2015 Elections: That the time may not be ‘out of joint’ (l)

O cursed spite, that I am born to set it right. 2015 Elections are here, with ‘war drums’ and ‘battle-tom-toms’ renting the air. It rages so ominously that there is such anxiety, such panic, and above all, tremendous euphoria of the Manichean type (of loving and hateful passions). The streets are screaming so wide that patriots […]

O cursed spite, that I am born to set it right.
 2015 Elections are here, with ‘war drums’ and ‘battle-tom-toms’ renting the air. It rages so ominously that there is such anxiety, such panic, and above all, tremendous euphoria of the Manichean type (of loving and hateful passions). The streets are screaming so wide that patriots and patrons of various callings have started to sound courageous warning that nothing be done to bring to truism the foreboding predictions that have, for some time now, been laid out before us Nigerians that utmost care must be taken that Nigeria does not cease to be this very year-this very year of our elections!
Thinking about the nearness of our forming nation to the very edge of the precipice, the terse couplet that supplies the epigraph of my essay, taking out of the lips of Prince Hamlet of Demark in William Shakespeare’s eponymous tragedy Hamlet tumbles on and drips off my trembling fingers on my laptop. To those who may not have read this play-Shakespeare’s classics are hardly produced (if still read) in our secondary schools nowadays, let me give a précis of the summative narrative. Out of a family treachery and unspeakable betrayal, King Hamlet was assassinated due to a love connivance and intrigue hatched between the king’s wife and his brother. The entire state was overtaken by mad outrage and instant vengeance-mongering. The avenger? The Prince, a high cultural, highly cerebral son of the murdered king-an intellectual who thinks too much, vacillates; prevaricates-a man given to philosophizing and short on action. It does not matter whether you have read Hamlet or not. Almost everybody knows the famous quotable quotes-To be or not to be: That is the question-from the same great Tragedy. Many do not know nor care about the source.
I have stated above, with some degree of daring optimism of and incurable specie-one that does not share the doomsday prediction for our nation by some American source-that the time will not be out of joint for our nation, no matter the ominousness of the signs on the political horizon of our country. Time being out of joint implies a time of social incoherence, a time of decay and dystopia, when the society or nation is out of order; a state of anomy. Now, as we prepare for election, the perception of those reading the stars of the present government headed by Goodluck Ebele Jonathan is that we are in the worst of times; that nothing is working, generally since the past sixteen years, but especially in the past six years, under the watch and control of the present administration. With that mindset and reading of the climes, it is time for change-some even feel so passionately distempered about the performance or non-performance of the government, that any kind of change is better than the present state of affairs. Interestingly, people who are no doubt of good and genial mental and intellectual disposition have joined the fray of this change- by- all- means and by- anyone disposition. In any case, the Presidential candidate of the APC is the round peg in the round whole. Why not? He has tried thrice before and has been denied. Let him come by all means and bring the desired change. They cannot wait. After all, nothing, in their interpretation of the present goings-on in government– cluelessness, the proverbial word on their lips is the vernacular climate of the PDP government-can be worse than the present ‘immobility.’ In their view, all the indices of good governance and sustainable democracy have not been delivered. Darkness palls on the nation when billions of dollars have been waffled. The economy now being read as the largest in Africa brings neither succour nor relief for the common man. Rebasing is a paper tiger when it reads high on the stock market. Gross Domestic product has not yielded gross domestic happiness. Security, the prime responsibility of government as dictated and denoted by the constitution, is in a frightfully dismal state. Insurgency and terrorism of the Boko Haram coloration has shredded the peace of our nation and the Chibok girls still under kidnap is the barometer for measuring the insecure state of our nation. The entire north eastern zone of our country has literally been taken over by Bok Haram. The government, they adjudge, seems to be helpless and hapless and the action requires security emergency as the terrorists have literally seized the monopoly of violence from the State. To cap it all, corruption has grown like an octopus rearing its hydra-head unabated and un-abating while the government looks on or looks away. So, change-through APC’s Buhari– spreads like wild -fire in the Harmattan.
To be continued