It is indeed that time and season again where Nigeria’s unemployed, underemployed and serial idlers find a semblance of employment and “dignity” in Nigeria’s politics of noise and notoriety.
With the 2027 general elections less than a year away and Nigeria’s shifty and shifting political alignments and realignments well underway, many Nigerians are throwing their hats into the ring and nailing their colors to the mast for one political party or candidate or the other. Behind the main players in Nigeria’s nauseating politics, which has yielded nothing but dysfunction and underdevelopment all these years, is an army of praise singers armed with a wide array of deafening weapons.
The other day, Adebayo Adelabu, Nigeria’s failed former minister of power who now has his eyes on the Oyo State Government House, was caught directing traffic in Ibadan. He was surrounded by a vociferous battery of supporters. When one of the APC gubernatorial candidates in Nasarawa State, Senator Ahmed Aliyu Wadada, went to submit his nomination form in Abuja the other day, it was as if the state emptied to accompany him.
At this stage, it is perhaps moot to ask whether those Nigerians who follow politicians up and down squealing like excited rats have nothing else to do. But in a country where unemployment and underemployment are rampant, perhaps the only thing that pays more than political sycophancy is banditry.
The disconnect between Nigerians corralled into disaster zones and those in the corridors of power is now well-known. Indeed, to dialogue with public officeholders in Nigeria is like a dialogue with the deaf because many of them are hard of hearing. Once they seek and obtain power by any means, they are often swift to shut out all voices. A major contributor to this soundproof are those who sing their praises day and night when they have embarrassingly little to show for their time in office.
Because so many Nigerians are now so used to scraps falling off political tables, silence becomes the price that protrudes from mouths scraped shut by scraps.
It is easy to sing false praises to the high heavens for peanuts during election seasons. What is difficult is living with the consequences of failing to demand good governance, accountability, and transparency.
All over the world, roads have never been paved with praise singing. It is also common knowledge that praise singing does not fix hospitals or schools or build up human capital.
Dignity demands that people do not serenade their oppressors, yet those who lend their voices to invent tales of illusory ability and imaginary capacity do this, always.
Now, with the election months away, those who have long hung Nigeria out to dry have made a target out of the country’s hungriest: they are sharing rice. Instead of sharing plans on how to consolidate their achievements, they are sharing rice.
The real tragedy, however, is not borne in sacks of rice. It is rather etched into the sagging faces and lips of the shortchanged who continue to sell their birthright to their oppressors for rice.
Nigerians will not be saved by the hungry. But it will not also be saved by those who eat rice as their right when the real deal is trampled underfoot by swine who have carved a rite of passage into cruelty out of corruption.
The question is, when the sycophantic praise singing dies and the bowls of rice lie bare, what will remain?
Ike Willie-Nwobu is a policy practitioner and social thinker. He can be reached at Ikewilly9@gmail.com
