Let’s go campaigning

For indeed, a thousand may be falling to armed robbers, ten thousand to kidnappers, a million to ritual killers and ten million to Boko Haram, the politrician’s goal is to win at all costs. Look around you, digitally mastered faces making incredible promises. They want your permission to loot your treasure and blight your future. […]

For indeed, a thousand may be falling to armed robbers, ten thousand to kidnappers, a million to ritual killers and ten million to Boko Haram, the politrician’s goal is to win at all costs. Look around you, digitally mastered faces making incredible promises. They want your permission to loot your treasure and blight your future. With our thumbs we give our consent.
There are carnivals and there are carnivals but none compares to the political campaign train. None is more lucrative. Tell me the last time you went to a carnival and returned with a face-embossed bag of rice, bale of cloth or other branded items free of charge? Naija’s colourful campaign atmosphere is electrifying. Populated by rented crowd and garnished with opportunistic stage performers, even pickpockets are not left behind. Photographers are at their creative best and praise singers are magnets pulling the hoi polloi to a free spectacle. A rally is where proverbial songs are spurned and character assassination perfected.
Everywhere you turn, the politrician’s cherubic face hides his wicked intent. The campaigning politrician is a dog in heat; they would do anything to get votes. This is when they wear the toga of humility, with perfected smiles broadened in plastic friendliness. Their otherwise gated vaults lose its huge padlocks and the compound heath is hell cooking something fit for mass consumption. They don’t mind getting high on the snuff of dusts caused by unfulfilled promises to tar roads. They spend their days on the rough roads and their nights tended by their doctors with nerves soothed by midnight nurses.
Politricians are curiously accountable as the elections draw near. Their pamphlets of executed projects as valid as dud cheques; they’ll steal other people’s projects to make it look real. Campaign plagiarism is not an offence punishable by law in Naija. A politrician would go for broke to compete for Father Christmas’ waning fame on gifts. Santa Claus charges high and distributes low-end plastic toys, the politrician dispenses of okada, soon to be banned once in office; sewing machine and pepper grinder for shops that would be demolished to create space for party faithful. They distribute Tokunbo vehicles but would soon prohibit its use after taking the oath of office.  
Campaign seasons put journalists in brown envelope heaven. They form cliques based on their presumed sense of national relevance and sneak up on perilous journeys to bring you breaking news. Truth is, they need the egunje that flows with it to bail out cash-strapped families living by James Baldwin’s famed statement – whose bread I eat, his song I sing. Unconscionable publishers forget salaries; they know the political mess butters the reporter’s bread.
The incumbent is a magical performer who manufactures evidence in photo-shopped glory. The challenger is a saint who lives by counting the sins of the incumbent, naming it to the unwary voter one-by-one and hoping that his team of liars will use it to advantage. Modern politricians keep a fat budget for social media trolls. Oblivious of how to type, they have little Levicks doing their dirty jobs. Their PR units work day and night. If the incumbent employed evil servants as image-makers, they know that failure puts their jobs on the line. But if the evil servant knows the clown stands no chance, they prepare the coffin to bury the drowning boss; setting the photocopiers on clandestine or nocturnal overdrive; xeroxing every sleazy file they helped perpetrate.
The courts are not covered from the charade. Liars and judges gear up for the post mortem. Injunctions and judicial torpedoes all in sync. After the magumagu and wuruwuru, the courts are the last hope of the highest bidder. The verdict you get is determined more by the palms you greased.
When all is done and dusted, the Naija voter is home to roost on malignant hopes and unfulfilled dreams. Home to candles competing with darkness and ‘I pass my neighbour’ generating sets adding polluted tones to the area noise. Home of rationed food and hunger-induced domestic rage. Back to his own republic of reality where he scrounges for water, paves his own roads and provides his own security. Home to checkpoint taxes and struggles to pay the hike in fees for schools with no guarantees of completion dates. Home of sickness where doctors go on long strikes and the neighbourhood dispenser performs illegal procedures resulting in sudden death.
Let’s go out, people, dance, jump, prance and sometimes kill for the oppressor’s seat. Let’s get out and be wooed with words like little brides later to be dumped like rag dolls. Let’s soak in the promises and bathe in divisive plans. In four more years, we’ll be back, where stomach infrastructure left us – doomed to repeat the cycle over again.