Today is a Sunday.
I am certain that in various churches across Nigeria, a prayer for the Nation and her leaders was said. I grew up understanding and witnessing the ability of prayers to change everything. Despite this strong foundation, I have grown up developing my own personal sets of belief. For instance, I have become fully convinced that prayers for the nation without proper politics is simply playing.
There is a growing sect like me, unapologetic about our faith, devout in our beliefs about prayer, but vocal about the importance of everyone playing their part in the politics. This has led to the formation of various movements, including those advocating for everyone to vote, join a political party, form a political party, pass the #NotTooYoungToRun bill and all shades of political advocacy in between. They are all extremely laudable. I only seek to add my two cents to the discourse.
I have a view of the world, framed by random musings of mine. I believe the world is a simple system made of multiple complex sub-systems, which are in turn made up of simpler sub-systems, further made up of a complex sub-system, and the cycle goes on, until it gets to basic simple system without any further complexity. Simply put, the world might just be an infinite cycle of simple to complex systems. This is why I am often keen to understand the systems for success and failure of anything.
One of such cycles is the Nigerian governance cycle. A politician, sponsored by a godfather, invests so much in winning an election by funding violence and leveraging off the poverty of his people. This investment has a termed 4-year limit, except he gets an extension. To ensure he gets the extension, he has to keep his people just idle enough, and poor enough, so that he can repeat his twin winning formula of violence and stomach infrastructure. Upon success, he has to repeat the same formula for his God-son, so as to perpetuate his reign!!
The idle, who seemingly find usefulness every election season, have also designed a system to perpetuate themselves. They get armed enough with cash and weapons during each window to remain relevant to the politician (by displaying their strength), as well as the populace (terrorizing them enough to instill fears of their literal insecurity).
The poor, are both complicit and victims in this instance. Trapped in a system that is designed to keep them poor, they create systems themselves that ensure they just survive, even if they stay poor. This design ensures that every election season is seen as just another opportunity to improve their survival lot and nothing else. If in doubt, ponder and ask why there is an upsurge in violence over N5,000 during elections, between people who have lived with each other peacefully over the last 3years. I carefully accuse them of complicity here, because they allow primitive roots of ethnicity and tribalism remain in their hearts. As a result, any attempt to galvanize their collective frustrations into a movement, is first viewed through the lens of this medieval instinct. Maybe it’s a system design in itself! However, I would easily argue this is one system they have an influence over.
In all of these complexities, a simpler system is born; the Promise Class (I first heard the phrase from a friend). A bulk of this class are those who have escaped the “Poor-trap” through a bit of good education and sheer luck. The other members of the class are children of the elite, who always manage to stay above the impact of this politician-idle-poor tripartite arrangement. Chances are high that the writer and the reader of this piece are members of this class.
Of all the systems, this class is the most important; intelligent enough to comprehend the complex systems, exposed enough to appreciate advancement and engaged enough beyond mere survival. Sadly, our intelligence has been stretched to indifference and often meaningless bird chirps on various platforms. Our exposure has made us selfish, either desirous of creating “Wakanda-enclaves” in Nigeria for only us and our children, or migrating in droves to geographical locations that offer us the promise of better opportunities. And our above-survival engagement has only produced irrelevant markers of success such as material opulence, even if at the expense of our collective commonwealth
Now this is the crux of my rant. Maybe what we really should be having are intelligent conversations and actions on issues such as term limits, political funding, political party governance, skilled emigration programs, the role of technology in civic exercises, federal character, nationhood, citizenship et al. Maybe we could stretch our intelligence into designing and influencing the adoption of alternative systems of governance beyond democracy as it is. Maybe this isn’t to cast aspersions on all ongoing political advocacies, but to express my doubts about the impact of my PVC/TVC, on a system that has been designed this way. Maybe it’s just yet another rant about Maybes!
