Politics in Africa might Just be a True Reflection of Us
We must accept that maybe something is wrong with the African youth, politician, the rich and the police. Yes, the police. They arrest government critics at the airport. Critics that don't even have TV shows like Trevor Noah. Critics who write and write and write on their semi-new laptops and get accepted to publish when they can cough up submission fees in $ & £.
Critics who are the youth that don't get a chance to go to BBN, cannot afford to travel out of their pockets, have no trust to their names. They get arrested.
There's no change org or petition platform demanding releases in Nigeria that anybody listens to because Nigerians don't even vote enough for government to listen to the polls not to talk of protests.
Union leaders have become party chairmen. Rich bourgeoises, feudal lords who cannot sponsor education because they know their campaigns are run by thugs for the uneducated.
And we have the rich, who are concerned about getting housewives to ditch their husbands for the weekend and travel to Paris on a stipend. We have young people who open Gofundme in America to fund Nigerians who lose out of TV shows in Nigeria.
But you know what? Cynicism has been our approach and no one is even listening anymore. It's not working.
We have squeezed up our noses enough times to catch a cold. We have condescended enough times but it's not working.
Maybe it's time we accepted that capitalism rewards your true desires. Maybe my righteous outrage about all this political mess that defines the Nigerian reality is just a drop in a ocean of people who are satisfied and contented by poverty, squalor and wretchedness.
We must understand that this clamour for a greater, bigger Nigeria might just be a fairy tale of a few isolated humans who have managed to bite the forbidden fruit of internet and travel. Maybe realizing that 80% of the Nigerian population will never step out of the country or see beyond their local internet means that we are all screwed!
Maybe Big Brother Naija is really what most Nigerians want and your holy resentment for these things is not enough to switch up the market demand.
If the politicians will continue to sell their agenda of ignorance, they must have a willing market to participate in their circus show. So we get entertainment that provokes nothing logical. Sure we try to twist logic into the whole thing by tagging our big sensual splurge a social experiment. Reality is that we are just a population that loves to play lottery, kick back, watch people do things daddy and mummy do, then pray that God helps us through the next week.
And today being a Sunday, we definitely add that to the mix. We love to pray the lottery too. If God could just be benevolent and sprinkle some miracles through our various churches and there's some few testimonies here and there. It's enough to get us all to the next rounds.
It might be your turn tomorrow, yes you! or you and you and you too! Amen!
Maybe something is wrong with us that no clinic has diagnosed. Maybe we are a special race and time and generation. It might be time to accept this thing and maybe stop feeling like anyone of us is any better. We are all just a few outliers in a pool of reality which reflects through the things we buy, the causes we raise money for. A community is donating R50 monthly to build a university but well, I know where I'm from, we don't do these kind of things.
In fact, it's a shame to crowdfund education, the glory is in donating to churches, celebrities on TV and for voting the next reality TV star. Look at yourselves people, we are the reality. I don't need a show to see what the Nigerian reality is. It's stupid and wasteful the way we live but well, let us all be okay with it and please this has nothing to do with immorality. It's all good. Demand creates supply, but I hope we sleep on our beds the way we have laid it and this applies for every time we collectively support these kind of wasteful ventures and then turn around to ask foreign governments for education aid, sponsorship and charity.
