By Chris Anyokwu
The Nigeria electorate can be likened to a child in a toyshop, particularly a child who is often enamoured of toys and suddenly finds itself in a well-stocked toyshop. Spoilt for choice as it is, what does it do? It is at once assaulted and assailed by a bracing sense of power. Suddenly its parents who have taken it in the first place to the toyshop fade into insignificance, a mere blur in the hazy penumbra of the environs. Puffed up with this self-inflation, this rather god-like suzerainty of sorts, the child goes out of its way to pick and choose, even rejecting and discarding the best of toys just for the fun of it! Thus for the besotted tiny-tot, good becomes bad and vice versa.
This child-in-a-toyshop analogy tells us something important and significant about the nature of power. It is a two-edged sword: liberatory and destructive in equal measure. It reveals the innate nature of its wielder, whether they are congenitally good or not. Power can turn a slave into a tyrant in a trice and a hitherto nice person bereft of power or authority can suddenly become a power-maniac if given power. Power can equally ennoble in some cases and in most cases, it can stupefy, unstopper and unleash mayhem and murder, etc., etc.
For the Nigeria electorate, when given power, it hardly knows what to do with it. Like a drowning person in a well and is thrust a rope to rescue him/herself, s/he will turn the rope of rescue into a noose to hang him/herself. Such is its luck that every four years, power is handed to the Nigeria electorate to rescue itself from drowning in the ocean of bad leadership and misgovernance. But what does it do with this all-important rope? It simply turns it into a noose for collective liquidation. To think that, before the arrival of the rope, the electorate has been experiencing, in the words of Obasanjo’s recent letter, “pervasive and mind-numbing insecurity, rudderless leadership, buoyed by mismanagement of diversity and pervasive corruption, bad economic policies, resulting in extremes of poverty and massive unemployment and galloping inflation”? Put another way for clarification, right now, Nigeria is bogged down with a plethora of egregious issues including over 20 million out-of-school children, a run on the naira resulting in stagflation. What is more, stagflation has sired and spawned ennui, depression, despair and hopelessness in the land. In the chequered history of Nigeria, a very critical demographic bloc – the youth – have never been this harassed and dehumanised by agents of state, a dehumanisation that boiled over and calcified into the EndSARS debacle which has been monumentalised and memorialised as the Lekki Massacre (or October 20, 2020). Thus youth unemployment resulting in anti-social acts on the part of the disaffected and disenfranchised youth ultimately provoked mass killings of unarmed protesters on the said day in that bloody October. The elite conspiracy of silence as well as the melodrama of denials that followed in the wake of the show of shame would have been laughed out of court if life had not been lost and property destroyed. Today hunger in the land has reached Biblical proportions. Most citizens are today scavenging for food in dumpsites like beggars. The Brain Drain or, to use a trending fancy term, the JAPA phenomenon is in full throttle as we speak. Thousands, if not millions of our compatriots are voting with their feet, as they are in a mad rush for the borders. The frog likes water, but not when it is hot. The concept of home, crucially, is undergoing redefinition and reimagining as natal habitus or motherland has turned exilic and exile home.
Like in the old dispensation, suddenly petrol queues materialised everywhere right in the yuletide season. For a country that is a major producer of crude oil and gas, there is no word to describe the pain and anger seething below the surface in the polity. What do we say about the prohibitively high tariffs on essential commodities such as power, vehicles, foodstuffs and other household items? All of these problems have turned the Nigeria electorate into indentured labourers, existential flaneurs and mere driftwood driven hither and thither by crosswinds of adversity. In the homestead of an average Nigerian family, the father is jobless or, at best, under-employed; the mother doubles as housewife and strumpet on the side/sly and the son is a yahoo-yahoo scammer and the daughter the Aristo’s good-time side-chick. And if the family is the basic unit of society, what does this unsavoury state of the Nigerian homestead tell us about the overall moral and spiritual condition of the nation itself?
In the face of the “Thingifization” or the “Chosification” (that is, the turning into a THING, according to Ola Rotimi’s If … a tragedy of the ruled) of the Nigeria electorate, it still clings on tenaciously to its old idols, much in the same manner of those atavistic denizens of the Old Dispensation in T.S. Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi”. Now we turn to the electorate’s enduring infatuation with its old idols of ethnicism and religion. Nigerian oral comparatist and novelist, the late Isidore Okpewho in his important oral literature text, Once Upon a Kingdom argues persuasively that there is nothing essentially wrong with tribalism or ethnicism per se. He posits that it does under some material conditions and social situations produce a feeling of solidarity and bonding when a people are faced with overwhelming odds, adversity, persecution or a threat to their collective being. But like in most things, care must by taken in how we handle ethnicism, otherwise it can liquidate the nation itself; it can jeopardise the future and return the group to its hunter-gatherer situation.
The question, however, is: has the Nigeria electorate handled ethnicism well? Has ethnicism benefited the people through the years? Is it not because ethnicism has always been a divisive and polarising tool that made the composers of Nigeria’s former National Anthem to state: “Though tribe and tongue may differ, in brotherhood we stand…”?
The endemic epidemic of “tribe and tongue” has produced a festering social environment of name-calling (omo-Ibo, onye ofe mmanu, ayamiri, ewu awusa, etc.), finger-pointing and cherry-picking. An “us” versus “them” mentality subsists as default mode in cross-cultural dealings. Thus, the constituent units of the country come across as merely voter blocs rigidly separated and fissured by fault-likes that, for all intents and purposes, are beaten tracks trodden by our political ruling class en route the fabulously provisioned centre.
