Presidential race: Arsonists applying as firefighters

The world’s most self-unaware creature on two legs, I believe, is the Nigerian politician who, it has to be said, is abetted by battalions/platoons of followers with a predilection for self-harm.

The dominant species of the Nigerian politician is, by nature, an arsonist selling himself/herself as a firefighter and is, routinely, taken for one. It is why this season’s carousel of presidential aspirants is teeming with some of the grandest architects of the gloom that currently envelopes the country.

By this, I mean people with the morality of a viper and performance records-in their current or previous positions-that “squalid” cannot adequately describe. Among these is a former governor who, despite leaving office since 2007, remains sufficiently powerful to get a state legislature to insert the name of his company-as the eternal sole revenue consultant-in a bill to amend the state revenue law. I may be wrong, but I believe such brazenness, thankfully stopped by public outrage, had no precedent.

There is another who, after leaving office to become the senate president, conveniently forgot the inappropriateness of receiving the salary of a governor in addition to the x-rated severance package he arranged for himself. This is on the same street as me not knowing that it is wrong to keep receiving salaries from a previous place of work years after leaving.

There is yet another, now a senator, whose eight years as governor, east of the Niger, was a catastrophic calamity (pardon that), marked by devotion to erection (of grotesque statues and other silly monuments) and mammoth greed that saw him convert public property (of which, thankfully, he has been relieved by his successor) to personal use.

Of course, there is the Confluence State Clown, with a performance rating in the sub-zero territory, who recently made the extravagant promise of creating 20 million millionaires in the country by 2030. Members of this category have committed hideous crimes against our collective sanity, things for which they should get corporal punishment in addition to protracted jail terms

Next in the pecking order are those who think all that needs to be done when turning up at the scene of an arson (Nigeria is currently one) with a watering can or seeks to arrest the lighter fluid. He/she has no capacity, but boasts only about having been speaker of a state legislature, member of the house of representatives, senator, minister or governor, positions in which nothing of note was achieved. It is as if being in any of those positions or similar is a clasping proof of capacity.

The state that is the seat of the Caliphate is run by one with a fondness for all-white apparel. He wants to be president, apparently because the mood appears to be in favour of a young man at the helm. Running one of the country’s poorest states should induce sobriety, but he -in 2017- approved N700 million for the purchase of a residential building in Abuja for a traditional ruler or, as his government claimed, for the traditional council. The said building, it turned out, belonged to the traditional ruler for whom it was allegedly bought.

Two months later, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) announced that a group of officials it was prosecuting for corruption had been freed by a high court in the state because this young governor, a lawyer by training and former speaker of the house of representatives, had pardoned them. It was as though what they stole were pieces of meat from his wife’s kitchen. He equated himself with the state.

There are a few with less blemish and somewhat decent performance records, but even they seem painfully unaware that they are not as appealing, nationwide, as they think. Saying democracy is a game of numbers is akin to saying water is wet. The ability to attract the required numbers is as important as those brilliant ideas they may have. That ability rests on factors that include ethnicity, religion, money AKA war chest, street-level (not social media) appeal, party platform and intra-party dynamics.

There is a chance that I may be wrong, but the last category requires more robust marketing efforts than they are currently getting. Our political space is not one that values new thinking (not saying they are necessarily apostles of new thinking), a state of affairs that benefits the first category, which knows what gets us jumping from one to 10 within minutes.

From what I have seen (admittedly on social media channels), their followers and those marketing them appear to think they are God’s gifts to the country and act like there is no need to persuade. They come across as when they spit out the aspirants’ presumed once-in-an-age qualities, the public is duty-bound to shout Hallelujah. They equally appear to believe that they are on a higher intellectual, moral and spiritual pedestal for finding those aspirants appealing. I am firmly of the view that there is a reason, a very valid one, that politics carries the tag of partisan. It is more of a thing of the heart and less of the head. The heart, without a doubt, is not so smart. Certainly, nowhere as smart as the head.

I am tempted to believe that there are not many people, for example, who doubted the late Obafemi Awolowo’s qualities. But he lost two presidential elections. I do not believe that he could have won either despite his stellar records and as shitty as the defunct National Party of Nigeria (NPN) turned out to be because of fatal attraction to arsonists as against firefighters.

That the coming contest has attracted a large number of clowns, I think, is because the next presidential election will be the second one that an incumbent will not be on the ballot and he has not shown a preference for any aspirant. That leaves us with a strong possibility of having another arsonist come in the guise of a fireman. We are condemned to having one emerge as the president and having many members of the same egregious guild emerge as governors, members of the federal or sub-national legislatures.