Every four years, a strange transformation overtakes the nation. Men who spend most of their lives behind high walls and tinted glass suddenly rediscover the existence of ordinary people. Politicians whose children move through the polished campuses of London, Toronto, and Dubai suddenly remember the names of forgotten villages and neglected streets. They arrive in long convoys with screaming sirens and impatient escorts, forcing traffic aside as though power itself must always announce its presence with noise. The dust from their vehicles rises into the air and settles everywhere. It settles on market women beneath faded umbrellas. It settles on unemployed graduates standing beside broken kiosks. It settles on pensioners abandoned by the state they once served faithfully. It settles on children playing beside gutters in communities that only become visible during election season.
Then the gifts begin to appear.
Rice. Salt. Cooking oil. Wrappers. Cash folded discreetly into waiting palms beneath party banners and loudspeakers.
But perhaps the greatest tragedy of our politics is not the exchange itself. It is the language surrounding it. We have become so accustomed to humiliation that we now describe survival as generosity. A five kilogram bag of rice is not kindness, it is an invoice presented to the poor for the future that has already been stolen from them. A piece of Ankara fabric handed out during campaigns is not solidarity; it is a costume stitched together to disguise abandonment. Even the bottle of oil raised triumphantly before cameras is not relief but evidence of a society where suffering has become the raw material from which political influence is manufactured.
Somewhere in this country, at this very moment, there is likely a mother standing patiently in a queue beneath campaign posters while carrying a hungry child on her back. Around her are songs praising men whose policies helped create the desperation that brought her there in the first place. Behind her stands a school building with broken windows and missing roofs. In front of her stands a politician distributing food bought with money extracted from the future of the same child asleep against her shoulders. That single image contains the entire moral failure of the system.
For power in our politics does not merely coexist with poverty. It feeds on it.
A secure population is difficult to manipulate. A population capable of meeting its own needs becomes less vulnerable to theatrical displays of charity. Once citizens possess stability, the politician loses his ability to masquerade as a savior descending briefly from the heavens every four years. Scarcity therefore becomes politically useful. Roads must remain damaged enough for repairs to look miraculous during campaigns. Hospitals must remain weak enough for medicine donations to resemble compassion. Schools must decay sufficiently for scholarships to feel like acts of extraordinary benevolence rather than basic obligations of governance.
What we call dysfunction is often maintenance.
And yet it is impossible to honestly examine this reality without extending compassion toward the ordinary voter. Too many analyses of vote buying are written from the comfort of full stomachs and stable incomes. They condemn the poor without attempting to understand the terrible arithmetic of desperation. When a man no longer knows how he will feed his family tomorrow morning, morality begins to compete directly with survival. The future itself starts to feel distant and abstract. Four years become less important than four days.
This is the psychological prison upon which transactional politics depends. The politician is not merely purchasing votes. He is purchasing exhaustion. He is buying the silence that emerges when citizens have been worn down by inflation, insecurity, unemployment, and endless disappointment. He understands that a population trapped in permanent anxiety rarely possesses the emotional strength required for sustained resistance.
There are adults in this country who have never encountered governance as anything other than abandonment. They have never known a political system that approached them first as citizens instead of prey. That reality should disturb us far more deeply than it currently does, because people who no longer expect dignity eventually begin to treat indignity as normal.
George Orwell once observed that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. In our own political theater, language performs another kind of deception altogether. It teaches citizens to mistake crumbs for inclusion. It conditions millions of people to believe that the feast of the nation naturally belongs to a separate class of human beings while everyone else must compete for leftovers scattered from above.
But the politician is not more native to this country than the farmer whose harvest fails because promised irrigation projects vanished into private pockets. The governor is not more important than the nurse struggling to keep patients alive in hospitals without electricity. The senator is not more deserving of comfort than the lecturer whose salary evaporates beneath inflation before the month even begins. The illusion of political superiority survives only because generations of citizens have been taught to bow psychologically before power.
