Nigerians are working themselves to a fitful frenzy over the on-coming United States Presidential Election in November. For ordinary Nigerians, it offers a fresh vista of release from the scrambled, dull, short, brutish, tentative, short and uneventful life they have been sentenced to by a streak of ravaging rouge leaders. To them therefore, the finesse and panacea the US contest offers is a relief and somehow, an escape from the state of nature and living hell some of their besotted compatriots have reduced life in Nigeria to. To the philistines and mandarins that have cornered power and molded it into an infinitely elastic scourge against Nigerians, the US presidential elections and all the glitz attending it is another diversion that frees them from the close scrutiny of the people against whom they execute their mind-bogging con art. To their unscrupulous enforcers, accomplices and executioners led by people like Ndi Okereke Onyuike, the coming US polls offers another explorable vista to internationalize and export their dubious con games with which they have crippled a well-endowed country and enchained its people. Thank God, their myopic expansionist quest came to a horrible grief!

Make no mistake about it; I am following the American elections. I read up everything about it. I watch the news and the flip-flops of the process. I watch as the climax build up and like every other Nigerian, I was almost tempted to have my own choice between Obama and Mc Cain, between the Democrats and the Republicans and between the various choices thrown up by the exciting race. I know that, as complex as we are as a people, we have different reasons, trust Nigerians, for our respective interests in what happens in November. Mine may be to thumb up a system that works for the betterment of its people. Okereke Onyuike’s own may be for the opportunity it offers her and her thieving cabal to find newer space for the type of sundry illegalities and corrupt acts they have been known to inflict on Nigeria. PDP’s own may be to look for flicks of imperfection to justify the next electoral heist, in their oft-touted aphorism that ‘no election on earth is ever perfect, not even the American system’. In all, the American election offers something for parched and stretched Nigerians but above all, it offers us a slide show of our degeneracy as a country. It offers us a flip of our national decay and it offers us chances of introspection on how we had careered down the labyrinth and how we have descended to the bestial level in a land that boasts of no less a resource base as the United States.

But then, I have found no real great reason to work myself up for the US polls when my country has been rendered. I find no grounds to heckle for either Senator Barack Obama or Senator John Mc Cain to win the forthcoming poll. I find no camp between the Democrats and the Republicans because the contestants as well as the first line beneficiaries are the Americans and their working system that is preened from the influence of the demons and principalities that have found a permanent residency in Nigeria from where they are posing a real threat to the entire human race. Perhaps, if Okereke Onyuike had succeeded in getting away with the dubious intent in her latest gamble, it would have been the end of history and the triumph of the evil empire, molded and fabricated in Nigeria, especially under Obasanjo and exported to the outside world by restive hustlers and con artists who dominated in that era.

While Nigerians endure, in palpable frustration, the deprecation of government as a result of the incapacity of the government inflicted by the past regime’s many acts of illegality and official duplicity. While Nigerians rue the complete reduction of the country’s electoral process to a tom-and-jerry comic script where all manners of scam arts are laundered, we are quaffing and ho-hawing about what Americans should do with their votes. While we have given up our electoral process to remorseless ghouls, rouges and scoundrels, while we have leased our national space to hell-vending brutes and glorified animals, we are raising stakes and bets about how an advanced people that have done their homework, cast their ballots. While we have lulled ourselves into a deadly escapist slumber as pimps and serial thieves run rings around us and eat away our national life, we are breaking our heads over who Americans will choose to lead them. While we have surrendered to an elaborate scam complex that has succeeded to trap the nation’s electoral process, its judicial process, its governance, the security agencies and all other vital organs that now work to entrench all forms of anomie so as to permanently arrest and cage the country, we find comfort in futilely celebrating the virtues in the American electoral process. While we have given up against the conscriptive ennui that has arrested progress, peace, sanity and order in Nigeria, we are hooting, like the Roman mob, for our own choice to be the choice of America in the November election. It is sad, very sad and methinks that if Nigerians, both at home and in the Diaspora release an ounce of the energy we are wasting on the American election to seeking an end to the howling charade we are being conscripted into here in Nigeria, things might change and we would have a country where we would be much more interested in who leads and the process such leader emerges from.

It is really exciting to see Nigerians building various permutations of what will happen in November. It is soul-lifting to read them expressing various sentiments on what other people do with their franchise. It is also curious to note that most of the speculators on the American elections are the very beasts, rouges and vermin that presided over the annihilation of the Nigerian electoral system and has made it the butt of the ribaldry of the comity of nations it has become today. It is curious that most of the spaces, media and otherwise, that today run snazzy close-ups on the American elections, the campaigns, the opinion polls, the endorsements, the frills and thrills, were the same that shamelessly sold out to the Obasanjo leviathan in its desperate bid to deface the country’s electoral process so as to either perpetuate itself in 2003 or to impose its spineless surrogate in 2007. They were the same institutions who, out of pure greed, sold out to the PDP and in a bid to achieve a pre-determined outcome, resorted to painting the map of Nigeria with pencils and crayons, and were selling these as opinion polls. It was the same opinion polls Obasanjo so much alluded to when the world rose with one voice to condemn his primitive criminalization of the electoral process in 2007. I pray these media organizations learn one or two things about opinion polling, even if to improve on the next scam. 

In all, I sincerely relish the American way of playing politics, the buzz, the excitement, the frenzy, the tension and all. It is really the game, which would definitely offer other nations the opportunity to improve on their own process. Sure, a lot of nations, even as close to us as Benin, Ghana, Gambia, etc. are learning and reaping from that effort. It is sad, very sad; that all Nigeria has learned from the process is the little negatives that attend the US election. It is sad that what official Nigeria, steeped in dubiety and guile had been able to take away from the American electoral system was the voters’ recount in Florida because it seemingly justifies the mad charade and sickening parody they carry out here in Nigeria in the name of eletions. So what makes me sad and pulls me away from the American race presently is that it only highlights the ugliness of Nigeria, not only in its twisted electoral charade but also in all spheres of life. It only pokes a melancholic feeling of how low we have regressed as a people; the opportunities we have washed down the drains in a bid to feather our elastic selfish nests. It provokes only nostalgia about a country practically grounded by greed and unbridled corruption. That is why I don’t really feel like breaking my heads on who wins. Whoever wins works for America, her dreams and her people and all those that show a demonstrable keenness to improve and not a terminally sick enclave like Nigeria.

Peter Claver Oparah.

Ikeja Lagos.

E-mail: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com

Robot  Villager

# 1 It is sad that what official Nigeria, steeped in dubiety and guile had been able to take away from t...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 11.09.2008 23:11

afam dike  JJC

# 2 Good piece.While the United States has produced ,the Reegans,the Clintons etc,our unfortunate country has only succeded in producing >monsters such as Abacha,IBB,Obasanjo,Anenih e.t.c....No surprises other races consider as inferior .May God help us!!! Posted by afam dike| 12.09.2008 13:21