Militia

We call it election but rather than vote, we tote AK 47. Before that, there were campaigns, rallies, posters, songs and dances, party names and emblems, rhetoric and barnstorming. Azonto, shaku shaku, et al. It swings from a fanfare to a fair of death and rancour. It ends not as democracy, but impunity. It is comedy if we remove the blood. A comedy in which we are afraid to laugh.

It is the ceremony of violence plus the blood, especially the blood. Polls in Nigeria now bow to blood. That is because elections are about violence. This rite seemed a right for all regions before, and many citizens often retreated to their holy hills for safety.

But from the past two election cycles, a region sticks out like lone lava. Nothing is legitimate unless it is mated to fire and fury. It is what we call the south-south or the Niger Delta. Since 1999, it has not been the people’s wish that matters, but gangrene from a gang of elite hoodlums. They have no respect for democracy, or the coercion of the conscience. They want power and they snatch it, and they amass wealth, weapons, street never-do-wells, and what is left is the Churchillian blood, tears, sweat and toil. Except that Churchill meant it in the language of sacrifice to country.

These politicians in the Niger Delta want it for personal, group interest, to ransack and flog the region to its knees and cart away the resources.

Except for two states of relatively low tides of brigandage, all other states in the Niger Delta can only legitimate polls by gansterism. They include my home state of Delta, as well as Akwa Ibom, Rivers and Bayelsa.  The relative innocents here are Edo and Cross River, who show spasms of infection of turbulence from time to time.

I wonder what the people, the helpless underlings of society think of democracy. They see it as a system of violence, by violence for booty. So, whoever represents anyone there must not be seen to have earned it from the authentic hearts of the people.

It is democracy by fiat, fuelled by guns, bombs, machetes. We have seen it in the past two weeks in all the states. In Sapele, we read of gunmen shattering the calm election queue by a rat-tat-tat of guns. Voters scampered away, a few fell and died, blood coloured the pristine sand, screams upturned the morning air. Ballot boxes were destroyed and the instruments of power mingled with blood and sand.

INEC offices are blown off in other states. Port Harcourt, Uyo, Yenagoa, Warri. Roads are apian ways of death. Hoodlums are hooded. In Rivers State, it is a military operation. Gunshots are a continuation of politics by other means. The foot soldiers are faithful. They parody the message of Christ in the Revelations: “Be ye faithful unto death and I will give thee the crown of life.” They fight, they ride on stormy boats, they flit through forests like silhouettes, they howl like wolves, they kill, they burn houses and ballot boxes when they are not stealing them.

A video in one of the states is in circulation of militants in a frenzy of thumb printing. They are unfazed though. They are like young men in a workaday routine, doing a job as genuine as an accountant sorting out the day’s numbers. There is no air of guilt, but sighs of fulfilment with every thumb that smudges a paper.

They see violence the way the ritualist sees it. In the shrine, the priest takes the goat or the cow, or the ram, and slaughters. The blood gushes out. The gore, too. The priests and others glow to the triumph. If it means fertility, then the child has come. If it means wealth, it means money will adorn every effort or lack of effort. If it is gunning down your enemy, your foe has fallen. You are triumphant. The ritual is a prophecy of victory. It is testimony in itself. After all, even the Bible says, a “testimony is the spirit of prophecy.”

So the big men, governors, senators, representatives, local government apparatchiks, all converge to strategise. Not on  ideas about school for all, food for all, or road for all, but gore of all the foes. How to snatch the boxes, re-write the results, pay the billions to all who will do the task, and win.

Is there any surprise that some of the governors do nothing but drone in luxury as they await the next ritual of the slaughter and mayhem that will bring them back to power? Why do roads but only a few months to the election, and pretend there has been no money all along? Some governors have done nothing of consequence but argued they had no money until  it was a few months and the billons started  coming out like spirits turned into flesh. We see the miracle and wonder.

It makes one shudder about the region. What calibre of governors and legislators would have represented the people if the brigands did not take over the cathedral? We shall never know. When we have senators without theories, or governors without vision, or commissioners with the gift only to toady up to the master, then the region is doomed.  Militancy has been blamed for this, including the roars of the Itsekiri-Ijaw hostilities. When they downed the bullets and guns of hate, they did not drown. They morphed into political footmen.  Some of them took advantage of the resource control idea and exploited it for personal fortune.

A place of immense wealth is a hovel of poverty of the people. The quest for resource control has followed after the analysis of the writer Eric Hoffer in his book, The True Believer. He said a movement starts as a cause, then it becomes an enterprise and ends as a racket. Oil is now a racket with politicians as the masters of the game.

The best way to win is to steal, kill and rapine. In his novel, Bound To Violence, Yambo Ouologuem tracks the African obsession with blood and death. The problem with our political class is their lack of education. They therefore have no ideas. They crave nothing but power. Outside of it, they are bored and useless. Hence philosopher Soren Kierkegaard noted that not money, but “boredom is the root of all evil.” Their minds are too vacant to contemplate great ideas to lift their environment. They want power for power ‘s sake. They do not fit into Thorstein Veblen who demonstrated that the leisure class build new centres of pleasure with their excess wealth. Ours have no such imaginations. They build mansions and store money in the west. When they make more money, they are also bored. They seek excitement, what better way to get their veins a-boil with blood again than to shed blood.

It is not that other regions are not fascinated with violence. We have read of a representative shot dead in Oyo State, of the Okota episode in Lagos. In the southeast and north, the polls result can be predicted even without violence. A herd sentiment marks out the regions. In the southwest, a sophistication shuts out the bull from the electoral china shop. The incidence of violence in other regions, though disturbing, pales in relation to my birth region.

We sometimes forget that Edo and Delta were part of the old western region, and had what we know as progressive credentials. We also know that what was known as the Calabar-Ogoja-Rivers also flirted with the idea in the First republic. But how did those regions fall into the sway of brigands and they have been on the other side of the spectrum? In political history, such changes only happen after a sea change of values. But it was a coup of opportunistic elite, a rage of carpet baggers that have held them in thrall of violence.

Elections there are a plebiscite on guns and not love of the masses, of military power, not the people’s will. Elections are a military operation, not a republican rite. It is a Hobbesian ceremony, not a people’s hurrah. It is therefore a farce. Most, not all though, who emerge from the system are frauds and impostors. We need an emergency on democracy there. Only when technology through e-voting upends human mischief can liberation come. Any other means will fail.