My Fellow Nigerians

The Intellect, the Will, and our Next President.

The presidential election is ~24 hours away. I have seen brutal ‘back-and-forth’ on social media (social media is a famous fertile ground for such negative interactions, afterall.) I have seen campaign strategies that backfire in real-time (you don’t shove your candidates down people’s throats), I have seen grave intolerance to people’s choice of candidates (makes me wonder if people really understand how democracy should work), and at the same time I have seen both ethnic and religious bigotry, I have seen all sort.

Over the years, I have come to believe that the political weaponization of poverty and religion in that country is legendary. Because of this, there are some people – and I mean this without offense – whose intellects are impervious to seeing the logic in things.  Appealing to such folks is (almost) a dead end, at least in a particular instance.

Last year I saw a fellow via a Nigerian TV channel who was reconstructing his house after a deadly flood. I was shocked after making the observation that his house would not pass for a pig’s pen in saner climes. If the house was used for animals in some Western States, such farms could be shut down on the grounds of animal rights violation. This is not to draw a blanket generalization for this demographic group, but I do not expect much from this fellow when or if an (especially new) N1,000 note is flashed in his eyes to vote for a particular candidate.

And yet there are people whose intellect are robust but have been subdued by their will ; typically driven by ethnic and religious sentiments in the Nigerian context. Such fellow might retort and point to the ethnic nepotism displayed by a such and such politician in the past. But my answer has always been, what benefits have been brought to an ethnic group for having such and such candidates (from their ethnic extraction) in political office?

There is a large chance that my little argumentation in this short essay will fail because I am not naïve enough to adopt the view that political decisions can almost exclusively be driven by the intellect; some people have sentiments that are as real as a rock.

But all these beg the question: What reasoning should our intellect birth in this coming election? Because things are so bad, my list is not many (just a couple), and they are simple.

1) Political parties (including candidates represented in such parties) who have demonstrated failure in the present or in the past, as evidenced by your living conditions, ought not to be voted for. This begs the question: what is failure? This is also simple (or should I say I hope it is). If a government is struggling to, say, deliver electricity in an age when reasonable governments around the world have done so, such government is a failure. This reasoning follows with basic amenities like the security of lives and properties, healthcare, etc.

Notice that a person in a Nigerian town without electricity, power, or the internet, living in extreme poverty, and who have lived his whole life in such a manner would have difficulty comprehending what reasonable governments around the world look like. This constitutes part of what I mean when I refer to folks “whose intellects are impervious to seeing the logic in things.” Case in point, some of us had to move to the West before realizing just how terribly run Nigeria was.

2) People should not vote for candidates with a blatant checkered past. A system that incentivizes bad actors with political offices only signals to a community of prospective to hone their guile, shenanigans and outright criminality. If we do that enough, suddenly, you have a place called Nigeria.

One of the most frequent objections I have, when I talk with Nigerians about Nigeria is when they invent a huge artificial demarcation between the people and the government. One of the useful responses to such fabrication is the following epigram “the greatest myth of our time is good people and bad institution.” To start, the people who hold political offices do not fall from the sky, and without mincing words, many of us who should know better vote in miscreants – only to start wailing at their machinations after we usher them in.  As you vote on Saturday, know that you are participating in the making or marring of the country. And your vote should contribute to breaking the vicious cycle of bad governance in the polity, not the other way around.