And whenever the transactional economy of elections begins to fail, whenever hunger alone is no longer enough to fully sedate public anger, the managers of the system reach instinctively for the oldest weapons available to them.
Ethnicity.
Religion.
Fear.
A hungry Yoruba man is encouraged to view a hungry Hausa man as his natural enemy. A struggling Tiv farmer is persuaded that his suffering originates from a struggling Jukun trader rather than from decades of elite failure. Christian and Muslim communities who endure the same collapsing economy are manipulated into defending politicians who exploit both sides equally.
This deception has endured because it transforms horizontal suffering into horizontal hostility. Citizens who should be united in frustration are instead divided into competing camps of suspicion while the real beneficiaries of the disorder remain untouched above them.
Yet inflation does not ask for ethnicity before entering a household. A bullet fired by a bandit does not pause to request religious identity before tearing through flesh. Kidnappers do not examine tribal affiliation before demanding ransom from terrified families. Poverty itself has never respected ethnic boundaries in this country. Only politicians do.
The elite understand something that ordinary citizens have not fully understood yet: their own unity is stronger than the divisions they preach to others. They exchange contracts across regions, protect one another across party lines, and negotiate power privately while encouraging public bitterness among the poor. They dine together after television debates and attend one another’s weddings while young men from impoverished neighborhoods are mobilized to insult, threaten, and sometimes even kill one another in defense of political interests that will never materially improve their lives.
There is a particular tragedy in dying for a politician who would not recognize your corpse if it lay directly in his path.
History repeatedly warns societies about this pattern. Long before nations collapse physically, they often collapse morally. The danger begins when citizens gradually stop believing that the state belongs to them at all. Once that happens, democracy slowly transforms into a marketplace where suffering becomes currency and dignity becomes negotiable.
Perhaps this is why citizens are constantly warned against “wasting” their votes on candidates who supposedly lack the machinery required to win. Pragmatism, in our political vocabulary, often means selecting which familiar oppressor should continue supervising decline. People are taught to distrust hope itself. They are instructed to believe that integrity is unrealistic, that decency is politically naive, and that corruption is simply the unavoidable price of governance.
But James Baldwin understood something essential when he wrote that human beings are capable of changing the world. Every major transformation in history once appeared impossible before it became inevitable. The first voices raised against slavery were dismissed as unrealistic dreamers. The first people who challenged colonial empires were mocked before they were celebrated. Moral progress has always begun with minorities courageous enough to reject the logic of inevitability.
A vote for an honest candidate, even in defeat, is therefore never meaningless. It is evidence that conscience still survives beneath the noise. It is a declaration that standards still exist. It is proof that memory has not been completely erased by propaganda and hunger. Most importantly, it interrupts the psychological monopoly of hopelessness upon which corrupt systems depend.
Election day itself reveals something profound about democracy that political elites quietly fear. For a brief moment, hierarchy weakens. Wealth loses part of its authority. The billionaire and the roadside trader approach the ballot box carrying exactly the same numerical power. One vote. No convoy can purchase an extra ballot. No title can multiply political worth inside that small democratic space. That equality, however temporary, remains one of the most radical ideas human civilization has ever produced.
Which is precisely why so much energy is invested in corrupting it.
And so when the campaigns begin again, when convoys return roaring through neglected streets with music, slogans, rice, and carefully rehearsed promises, citizens must remember something deeper than anger. They must remember their own value. They must refuse to see themselves as livestock waiting to be fed before an auction. Nations rarely die in a single dramatic moment. More often they decay slowly beneath the accumulated weight of surrendered dignity, until citizens become so accustomed to surviving that they forget they were once meant to live freely.
The dust always settles after the convoys leave. The bags of rice eventually empty. The banners come down. The songs disappear.
But the consequences remain long after the applause has faded.
And in the end, the most expensive thing any people can ever buy will always be a cheap politician.
Stephanie Shaakaa
08034861434
