Few weeks from hence, Nigerians will be made to go through another electoral ritual, that I dare say, they are fed up with. Flashback to four years ago, the mere possibility of an emergence of an opposition party, for the first time, helped bouy the enthusiasm of Nigerian electorate.

However, the masses’ experience in the last four years has only helped to make more stoics of many average Nigerians, many of whom have since sealed their minds to any hope of change (positive change!) from this democratic experience.

To be surprised if there is high scale political apathy across board in this year’s election is to be deliberately dead to the angsts of ordinary Nigerians. In fact, despite the preaching about the evil inherent in bribe taking and participation in vote buying, many a Nigerian who will be at the polling unit in the elections that will be held, will be there mainly to get incentivised in cash and in kind.

Has there been any slight possibility that Nigerians could have been saved from the political claws that are the established political gladiators, and their various parties they choose to be in as suits their political survival, in the last four years? Perhaps, but I doubt.

Before Atiku

Prior to the emergence of former vice president Atiku Abubakar as the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, the real contest for the 2019 election stood at President Muhammad Buhari and whomever the PDP would present and or those who could or would be aggrieved from the PDP’s primary.

That hypothesis threw up a possibility of at least two strong candidates slugging it out with Buhari. Circumstances have since buried such possibilty as the projection (from APC, mainly) that PDP’s presidential primary would result into acrimony that would bring up many other realignments that would throw up other candidates never happened.

Atiku emerged. The strong personalities he contested his party’s ticket with stayed with him, knowing full well that it’s better to pool strength together with Atiku than to go confront Buhari alone in the presidential election. What this means is that, the presidential contest is firmly in the hands of the same establishment who has led Nigerians into the present dark tunnel without a hope of light at its end, as APC is just the obverse of PDP.

https://newpostng.com/2019/01/11/why-young-people-will-continue-to-run-away-from-nigeria-by-yusuff-uthman-adekola/

What about Third Force?

Safe to say that the much vaunted third force would definitely not take anything back in this year’s election- if there was ever anything to take back in the first place. I deliberately did not mention the candidacy of other parties (who could be described as the third force), apart from PDP and APC, in the scheme of the first possibilty, for obvious reasons. Nigeria was never ready for them.

And as it has turned, and despite pretending to the contrary, the so-called third force candidates have shown that they’re not ready for the huge task of salvaging Nigeria from the grip of its neo-colonialisers, who unfortunately are Nigerian citizens, the so-called one-percenter. Perhaps, a few have shown potentials. Maybe the potentials would grow in the nearest future, or never grow at all.


And it was Obasanjo’s Force!
It was said that the former president slyly hijacked the movement. But with such provenance, the third force was bound to enjoy a lot of suspicion rather than the benefits of doubts it needed badly at the start....

https://newpostng.com/2019/01/12/2019-election-and-the-perils-of-choice-nigerians-will-be-making-by-tobi-idowu/