Sickbed messages and recall blues

It is not difficult to be an expert in Naija politics. Ask every foreign correspondent who has covered Naija for a week or two, sometimes they end up with a bestseller from the experience. And when you write a bestseller, you are an expert. The rules of our political engagement are not complex at all. […]

It is not difficult to be an expert in Naija politics. Ask every foreign correspondent who has covered Naija for a week or two, sometimes they end up with a bestseller from the experience. And when you write a bestseller, you are an expert. The rules of our political engagement are not complex at all. There are no left or right to ideology, in fact, we discovered long ago that ideologies are an albatross to conscientious politicking and so, we jettisoned them for the politics of survival. 

As even Attahiru Jega as INEC Chairman would most likely confess in his memoirs, a professorship in political science does not equip you with the practical knowhow needed to navigate Naija’s political waters. But Jega swam through and returned home a victor. While other nations believe that politics is a field where there are no experts and that everybody comes to learn, make mistakes along the way and improve, our transmutation makes no such claims. 

Our embrace of politics is itself a mistake from which we have learnt nothing. We are very content to improve on the mistakes of the past such that our present mistakes dwarf those of the past. We make no claim to progress knowing that there are no umpires and no consequences for both our actions and inactions.

We have just celebrated the big Sallah and as is customary with global leaders who have theoretically separated the state from religion, our ears and eyes are open to the messages of state actors at festive seasons. In the political hierarchy, everybody waits for the big guy’s message before releasing their rehashed crappy statements then following the holidays.

Who would have guessed that so soon, we would be getting a message from another uncertain presidential sick bed? That was exactly what we purportedly got from Sai Baba since no voice expert has successfully distinguished between the real voice of Aisha’s husband and that of MC Tagwaye. The uncertainty comes from what we have not copied from the Americans while dubbing their constitution. That presidential candidates need to come clean on their health status because, like every other job; while that declaration cannot be used against them, it helps transparency that is supposed to be the bedrock of public accountability. 

In the political calculus, such things are not as important as which region produces the president. It’s not a decade yet, when we heard such messages from the late Umaru Musa Yar’adua. The aftermath of such contraption instituted the first cabal in governance; foisted on us as a nation, the shameful doctrine of necessity then a lacklustre government led by Goodluck Jonathan. Here we are again, struck by the same lightning twice within a decade.

It is not the only thing we’ve repeated. At the beginning of this year, Musiliu Obanikoro was a fugitive in America, subject to all sorts of threats, media trials and speculations. As all exiles know, there’s no place like home, even if you have stolen enough to last you three generations – where else can people transform from zero to hero; from nothing to something except in Naija? Well, Koro is back in Lagos, Koro is back in politics of relevance, and Koro is poised for the one thing he has been struggling to get all his life – governorship of Lagos State. 

A repented PDP-for-life man, Koro has seen the light. By the time he returned home, most of his contemporaries have left the politics of the fringe and decamped to the Asiwaju Peoples Congress, where bread is buttered and sins are atoned for. In a picturesque ceremony, Koro has decamped from PDP to APC. If that makes you feel like puking, please go ahead and throw up but know that in the kernel kingdom, no dog ever lost its peerage for lapping up its own vomit. We are not the Bushes and nobody should expect us to raise three generations of leaders following in the footsteps of their forebears in the same party. 

With his first release, Ajekun Iya is still top of the social media charts, Dino Melaiye could go back to the time before every Okun man identifies as a Yoruba man; those years when the late blind Evangelist Obidiah used to sing this song at every crusade ground:

Otam ma yom o

Mba subu ma pepe

Mba subu ma pepe dide

Ma yom o

Mba subu ma pepe

Mba subu ma pepe dide

Literally meaning, rejoice not over me oh my enemy, for after I fall, I shall rise again. 

For those who worried that the people of Kogi West might make history with the Melaiye recall, happy to disappoint you. No such precedence would emanate from Dino’s constituency. And that’s not because Mike Ozekhome is holding a sword of judicial Damocles on the recall register, it’s just that lightning strikes twice. In 2005/2006, Ibrahim Mantu as deputy sinnate president came as close to being recalled as anyone could, yet survived to complete his term. If anyone needs requires proof, they should find out how a people so endowed get to elect crooks as representatives.