Is Nigeria losing her May 29, 2023 opportunity?

 

YOU have no option but to enjoy the oratory and live drama in the media currently because their is nothing else.

  Love it or loathe it, whenever it is time for politics, every other thing steps aside. During political campaign periods like we have now, the society does not really have enough chance to pause, think or study to understand anything. Everything moves fast, in flux, frenzy, ratzzmatazz and all. Even the most circumspect loses his thinking faculties fast, no matter how esteemed he is in exercising his head, heart or mind.

  This is very evident now across Nigeria. Things are more dramatic in the presidential campaigns. Our media space is awash with high-falutin verbiage, vitriolic effusions and arrant confusion, no provocative content. At best, what we have is a plethora of comical slapsticks, sitcoms, banalities and balderdash.   Even space for information, education and entertainment are no longer there, especially on radio and television.

  Naive followers like me follow them, deluding ourselves that soon the campaigns would dovetail to debates or at least, near-serious talkshows on vital challenges rattling Nigeria, our beloved country that has been on her knees in every sense and dangerously sinking farther in humongous challenges.

  Sadly, I have heard none.

Suddenly, here we are, within a smell distance to the coffee  we must smell.

  Upon beholding the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mahmoud Yakub, address a press conference yesterday, and giving update on the upcoming 2023 general elections, I shuddered and gasped in fear. ‘ So, we are now there,’ I asked myself, more in disgust than in alarm.

On Saturday, February 25, six weeks today, we will go to the polls to elect one of the one-dozen-and-half persons traveling all over Nigeria currently to be our country’s new president on May 29. I have managed a pause to ponder what, who and how I will vote, as well as which of the 18, I will convince my crowd to route for with difficulty.

  Truth is that I have read some of their largely, copy-and-paste manifestos from where I found nothing very heartwarming as solution to  our country’s myriad of problems (actually, our many hydra-headed troubles).

  Hearing Prof. Yakub’s reminder of the election dates, yesterday, put a needle in my pillow and I cannot sleep comfortably on the matter.

  Nigeria has been a global laughing stock of sort given our abysmal economic, political and even socio-cultural performances, yet no forum has ever been held for the presidential candidates to tell us what they would do differently from the hitherto flawed approach. Even in sports where we had been strong, we have turned poor in recent times. Technology, science, trade, we wobble while the rest of the world push ahead with new ideas. None of the candidates had told me anything on these.

  Insecurity has rocked us for over a decade but there has been a debate on it, yet the polls dates are drawing near and nearer.

The vexed issues of ethnicity, proper federal arrangement, general employment remain as they are. I thought the time to address them is the build-up to this election but here we are.

I live in South East of Nigeria and I thought that a keen aspirant for the presidency of Nigeria would consciously reach out to me and regale me with special carrots he or she has for me. Nothing like that has happened. 

  But who really cares about my disappointment? It does not appear that there are many of the candidates or the politicians around them interested in my headache. 

  However, while worrying about the glib and dribble of the politicians, I pondered the much individuals and non-political organisations across country have done to force the candidates to address the vital issues. I could not find much.

  So, your guess is as good as mine what our fate could be post-May 29. Well, we have 44 days left to presidential election.