Fault-lines! Fault-lines? Not for our bulimic and sybaritic political elite. If anything, they delight in driving a wedge into what divides us rather than solder and suture it. They manipulate, explore and exploit these old and ancient fault-lines for their collective self-aggrandisement, for elite espirit de corps and power retention. The elite usually fan the fire of ethnicism, clannishness, hate and hostility on grounds of ethnic difference but at the same time, deploy ethnicism to their own political advantage. The entire party structure in Nigeria is one and the same platform. Never mind that they come in various names and labels – LPN, PDP, APC, NNPP, APA, SDP, name it! They are all the same – veritable routes to the feeding trough. The political class is united by what the Italians call Omerta (a code of loyalty) and they are bound by an insatiable desire to continue to hoodwink and fleece the electorate (or the poor masses) and keep them in perpetual immiseration and apocalyptic servitude.
Have you ever witnessed a social gathering of politicians in Nigeria? Let’s say a wedding or a funeral? You would find the son of the opposition party candidate being joined in wedlock with the beloved daughter of the ruling party candidate. The chairman of the occasion would be the fire-eating contrarian, the chairman of the Revolutionary Party of the Poor! As Charly Boy would say: our mumu don do! It beggars belief that Nigerians cannot see the all-for-one-one-for-all unspoken code among their rulers, who are “enemies” by day but chummy comrades by night. Meanwhile, what do we see among the electorate? Bone-deep resentment, mutual mistrust and hostility, hatred and animosity.
Now we turn our attention to the politician’s religion vis-à-vis the religion of the electorate. For starters, the politician does not have or even kowtow to or genuflect before a single deity. He worships everything. Situation or circumstance (or even happenstance) determines his belief system or/and the god to whom he salaams. He might be in church this morning but tomorrow he is rising to his feet and bowing in supplication in a mosque. Some politicians renounce their ancestral faith on the eve of an election and swear by Ogun, the Yoruba god of war and the deadly hunt, or by Amadioha, the Igbo god of thunder, that their new-found faith had all along been their religion. Such a clash or collision of temples or altars is all in a day’s outing for our enterprising men of action. We shall refrain from name-calling in this regard for they are legion like the demoniac of the Gadarene. Whilst our chameleonic men of power are having fun in this chiaroscuro of clashing allegiances to the Abrahamic Gods by day, however by night they never fail to do right by the Devil in sundry covens. This incestuous promiscuity of the political auteur facilitates a seamless criss-crossing of cleavages, fault-lines (here we go again!), identities, loyalties, etc. The Machiavellian code of the end-justifies-the-means is the politician’s solemn Article of Faith. Such amorality ensures that even the gods present themselves as errand boys for the power- wielder. He is so powerful that he can kill them off at the drop of a hat if the mood takes him. To be certain, as flies to wanton boys, so are the gods – and humans – to the politician. He kills them for his sport! What does this say about the nature of the politician? For him, everything and everybody is fit and proper material for sacrifice. Sacrifice on the suppurating altar of vaulting ambition. For him, also, there is no price too stiff or too high to pay in order to gain power or cling on to it after securing it. Yet, as we are told, the sole aim of power is power.
Yet like an opium, as Karl Marx famously declared, religion has continued to put a knife to the things which hold Nigerians together. Sometimes, as a believer, it is difficult not to sympathise with atheists and agnostics when they cast aspersions on religion. For instance, Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) once expostulated thus: “There is no theory of a God, of an author of nature, of an origin of the universe, which is not (to my feelings) so irreverent as to make me blush, so misleading as to make me mourn”. An adherent of necessarianism, a deterministic doctrine of causation, Harriet Martineau shared conceptual affinity with Richard Dawkins whose book The God Delusion contends that a supernatural creator, God, almost certainly does not exist. The Humanist Heritage promoted by the likes of John Locke, Joseph Priestley, Dawkins and Martineau, among others, appears to make short shift of religionism a la Nigeria electorate whose muddle-headed subjectivism and herd mentality fly in the face of stark and pitiless objective reality. It does not matter how educated, how wealthy, how well-travelled, how eloquent and how “wise” some people claim to be. When it comes to the matter of religious superstition, they are back to the beginning: the cave!
Perhaps if we all practised the same faith, there would have been hope. But we don’t. Jesus Christ Himself sensationally declares that religion is a “sword” rather than “peace” (Matthew 10: 34). It divides and rips asunder the family, the community and the world. True to form, the advent and practice of religion (in our case, Christianity, Islam, and African Traditional Religion) has polarised our society. Even within the same religion, there are schisms and factions, sometimes, deteriorating to the point of war. Our politicians exploit this to their own advantage, of course. At present, there is elite pacting with some rogue elements among the religious establishment and sub-cultural groups whose antecedents proclaim only a trail of blood and gore, and the sacking of communities in the pursuit of parallel self-determining theocracies and militia warlordism. Thus, when officialdom enters into some wheeling-and-dealing with fringe blocs of power-mongers, then you know that the time for the final solution is well-nigh. It’s a zero-sum game of apocalyptic proportions, indeed.
To recapitulate, in spite of the hellish experience of the last eight years (see Obasanjo’s recent Open Letter dated 1st Jan., 2023), objective reality indicates that the Nigeria electorate is not ready for a change; not prepared to slough off its chains and inaugurate freedom and the good life. As the saying goes, Nigerians love slavery so long as the slave-master is their kinsman! Again: another popular quote is in order here: “A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims… but accomplices”. The nature of the African post-colony is such that the electorate shall continue to act like a child in a toyshop, especially during elections such as the make-or-mar presidential one ahead of us.
• Anyokwu is Professor of English, University of Lagos