The hats stumble, tumbling onto the arena with a heist of millions of naira in hand.
Who needs a Nostradamus to know that 2023 looms on the horizon with queer enactments blazoning our political space?
As in Sergio Leone’s 1966 Italian epic spaghetti starring Clint Eastwood as the Good, Lee Vancleef as Bad, and Eli Walach as the Ugly, Nigeria is not wanting of some artistes, with mission absolute – traducing the will of the masses.
It is going to be nothing short of a blockbuster, the politicians are poised for the matador, ready to fight dirty, do-or-die as they call it.
What an innuendo for the mudslinging, fake news, red herrings, litigations, the bruises – anticlimax, and the extreme, arming foot soldiers to disrupt the electoral process through thuggery and violence.
Hmm, these are what it takes to get the job done in Nigeria! Should it be?
To the dyed-in-the-wool politicians, the prize is worth the grit, the plum job, the political office, which many a politician without scruples considers an avenue for self-enrichment.
Definitely, the nation at this time of economic distress needs will be glad to be rid of some actors who might further widen the breach of the battered national purse should they manipulate their way into power.
Even before the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, sounds the conch, the battle for the souls of an already impoverished masses has begun: paltry sums of money are mincing their way into the homes of the gaunt and kwashiorkor: crystal evidence of how poverty has become weaponized.
Well, for some other Nigerians, those fortunate to make delegate lists of parties, it is bye-bye to penury, as they are smiling to banks with millions.
Even now, surreptitious nets are flying; plunging into national tills already plundered to heaven high, the N80bn treasure carting by an AGF just a tip of the iceberg.
And Nigerians are well schooled, aware that most politicians are like the proverbial spot-dig-in leopard, bent on making sure votes do not count.
The colours polls wear are no longer strange: money-making rounds, rigging, maiming, killings, ballot boxes routing for subversion to conquer whatever choice people make.
The masses have a role to play in frustrating the Ali Baba among the political class and one sure way to fish them out is their antecedents, no matter how hard their foot soldiers and acolytes try to polish or launder their image.
The masses must seize on the past of deceitful politicians to haunt their present and future aspiration to ensure their consignment to the perpetual dustbin of political history.
Doing so will stem the tide of deception that bestrides politicking in the country, and ensure the separation of wheat from the chaff so that the right persons and best hands occupy the elective offices.
Simeon Ugbodovon
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