By Ugochukwu Ejinkeonye
Now that the campaigns and elections are
over and the winners have been sworn in at both the federal and state levels, I
think that the best next step for us now is to hurriedly put aside the convenient,
barefaced lie that any political party is “better” than the other so we can
frankly and meaningfully engage our new set of rulers. Yes, one party may have
succeeded in packaging itself better than the other or rather out-lied the
other, but it would be terribly naïve, and, indeed, tragic, to ever embrace the
grand illusion that some band of “redeemers” is in town and that they
are any bit different from the people that just lost out in the power contest.
*Buhari
Although, our politicians try very hard
to hide it, “stomach infrastructure” has remained the most enduring theme, if
not the sole motivating factor, in Nigerian politics. Long before it received
popular expression during the recent governorship elections in Ekiti State,
late Sunday Afolabi, a minister in the unmissed Olusegun Obasanjo regime made
it clear to Nigerians that those who were given political appointments have
been invited to “come and eat.”
And so, in keeping with the tenets of
this “democracy
of the stomach” (apologies, K.O. Mbadiwe), since General Muhammadu
Buhari was declared the winner of the presidential elections, the traffic to his
Daura, Kaduna and Abuja quarters has reportedly tremendously increased. The
crowd seeking his ears will even multiply now that he has been sworn in as Nigeria’s
executive president and thus acquired full powers to invite people to “come and
eat.”
Indeed, he is the new man on the throne
who has taken possession of both the yam and the knife, and so people are
falling over themselves to pay him “courtesy calls” – another name for
negotiating the welfare of the stomach! Some are plain about their mission – to
seek how a piece of the yam (or even crumbs) could reach them, while some
others hide behind the popular phrase of negotiating “for my people.” But we
can only know the people driven by altruistic motives by the kind of requests
they table.
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