September has finally come. In a few weeks, the campaign for the 2023 general elections in Nigeria will officially kick off. So far, what we have seen in the many meetings and consultations in Nigeria, in London and elsewhere, is the appetizer. Soon, the main dish will unfold. The streets will be defaced with all manner of posters. There will be all kinds of campaign propaganda blaring on radio and television. The social media rats who have since been trained to join issues and post a lot of nonsense will take over Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, Tik Tok, etc.
Who told you that there is no money in Nigeria? Think of the ease with which the political contestants bought N100 Million forms like puff-puff during the party primaries. My guys, there is a lot of money in Nigeria. It is just that a few people who are not producing anything have cornered, seized and stocked all the money for themselves. At a time when many fear that the Nigerian nation is burning, those who because of the money they have fleeced, believe that they own Nigeria, are busy flexing their muscles. They are buying up everyone they think can write tolerable grammar to write for them or who can speak without any comma or full stop, to tell one and all how God has ordained them to rule Nigeria in 2023. Please note that they want to rule Nigeria, not lead Nigerians.
If you are a publicist or a professional noise maker and nobody has engaged you yet, then you have a big problem. You might need to go to your village and ask the oldest man in the clan the reason for your misfortune. Check Facebook, WhatsApp and the other popular digital platforms and you will find that anybody who can write is writing. On radio and television, anybody who can talk is talking. Oh! you will read and hear so much bad English and bad reasoning and a lot of nonsense. The noise makers are already very hard at work and yet, the referee has not yet blown the whistle for the match to begin!
Oh, how could I have forgotten? The big pastors and prayer warriors have also been consulted and fully mobilized to cast and bind, speak in tongues and pray ceaselessly. And the juju men? 24 hours of the day, they are throwing cowries into the air and consulting strange spirits. The matter is that serious.
The coming elections in Nigeria are critical. If we are not careful, the elections might spell the end of the Nigerian experiment and at very huge costs. As the big contenders get ready for the mammoth noise-making Nigerians will be subjected to between this September and February 2023, I wonder whether there are many in Nigeria who have not yet made up their minds who to vote for.
In normal circumstances, we are supposed to simply let our friends, family members and associates vote their “conscience”. These are not normal times. The coming elections are not normal elections. Any person who purports to love Nigeria must take a stand this time.
The PDP has been given the chance to lead Nigeria and the party failed Nigerians. It is as a result of that failure that Nigerians went on to seek the unfortunate alternative that APC has shown itself to be, failing Nigerians colossally. I have written here before that it has become very clear that the structures of the PDP and APC will never lead to the emancipation of the Nigerian people. Those structures were built for the private accumulation of wealth, power and the mercantilism of a few. They are terribly infested with the corruption virus. They will only lead to more hunger, more kidnapping, more insecurity, more joblessness, more stealing on a bigger scale and more hopelessness for the Nigerian people and possibly the brake-up of the Nigerian nation.
The entire concept of some persons accumulating enormous wealth from the Nigerian people without doing any visible work and turning around to use the wealth so accumulated to buy the leadership of the country in order to acquire more wealth, is obscene.
It is clear that the young people of Nigeria, the same age group that drove the #endsars movement, have understood the obscenity that is the present political contraption in Nigeria. They have concluded that for Nigeria to achieve true greatness, an end must be brought to our current virus infected bullion van democracy. It is apparent that a new structure is required that truly belongs to the young people of Nigeria for the repositioning of the Nigerian nation.
Many might wonder why the “Obidient” movement in Nigeria has caught fire as rapidly as it has done. Peter Obi simply found a vacuum created by the PDP and APC and moved into it. A lot of Nigeria’s young people have caught the spark in the moral leadership which Mr. Obi seems to exude, the kind of leadership that they find absent in the very corrupt bullion van democracy that Nigerians have experienced these past years and which has brought our nation to its knees.
There are things that the Peter Obi Movement must not do so as not end up as a big disappointment to the army of young people from practically every part of the country who have become inspired by the gentleman with a falsetto voice. The Peter Obi campaign must not be funded by Peter Obi. There has to be an independent, transparent and accountable financial platform set up immediately to which the average Nigerian who is “obedient” can contribute his N100 or N1000 and ensure that the campaign is funded by millions of people and that the man remains permanently answerable to the millions. That will bring an end to the bullion van system of election funding that has done so much harm to Nigeria.
This a historic moment for the Nigerian nation. It cannot be about money, tribe or religion. It must be about Nigeria. Sometime in the future, every Nigerian must answer to where he or she stood at this moment. Are you with the young people of Nigeria or against them?
See you next week.
– Okoroji is the chairman of COSON