The dangerous shows for 2015

If the period running up to the 2011 presidential election portended tragedy for the intuitive citizens, this period, four years later, should rattle even the indifferent, for whom this must be a phase for overcoming their moral dilemma.
My curiosity about Nigeria became chaotic this week on sighting a Borno Express cross-country bus with a poster of Governor Kashim Shettima, seeking re-election, another term of terrorised living in office. This got me wondering why our politicians, who had been crying that their Office threatens their existence, and sanity, are still desperate about staying longer in the same Office.
The main culprit of this dangerous greed is the President, under whom the country has lost bearing on the way forward, so much so that even his most indecorous media aides, confused in the social media, are now asking “God”, advising the citizens to pray, to end what their principals were elected, with enormous resources at their disposals, to undertake.
But the show of greed, and shame, even worse than the President’s desperate bid to remain in power is clearly that of the citizens “procured”, as Dr. Oby Ezekwesili once said of contracted protesters, to champion the re-election campaigns of the same man whose administration, for seeming incapability, has not heeded the plea to rescue the hundreds of his subjects who have been in captivity for the past 150 days. And to highlight their inhumanity, they launched a #BringBackGoodluck2015 billboards, signs and hashtags to ridicule the demands of unrelenting #BringBackOurGirls.
What further frustrates the possibility of ousting the cunning government or having citizens forming alliances against it, are the divisive publications on the complicity of some friends and allies of the government revealed by an Australian named Stephen Davis, and uncritically popularised by some prominent elements of the main opposition party, the APC.
Instead of having Davis’ so-called revelations adopted for careful analysis, Nigerians, including a prominent member of the opposition, contributed to the confusion by not only endorsing the Australian’s claims that certain people, both Muslim and Christian, were responsible for funding of the Boko Haram insurgent, but that the sect also has political and Christian variants, backing the claims up with lame inferences that can only appeal to the senses of a conspiracy theorist, an unthinking escapist.
There’s a need for us, and especially the opposition, to employ reasons, instead if sentiments, in promoting some of these embarrassingly petty conspiracy theories. The opposition must understand that if you fight this government with flawed statistics and hearsays and polarisation, you’re just making the return to Aso Rock easier for GEJ. If they want to replace GEJ, whose PhD I now suspect is in divisive politics, on the back of polarising sentiments, then they must be very prepared for an embarrassing defeat in 2015. What keep APC going are sympathies, sympathies of a people in need of change, sympathies of a people willing to give them a chance despite obvious flaws. But it needs men of model conducts representing its interests in the media.
My only fear, which has become a looming apparition now, is the memory of the gory revolts that followed the announcements of the results of 2011 presidential election in the north. We must not prepare these impressionable members of the lower-class for another horror history, which is what some of these politicians do by promoting unverified claims to gain relevance and be seen as rights ambassador, whereas they’re everything but selfless in their pursuits if political powers.
The underclass is not the only trouble with electing ideal candidates in Nigeria. Poverty is to the underclass, what sycophancy is to the middle-class. Both syndromes dispossess their victims of ability to be rational, like the sycophantic members of the middle-class contacted by the government to form about 8000 pro-Jonathan campaign groups, just to procure the under-class as foot-soldiers of Transformation Actors of Nigeria, which they prefer to call “Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria”,  and other 7999 groups.
Today, in its nearly 64 years in existence, the thriving industry in Nigeria, with productivity higher than the Oil industry, is Sycophancy, which represses existing and proposed political resistance. The poverty of the underclass and the sycophancy of the middle-class are the reason idealism is impracticable in Nigeria. Sometimes, in pursuits of idealism, you go out campaigning for  ore visionary leaders, and return home only to realise that your lunch was made with “gifts” by, or bought with money given by, a fraudulently prebendal politician.
This is how the two social classes betray promising leaders. The last time Gani Fawehinmi aspired to lead this country, our rejection of his bid was almost unanimous. And I doubt if there has ever been a politically awakened individual who had stood up for the masses, in the race to the Office of the President, Federal Republic of Nigeria, comparable to the model civil rights advocate. Please, don’t mention Fela, because I’m sensitive to certain moral responsibilities.
In fact, if our politics is sincerely all about “personality”, Buhari himself shouldn’t beat Gani, who resisted even the military extremisms of the Buharis. But we’re in a country where idealism is a myth, but this shouldn’t be an excuse to our dissent with the hired paupers and contacted sycophants whose betrayals forestall our struggles for change. So, we need to task our presidential candidates with offering us something other than romanticisations of their personality, something concrete, an implementable development plan for redeeming this changing Nigeria. This “I did not steal a kobo” campaign is beginning to sound like GEJ’s “I had no shoes” scam of that unfortunate 2011. May God save us from us!