I’m beginning to believe that we suffer from gross selective amnesia as a nation. I have read befuddling wistfulness manifest in many commentaries about possible free, fair, and credible polls in Bayelsa, Kogi, and Imo. And I wonder who did it.

Are you not aware that the morning tells largely what the day will be like? With the electoral larceny of February and March 2023 and the attendant judicial summersaults, tell me who believes in the sanctity and sanity of the electoral process anymore?

Who will wait for a sullied, stained, tainted, and corrupt umpire—in this case, Mahmood Yakubu’s INEC—to declare results without doing the untoward? Does the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) have the capacity to organize a ‘free, fair, and credible’ election? The truth is that the floodgates of blood have been unlocked in Bayelsa, Kogi, and Imo because the man who must win must understand that ‘power is not served ala carte, he must snatch it, run with it’ and, where necessary, kill for it. That is where we are.

If you like to call me a sore loser for telling the truth, call me a grieving Obidient, but can you sow cassava and reap cocoa yam? I can bet the heavens that a million battalions cannot maintain peace in the off-season elections scheduled for November 11, 2023, in the States of Bayelsa, Kogi, and Imo. Speaking deeply, the polls are scheduled by the umpire, INEC, and the president to be theaters of blood. I pray they prove me wrong, I pray. But how can they when those who hailed the violence that greeted the February and March National Elections occupy prized positions in government today?

How can they when ‘Go To Court’ is the new cliche in town? Must you not win by any means possible and through any crookedness available for the loser to ‘Go To Court’? A thousand and one pages of signed Peace Accords will pass for toilet sheets if nothing is done quickly to recalibrate our moral margins and redefine the frontiers of politics and electioneering in Nigeria. Anything else is like the Wait For Godot.

After spending over 320 billion in the sham-called elections that Mahmood Yakubu and his goons superintended over in February and March, no one is yet on trial for several unexplainable and inexplicable hitches, glitches, and ditches. After watching the Danse Macabre that the judiciary gave a clean bill to, and after seeing ‘Go To Court’ mean ‘We Own The Courts’, what do you expect will happen in Imo, Kogi, and Bayelsa? You are not a Clairvoyant, nor are you Nostradamus, if you say, sorrow, tears, blood, and mayhem. But wait, must this mess continue ad nauseam ad infinitum?

It is, however, not all doom and gloom for countrymen and women; the present crisis will most definitely make true the time-tested praxis ‘only when it’s dark enough can you see the stars’, something that must be given sooner rather than later, and then the task of nation-building shall begin. Here you may call me a clairvoyant, you may call me a seer, or even call me Nostradamus, but like Carlyle, I believe that NO LIE CAN LIVE FOREVER, like Cullen William Bryant, I believe that TRUTH CRUSHED TO EARTH SHALL RISE AGAIN, and I believe that a new Nigeria is in the horizon.

My faith in God tells me that Nigeria shall rise again. My faith in Nigeria tells me that a New Generation of Patriots and Thinkers are ready, willing, and able to berth the New Day, the New Deal, and the New Republic that we crave. And my faith in humankind says to keep the fire burning, Chris, for the day, is near.

Cometh the moment, Cometh the Man.

I wish the States of Kogi, Bayelsa, and Imo what I wish Democracy in NIGERIA. So long, Folks.

Prof Chris Mustapha Nwaokobia Jnr.
Convener COUNTRYFIRST MOVEMENT.