Yes, equally know that neither President Muhammad Buhari (PMB) nor Alhaj Atiku Abubabakr (AAA) would offer their son or sons as sacrifice to appease the gods of violence that constantly traverse this landscape whenever it is time to elect new authorities on this land. Why then would you offer your soul as orifice for the gods of greed and unconscionable ambition?
Do you remember his story? He was murdered by the party in power in that state during the latter’s campaign of vendetta against members of the opposition just before the court gave its verdict that it was the candidate of the opposition that actually won the gubernatorial election in the state. In other words, just before the king was crowned, just before power shifted from A to B, just before the rulers became the ruled, some people’s heads were put on the guillotine, mostly by force not by choice. They were killed in order that the king may ascend the thrown. He became the governor only after one or two of his most loyal followers had been sent to the otherworldly by agents of the people in power who never wanted to leave power.
But that ironically is not where I am headed. Four years thereafter, just before the new governor completed his first term, the leader of the then ruling party, the governor who superintended the terror and brigandage which partly led to the murder of the supporters of the new head in the village, decided to jump ship. As soon as he did, the political equation in the state witnessed a quick and automatic realignment. Leaders of the opposition became leaders of the party in power. Murderers of yesterday became saints of today. The enemy of the new governor became one of his closest friends. What had been fair became foul; what had been foul became fair. Together, they now mounted the podium, danced and sang lullabies of love and friendship.
Meanwhile, the bones of the murdered friends and followers of His Excellency continue to wither and atrophy in their graves. Nobody remembered them anymore. Not their wives; not their children. Nor their aged mothers. Nobody could have remembered them thereafter. It is not because politicians do not, by choice, wish to remember their dead friends anymore particularly those who are killed in support of the cause and in defence of the mandate. It is simply because the dead has no value in political practice once it is dead. Unlike death in the cause of the Almighty, they who ‘taste’ death in active political practice while carousing the jaded and roguish political landscape of Nigeria might have nothing to ‘report’ in the hereafter.
But people are already being killed. Political campaigns have become theatre of war and the absurd. Pity the ordinary Nigerian who is caught up in the ‘madness’ of the moment. He has been told that there is no other alternative to good governance but through democratic practice. The most difficult riddle to ponder in the world is the wo/man him/herself; the man who could have been a woman; the woman who could have been a man. All alone he is without peace; together with her, he experiences peace. Alone without him, she is at peace; together with him, ‘productive’ conflict ensues. We are entities borne of thesis and antithesis, of conflict and contradictions. We are endowed with the capacity to love; we have been imbued with the power to hate. We have the power to build. She is able to destroy. Whatever he gathers, he can scatter; that which he purifies he corrupts; what she refines she can defile; her tongue is capable of praise and flak. No entity is such an enigma like you and me; we know without peace we cannot prosper; yet we sometimes wage war in order to have peace.
Thus democracy mirrors all of the above. It gives us the opportunity to discover the bile and the animus in us.
In every given democratic setting, it is not always the beautiful that bears the crown. In climes where angels have emerged to rule and run affairs of men, such angels are pilloried and attacked for daring to venture into the human world. The world usually loathes those who desire the best for it; it is its nature to conflate the good with the bad. The more confounding the landscape, the more ‘democratic’ it becomes. Remember, if you kill for or allow yourself to be killed by these politicians, it is going to be between you and your Creator. On that day, PMB would tell you point-blank- “O! Almighty, I never met him in the world let alone gave him any instruction to kill or allow himself to be killed on my behalf”. On that day AAA would disown you. He would tell you to your face, while trying to account for these and those companies, in the presence of the Almighty- ‘this man is a fraud; he is corrupt. He wants to corrupt my account in your presence. I never met him for a moment while we were all on earth”
