NIGERIAN ELECTIONS, NATIONAL INTERESTS AND THE OBSTINACY OF THE OSTRITCH By Abah Matthew Abah-Enyi (windsoundafrica@gmail.com)

A fact that is available to even the least informed man or woman on the streets of Nigeria and those of most other African nations is the one that establishes that the country is the most populous black nation in the world. Arising from that undisputable fact is the reality of another one that stares us in the face, which is that there is no other African nation far or near the shores of the country that has the size and economic wherewithal to contain refugees from the nation if it bursts at the seams from avoidable disasters, be it economic or security.
As the nation’s citizens engage themselves in the task of electing a President, National Assembly Members, State Governors and Houses of Assembly members in February and March, its citizens should ordinarily need no extra-ordinary entreaties to be properly guided on this onerous endeavor. Unfortunately for Nigeria and Nigerians, these are far from ordinary times in the nation of over 200 million people, the giant and largest economy of the continent. In deed, these are the most extra-ordinary times in the history of the largest concentration of the black race on the surface of earth as far as the issue of existential righteousness is concerned. These are extra-ordinary times when, at the economic front, what used to sound like fairy tales only told by grand fathers to children about the value of the nation’s currency during their times have become bimonthly occurrences in the present era. These are times when what the sixty-year old Nigerian used to read about kidnappings and ransom payments on the pages of novels written by ingenious fiction writers like James Hardley Chase in their teen years have come to live with them in their remote villages across the nation. On the corruption scale, hitherto culturally forbidden monetary cravings amongst brothers in years past have donned the toga of normal selfish financial out-smartness between kinsmen and even more horrendously, between government officials and public coffers. These are times when every sin and crime would only be considered as one only when the right price is not attached to its commission. Events and indications on the faces of Nigerians in the past one year leaves the dispassionate commentator on the nation’s moral trajectory with no other coinage for its description than that of a nation on the brinks of catastrophe.
In other climes and at our more glorious era of decades past, these are times for a revolution, not on the terrains of rugged wilderness with lethal arms and ammunition but on the minds of citizens as they head for the polls. These are the times to ignite a mind process to correct all that have gone wrong with the ship-of-state called Nigeria AT WHAT EVER COST TO TEMPORARY PERSONAL COMFORT by voting and allowing others to vote for who their fact-guided consciences urge them to vote for. This is the time for Nigerians to break free from the hostage camp of economic planlessness, insecurity, corruption and political brigandage all of which have assumed the level of iron-cast impunity. The nation’s citizens, irrespective of his or her socio-economic status or area of residency, are at home with this fact.
The question that assails the minds of commentators on the Nigerian electoral debacle is not unlike the one that confronts an ardent observer who watches the ostrich as it forays for food on one of its preferred environment-the pond. At the risk of choking itself to death from the view point of man, the gigantic bird wallows in this act to the consternation of man. How it rationalizes the uncanny habit in the face of the fact that its eyes are assumed shut in the pond and the entire life stands imperiled as it does this remains a confounding mystery to man. So it is with the Nigerian political foot soldiers. Just as the ostrich seems to prefer the demise its entire body is exposed to when it plunges its head in the pond for food, so history is about to record the unwary Nigerian voters, led by the nose by political jobbers, as those who do not possess the guts to think about the future of their own generation. This is the time to revolt against the ostrich’s self-imposed blindness in us and those whose known sources of living are the votes they “delivered” in return for the monetized insults they got from those who have abducted their consciences. Political office candidate’s developmental antecedences, irrespective of tribe or religion and even political affiliation should determine the voltage at which his or her acceptance at the polls would be embraced or rejected. The electoral habit revolution Nigeria and her citizens urgently need has to be deployed NOW, during the 2023 general elections.
Abah-Enyi is a Development Communications Consultant, Public Affairs Analyst for Nigerian Newspapers and Editor-in-chief/CEO, Wind Sound Africa.