God don ready sabi
Election is few days from now and the prevalence of political apathy among the southern populace, illiterate, semi-literate, and educated, is repugnant. The illiterate and the semi-literate seem to fair better, though. The political apathy exude by the educated is alarming. One then wonders why millions of naira is spent on political adverts on the social media. In the end it is the less educated, the elderly, the ones that stomach infrastructure will easily suffice, that will vote in the south.
Election day is another holiday or casual leave for the political apathetic among Nigerian workers, in the south at least. This is why I strongly share Tunji Ajibade's submission in The Punch of September 28, 2018 that, politically, northerners are smarter than southerners. He submits thus: "...The rate of collection of PVCs according to INEC was low. It's more so in parts of the South than the North of Nigeria....Oloja pointed out that although the North appeared silent at the time, it was working actively towards the 2019 elections. The North, he said, was mobilising its people on several fronts, including getting the masses to register and collect their PVCs while the South was busy making noise in the traditional and social media. He notes further that most people in the South are too proud, aloof, making too much noise online without taking the essential democratic steps that determine who gets political power. My addition to that is to note how in the last Ekiti and Osun governorship elections politicians had to deploy money to lure (supposedly highly educated southerners) to the voting booths; meanwhile, supposedly illiterate northerners would always fill voting booths to willingly cast their ballots."
Despite the braggado of being educationally advantaged, the northerners beat the southerners to political power. Southerners tend to forget that it is political power, left to Northerners, that dictates the viability of the economy and the general well-being of the populace. With the white elephant project that oil exploration in the Chad basin has become, the Northern political power bloc keeps in mind the possible disintegration of the frail geographical entity called Nigeria and continues the search for crude oil at the basin at any cost. That's just an example that further corroborates Tunji Ajibade's submission that the North operates by foresight that always gives them political advantage. He posits: "While some in the South went about shouting themselves hoarse and threatening the consequences for Nigeria if the June 12 mandate was not validated, the North, that is the more relevant personalities, was silent, or seemingly so. My view then that when the North was silent, that was when it was most active, was confirmed after General Olusegun Obasanjo was released from prison in 1998. Gen Ibrahim Babangida visited him in his Ota home. Asked by journalists what he came to do, he said he came to see Obasanjo because the retired General mattered and would continue to matter in Nigeria. People such as Prof. Ango Abdullahi, a former VC of Ahmadu Bello University, had since affirmed that the meeting where the North resolved to adopt Obasanjo as the PDP presidential candidate was taken in his house. The North was silent but had its way that time, while those who only shouted had their say."
Southerners are always too busy to be at political rallies; they are too sophisticated to cast their ballots either, but they are given to social-medializing on the democratic process, spending hours that influences little or nothing during the election. The candidates of their choice win opinion polls that are inconsequential in the political process of the country. They are also the one that are politically polarised.
It is also pathetic to hear Christians' disposition to politics, particularly elections. We have been so delusioned by many years of inadequate appropriation of scriptural truth laid bare in black and white that we are so encumbered with our heavenly pursuit that we have lost earthly relevance. The result of this delusion is the ill-informed antagonism of Christian aspirants, especially the pulpit bound. Can anyone forget the intimidating rhetorics and intellectualism, and opposition with which Revd Martin Luther King Jr fought the forces of racial discrimination and inequality in the US? And what of Archbishop Desmond Tutu? The voice of one crying from the church against apartheid in South Africa. In Nigeria, the church is expected to be docile and passive. What a repressive arrogation! Didn't Daniel, said to be a prophet, soar to the political pinnacle in the then Babylon Empire? It is then left to the imagination when scriptural perversions are common place and form the basis for our actions and inactions. So when a Christian lady said to me, "I won't vote, God already knows who would emerge winner" I understood her. When asked the implication if every other eligible voter takes the same stance as hers, her answer was incoherent, but expectedly defensive. In a situation that a vote counts, it is minus for any of the political aspirants. Her view is regrettably shared even by colleagues at work. One of them had made the inconvenient effort to collect her PVC, but to my dismay, she said she won't be voting. "Nobody will take my place, I will live to be the mother of my children," she stated emphatically. Pathetically, this sad disposition has remained so for years and it may not change soon, reason being that men are bond servants to their beliefs.
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