be surprised, therefore, that your names disappear on the day of the election. This they do in constituencies where they are weak and their electoral fortunes are not promising. It forms part of the manipulative strategy of the politicians. Guard against this as it will be too late on the date of the election to start complaining about your missing names. Further trick of politicians is to scatter the names in the Register on the election day to unimaginable locations, thereby frustrating your effort to locate your polling booth in order to exercise your franchise. This further calls for vigilance on the part of the electorate. At times, it is not accidental that officials and materials arrive polling booths late, it is often orchestrated again by politicians. If it will not be too much of a burden, you can visit the election secretariat, or at worst, wait patiently till they arrive and insist that every available voter on the queue must be attended to before the officials close. Of importance to you, the electorate, is the compelling need to collect your cards at the INEC’s office prior to the election. Cards do vanish for inexplicable reasons, suggestively due to the nefarious activities of politicians. There is strong suspicion that some corrupt INEC officials do compromise their positions by selling the permanent voter’s cards of people to politicians for usage where possible and /or deprivation of the potential voters for the opposition. As electorate, you need to watch out on this and insist on collection of your cards. It is after checkmating all the above that you, the electorate, can produce good leaders that the country needs. Where it is as a result of your connivance or stupidity that bad leaders emerge, you are worse than those wreaking havoc on the populace in the name of bad governance. You only justify the saying that a people receive the kind of leadership they deserve. I am convinced you can do better.