BEFORE sports put (football) in that category, religious or tribal sentiments, the major thing that divides us and bares us to our barest most basic primal and feral minimum is politics. I saw the inner core of many people exposed in the months leading up to the elections and I understood the fact that nothing pretty much has changed. We have many rivers to cross. Indeed we have. We will continue to be torn apart by sentiments to a crop of leadership who have no permanent friends or enemies but permanent interest which is not to lead but to rule and share the commonwealth and destroy the mother land while at it.
Unarguably, the tension was palpable and there were a lot of reactions and counter reactions and majorly between supporters and members of the Umbrella and Broom groups respectively. Some were hilarious in an attempt to score cheap points against each other while others were downright toxic, forcing me to unfriend, snooze or outrightly block many social media friends. I did that as much as it is for my peace, sanity and to not descend in some circumstances to the level of dormant toxicity and vileness that politics only pushed out in many. For me, my greatest joy is to be able to walk away from toxic arguments and to control these fast fingers of mine that type almost as fast as my brain releases the thoughts.
Stay away from Ogun or be disgraced, Amosun warns NLC leadership
With the results coming in trickles, celebrations have already begun leading many to begin to gloat as though having a favoured party or candidate is like having a favoured football club. Election connects directly to the soul and survival of a nation. You gloat when you belong to a team. When you belong to, for example, a football team. Followers of English Premier League knows what it means to gloat.
Though we are not in any way connected physically to those clubs, there is a vicarious sense of liability to anything that happens in our favoured club, whether on zenith of a winning streak or a nadir of a losing tunnel. Therefore we find it refreshing to boast and gloat because of experiences peculiar to our club. But not the Nigerian experience. Never the Nigerian experience. Because nobody owns a bragging right. Nobody needs to gloat. Because gloat or not, boast or not, the experience affects us in all. The best we can do is to struggle to support our choices or learn to live with it. Nobody is a winner in society that forebodes nothing but gloom.
Nobody is a winner when the future looks hopeless. Nobody is a winner when our collective stupidity looks suspiciously like borderline masochism. Nobody is a winner when our happiness borders on vindictive joy that forgets that we are more connected than we think. No danger is too far away. So no one should feel securely cocooned and untouchable. No one.
We want to rejoice. Not yet. Do we stop to count our losses? I was appalled when some people ignored the violence in some spots across the country and were instead blinded by their political sentiments and brazenly justifying their political sentiments over lives that were lost. And I realised that we have become so insensitive that we don’t care how much blood we need to step over to get over where we are going. Yet we can be likened to the wild dogs that is considerate and will protect his offspring but feeds fat on the offspring of its forest neighbour, the grass cutter. It’s okay to gloat, to laugh, to clink the glasses on what we perceive as our victories. Are they really ours? Our victories or the victory of the unapologetic and elitist political class. We should count both victories and the causalities and begin to consider the kind of future we want to leave for our children. Can Nigeria be the land of their future? The land of their dreams? Or is it time to face the truth that dual citizenship for them may not be so bad after all?
Nigeria is a peculiar place. It is the only country where you never see the children of the political ruling class come out to exercise their own constitutional rights. But it is a country that pushes its youths out to the call for duty with no welfare or security package to protect its youth. A country that uses the blood of its youths to clean up the ambitions to power. Corps members assigned for elections were mostly left stranded with most sleeping in unprotected schools and streets and with no apologies. So many tears, so many tales of woe.
The morning after, we are back to drudgery, to where we left it. To defending our choices. To living with our choices. What a people. What a country.!
and then