We need to tell ourselves the home truths before Machiavellian principles of our desperate politicians make a victim of us all. Media services scan has indicated that when losers resort to court/legal gymnastics to annul the wishes of the people to make it look as if voters do not count, there is bound to be chaos that will lead to a fight over nothing!
When a few arrogate unto themselves the voice of a particular religion and/or region, geopolitical or tribal zone resulting in emotional issues fatigue and create unnecessary tension by heating the polity, there is bound to be anarchy that will make all look foolish over a fight over nothing!
When a few get themselves armed or are armed by politicians to unleash mayhem on helpless and hapless voters as vigilantes, tribal cult groups, thugs and religious “Boko Haram”, the nation is bound to groan and send many into early graves over a fight over nothing!
When the electorates fight for desperate leaders who have been squatting or sitting on the floor of corruption like bloated toads and are now putting their two hands on the sand of ease of corruption, it is a fight over nothing!
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It is a fight over nothing for Nigeria to have squatted so long in the loo or toilet of corruption and visionlessness that those who contribute to the underdevelopment of their local, state and federal government are now aspiring to national leadership as winged flies of skewed or new paradigm of nationalism, change and development!
But the efforts of these negative forces, whether sponsored or catalysed by politicians who play god, in most cases, is bound to affect all of us. It is like a man throwing a stone in the market place; no one knows on whose head it will land. Many Nigerians are now ready to give evil people a dose of their own poison!
Some of our politicians are behaving like madmen and specialists in glass houses, threatening to pull the edifice down in the face of eminent loss of an election. Civilised citizens, women and youths of this nation should not allow them! No individual or group has a monopoly of violence. At the end of the present exercise, most politicians would have used their hands to slap themselves because of their careless utterances and negative actions that are against the corporate and peaceful existence of the nation! Soon and very soon, they will begin to nurse the wounds of their actions.
When there is anomie and a state of lawlessness, politicians would have no place to hide as they would have constituted themselves as the enemies of the people! The people themselves will subsequently demand their pound of flesh by the simple reason that those they expect to change their predicaments in poor medicare, housing, dilapidated educational and other systems have severally and serially turned out to disappoint in the long run! It is payback time for such politicians!
Many of our contesting politicians have one way or the other contributed in the system failures that we are presently experiencing in all sectors of our socio-political and economic environment. Many lives have been wasted unnecessarily by military and civilian politicians. Now some of them indulge in verbal condemnations of what they helped to build or install and our Roman mob electorates who are long pauperised are busy clapping their sapped hands and singing different hallelujah songs to thieving and depraved politicians! They do that when other politicians with vision and mission not rooted in tribal and religious idiosyncrasies are left marooned in the gutter of lack of political supports!
As we fight over nothing and make brothers to rise against brothers, tribes against tribes, religion against religion and the foolish against the wise, let us remember our local, state and federal systems long killed by the greed and avarice of a few that are ever smiling to the banks when there is mass poverty and anarchy in the land!
Let us remember that Nero may no longer fiddle when Rome burns! Our youths are continuously getting restive and may not as compliant minds continue to watch helplessly while analogue leaders continue to market their ignorance of leadership. We can no longer use yesterday’s analogue solutions to solve present digital problems! And we cannot expect change in our system if we continue to do things and recycle old leaders to do things the old way! The world is moving too fast for non-compliant politicians!
Today, we have seen that yesterday’s struggles “for our own to be in power” have yielded no commensurate dividend for the people. Religious and ethnic over-lordship is not synonymous with the rise of the people’s Gross Domestic Product or Gross Domestic Happiness! Let us begin to judge ourselves from the content of our character and not from the narrow prism of where we come from or what religion or tribe we parade. It is only then and then alone that we can be fighting positively over something!
The only time when all will know that the present hullabaloo and name-calling of political opponents is a fight over nothing is when the game is up and election sloganeering is over and winners will smile to the bank after recouping all their expenses and losers will develop hypertension. Then celebration of impunity and political buffoonery rooted in individual overrating of political relevance will be over!
It is then and only then that it will be glaring that political power does not come from the north, south, east or west but from the Almighty God, the one who makes and unmakes politicians.
Can’t you see desperate politicians forming new alliances by discarding age-long friends and allies? Can’t you see these politicians defecating on the stools they sat on when they are about to leave? Can’t you see many of them dumping the ladder they used to climb to the top? If they can do all these without qualms because of power, is it you the bloody electorates/voters they will not dump in their hours of glory? Use your tongue to count your teeth and do not fight over nothing!
S. A. Shaibu Salminen
