YahooPlus Politicians & Their Maga Electorates, By Tunji Suleiman

Nigeria has an estimated 186 million population that’s growing fast. We are very fecund. Give us enough time, we can born for the entire human race if we proceed at current growth rates. This has been known to most for a while, thanks to NPC NBS, WHO and other data sources.

Last week, a publication credited to INEC reckons the number of registered voters in Nigeria to be about 74 million. What most people don’t know is the component of our population that constitutes our political elite. For a while now, I have been trying to figure out that subset of our population that constitutes our political elite. Recently, I got a good pointer off a good governance forum. It got me thinking and propelled me in the direction of obtaining near exactitude of the information, which is not available on INEC website. I have approximated to 12,000. My estimate is presented below:

Table of electable seats/political offices in Nigeria:

Electable Seat/Office.  Total #
Ward councilors-          9,572*
LGA chairmen-              774
State HoA members-    1000*
Fed HoR members-      360
Senators-                       109
Governors-                     36
Deputy Governors-       36
President-                      1
Vice President-             1

Total- 11,889

NB: I stand to be corrected on asterisked entries for LGA Ward Councilors and State Houses of Assembly Members which are extrapolations. Please assist by supplying the exact figure for your state and LGA if you have them.

Using above figures, one can easily estimate that less than 0.0001 of our compatriots are the people we give our mandate with the responsibility to run the affairs of our nation and chart the course for our future every 4 years or lesser terms.

Bringing this closer to home, the legislators who are the nearest to the electorates at the ward, state constituency, federal constituency and senatorial district, at an approximate total of 10,815 make up 93% of the political class. It is therefore not far fetched to submit that this subset of the political elite should get the largest share of the blame for leadership crimes against Nigerians. This subset is the one closest to the electorate and over which the electorates have the most power, that of franchise and of midterm recall. Incidentally, however, it is the same one whose members conspire among themselves and with the executive as rubber stamps to commit heinous perfidies against the electors they purportedly represent.

We all are witnesses to the misgovernance that has gone down for the last 18 years in this country, orchestrated and perpetrated by this overall negligible number of our compatriots, so-called political leaders, who see their life missions as to “chop and quench” and their stewardship only as opportunities to feather their own nests and those of their cronies at the expense of the people. In spite of the efforts of a few good men of integrity among them who have attempted and continue to try to bring about positive change to our nation but who as yet have not succeeded due to a preponderance of folks whose mentality is akin to the psychology of thieves, our political system has evolved into a ‘lootocracy’, a unique form of government unprecedented world over whereby the leadership cannibalizes on present and future generations of the populace and their commonwealth.

But what do the people do? We hail and we wail, we complain and retire in indignation and/or fear into our docile corners and comfort zones. When we are not ranting and/or yakking, we dissipate ourselves in endless prayers, beseeching spiritual intervention into our temporal affairs through ‘gods of men’, who are themselves wolves in sheep’s clothing that use fear mongering about a nebulous afterlife to prey on the hapless people, and thereby pauperize and feed fat off them to live in opulence in their own heavens right here on earth in the current existence. We on the other hand wait for death before we can enjoy heaven or suffer eternally in hell. A classic case of what the Yoruba describe as “chopping beating upon the insult of pendulous lips” and which the English call double jeopardy.

The question then is why are we so afraid to take charge of our present and future, and our destiny? Why do we suffer and smile? I have wondered to no end.

Fela, the Abami Eda, explained long ago in one of his humorous evergreen songs in pidgin, “My people sef dey fear too much. We fear for the things we no see. We fear for the air around us. We always have reason to fear: I get one car, I get one house, I get young child, Papa dey for house, Mama dey for house, I no wan die, I no wan go. So policeman go slap your face you no go talk, army man go whip your yansh you go dey look like donkey…”

As Mickie Igwe, one of the upcoming leaders of our generation, puts it, “One of the greatest reason why Nigeria is still held down is because of your fear. Rise above fears & mediocrity and step out to take what rightly belongs to all of us. We have a responsibility to salvage the soul of this country.”

I say it is a combination of fear, stupidity, and indolence of the political hue. It is what we call ‘mumu’ or ‘mugu’ in 9ja and/or ‘maga’ in ‘Yahoo! boys’ lexicon. So I will just quickly give it a label that we can all relate to for now. That way, we will know what the reference term is when we return to the matter later (on this platform or elsewhere): our problem is ‘POLITICAL MUMUISM’. It is the reason why we allow 0.0001% percent of the populace and 0.0002% of the electorate to wastefully consume our present and mortgage our future. As if that is not bad enough, we also let this infinitesimal group of wreckers use our heads to break coconut by setting us against ourselves along partisan, religious and tribal lines with carefully crafted hate messaging. For them, we turn ourselves into political thugs, help them in their electoral heists and slaughter ourselves. They and their collaborators in the dime-a-dozen pulpits across the nation feed fat and smile to be banks, whilst we pray and fast for heavenly intervention in our earthly affairs and/or starve. And I say #OurMumuDonDo, apologies to Charlie Boy.

This 2018 is the eve of an election year. The political run of play will get both dramatic and frenetic in the lead up to May 2019. Soon and surely enough, our seasoned political Yahoo! Yahoo! guys in the legacy parties and the wannabes in the 22 newly registered ones will soon start plying us with their ‘formats’. Are we going to fall ‘maga’ again? Time will tell. And I will still be here treating our fuckups with my pen.

Meanwhile, have you got your PVC? If not, ensure to. If you have already, you are on track; just keep it close, shine your eyes on the torrent of rhetoric and propaganda that’s sure to follow, and vote in the upcoming elections. If after all that precaution, you still fall for the antics of political fraudsters, don’t fret. You can still claim that you took what appeared to you as the best decision at the time and that you did your bit. You can even console yourself with the Chinese adage that “if you fool me once, you are the fool, but if you fool me twice then I am the fool”; whether or not you are a first time voter.  So long as you didn’t sell your vote. And even if you are constrained by hardship to collect money or stomach infrastructure from our  thieving politicians as inducement for your vote, don’t kill yourself. Now, get this: I don’t endorse selling one’s vote, but you won’t be the first if you elect to collect the items and still fuck the political desperadoes up by voting for the candidate that your conscience tells you is right for the job. They did the same on a grander scale to one former ruler famed more for his appetite for strong drink and condoning grand larceny than for providing good leadership. That will serve them right. After all the money they share is loot from our commonwealth. They simply use our Abu’s money to provide our Abu hospitality.

What would be intolerable is for you to be deliberately apathetic and/or uppity, or fail or neglect or refuse to register and/or to vote. Then you will be an IDIOT. You don’t have to take my word for it, just google. You will find that the English word ‘idiot’ is from the same in French, which is from the Latin ‘idiota’ which itself originates from the Greek ‘idiotes’ for a private person who holds no public office and doesn’t participate in the political process. Maybe then you will accept when I say you are an ‘original sufferhead’.

Now I don’t care how you feel about this or what excuses you give. Just get involved is all I am saying. Yes, all can’t be public officials. Yes, political offices can never be enough to go round. But he that doesn’t participate in politics is an idiot, a criminal accomplice to bandits and a traitor to his country! And so all the terrible things above are what you are if you are 18 by year end 2018 and don’t at least vote in 2019 and if you don’t tell others from now on. There is a lot of work to do to rid our high places of power of political carpetbaggers. And there’s little time to do it in. When you stand accused of having a big mouth, prudence dictates that you don’t leave it agape. We can’t just continue to born children that will suffer and have no hope for the most basic elements earthly existence beyond 2019.