USA Africa Dialogue Series - Democracy on sale or Democracy for sale (hook, line and sinker.) Which one ? Re - Nigeria and “Democracy at Auction Ahead of 2027”

Always a good starting point for this kind of engagement : 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,...” 

The “all men” in Nigeria and other fledgling African democracies are mostly enveloped in diverse ethnicities, rivalries, cultural & religious identities, various levels of riches, mired in poverty, suffering at various levels of austerity, insecurity, victims of injustice such as lack of basic necessities such as electricity, access to clean potable water, healthcare, opportunity, a future, quality education etc etc etc… 

This week I have been spending some time with the marvellous Joshua Bennett and his very latest, eye-opening, heart searching “ WE (The People of The United States) “ - another milestone achievement coming on the heels of his earlier poetry, and nonfiction  

 / Spoken word: A Cultural History 

// Being Property Once Myself : Blackness and the End of Man 

///  The People Can Fly: American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time

The rabbis teach that if your knowledge doesn't increase, then it decreases. Previously, I knew about the four sons, and today, I just found out that there are 5 Types of Humans. Only five.  The relevance here is that given that “ignorance (of the law) is no excuse”, to which category does each judgemental one of us truly belong ? 

Are we not supposed to thank him for telling us all what we already know or suspect? Well, at least, it's there for the record, the as usual, indignant, law-abiding, righteous-sounding, upright, sometimes sanctimonious Johnny Onyeukwu donning the prophetic mantle of “warner”, and once again, his timely, despairingly real but in no way surprising, so to speak, sounding the alarm with his “Democracy at Auction Ahead of 2027” - as if sounding the alarm is going to stop, arrest, prevent or reverse the direction of the runaway train . At best he is informing, and has informed the general public about those aspects that he sees as the current lay of the land. 

What's obviously missing in the whole enterprise, is the Rule of Law - absolutely - the glaring absence of the rule of law currently at an unenviable tangent or crossroads with the proposition that, not people empowerment but just NAKED "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"

Except that in this general instance - it's really a lack of people empowerment that corrupts the body politic, not that there are no rules, or what’s known as separation of powers, but that ( so it seems) everybody is breaking the written and unwritten codes, doing what is legally impermissible or morally reprehensible, and in the absence of an enforcer (of the law) it’s perfidy brazenly ( in broad daylight) or surreptitiously ( concealed in darkness) - impunity - Biblically described as “spiritual wickedness in high places” getting away with as much as they can  - no denouement of the kind we find in Crime and Punishment  with Rodion Raskolnikov winding up in Siberia or Citizen X unexpectedly in Kirikiri for election malfeasance or more momentarily winding up in an even hotter and less congenial climate in JAHANNAM 

Even if charity begins at home, in line with Mr. Follow-Follow, we could first take a look at Trump country, Nigeria’s improbable, most powerful democracy role model:

 USA : Democracy for sale.

And then come to realise that there's no point in “ the pot calling the kettle black”

Nigeria : Democracy for sale ?

Is there anything that has happened before, that will not happen again? 

God forbid ?

In the era of military governments in Nigeria, the old colonial British media mindset featured ironic headlines such as  “The Changing of the Guards ” - one military despotism succeeding another, like the handing over of the baton at a relay race,  in the case of Nigeria, either voluntarily or by military coup. Emeka Ojukwu put it succinctly: ”The military takes over for one reason only: For Profit !”  Back then,  dispensing with costly, divisive, rat-race elections, national assemblies etc. which meant more cost-effective no nonsense rule and it still does  a fat lot of good when the pious Nigerian Pentecostal pastors lament, quoting a rhetorical son of goodness asking, “ what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?”

These days, the contents of John Onyeukwu’s latest lamentation about the current (pre-dawn?) state of affairs in his motherland is merely seasonal, it’s a cyclical déjà vu which comes around  as a constitutional formality once every four years. I can imagine an Oyibo such as the world’s greatest wannabe Emperor Trump ( super-oyibo) currently taking up arms against a sea of troubles - trying to coerce- metamorphose the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, into “the Strait of the United States ”.  I can imagine him curling his lip and screwing his wrinkled face up with contempt as he reads it . If Temene was his mother tongue he would probably “suck tit” and emit a “Shiooor  - what do those God-forsaken Negroes in Nigeria know about democracy ?  By Jove,  hundreds of them have PH-Ds in political science, and yet they still  can't even conduct a simple free and fair presidential election ! “ 

 Well, the devil is always in the details and taking into consideration the 6th of January Insurrection which Mister Trump inspired and his insistence up to this day that the 2020 Presidential election which he lost was stolen by Joe Biden, he will probably listen with a sympathetic ear to all who eventually claim to have lost their bid to be elected President of Nigeria because they were victims of election fraud….

Thankfully - because of so many Nigerians with a PHD in political science, unlike that comedic village school teacher Lakunle, for fear of the reprisals, Trump wouldn't dare articulate anything like "your race of savages"

The fact is that if we are to go by partisan media reports, rumours, gossip, fake news , conspiracy theories etc, in line with Afro-pessimism, the results of the upcoming mother of all Nigerian Presidential Elections scheduled for 16th January 2027, are already compromised and will be contested , since what's actually happening  and to some extent or other, what has always really happened is the same old sad story of democracy on sale  and also to some extent - the pundits who  will soon be prophesying  the results of the upcoming do or die, winner-takes-all elections will inevitably have to   factor in the reality that only the contestants with really big money bags will be standing in line to be the highest bidder and eventual winner…

“Take the money, but vote for your conscience” advised Sierra Leone’s John Ernest Leigh, when in similar dire straits, once, or was it twice upon a time.  The question is, isn’t the conscience already compromised when poverty-stricken Citizen  X “takes” the money ? 

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