Season of anomie

These are indeed strange times. For a lot of strange things are happening.

And I’m not talking about the successful penile transplant in far away South Africa (at least, we can now give added push to the proposal that rapists be made to donate their instruments to those who’ll use them with more discretion).

I’m also not talking about the decomposing corpse that dropped out of the wheel well of a New York-bound Arik airplane, after spending four days in there and going to America and coming back. No.

I’m not even talking about how the politicians are all exposing plots of how their opponents are plotting to assassinate them: How Jonathan wants to kill Tinubu, how Akpabio wants to kidnap Buhari, how Amaechi wants to kill Wike and how Wike and Dame Patience have sent killers after Dakuku. No!

I’m not even worried that, with less than two weeks to our general elections, and despite reassurances from the highest possible quarters, not a few people are still unconvinced that there won’t be another shift in date. I’m even less alarmed that a ruling party that has threatened to govern for 60 years (in the first instance) is now so scared of going for elections barely 16 years down the road. Neither am I curious that an opposition party, which has never won at the centre, has awarded itself victory even before the first vote is cast, and is threatening all of us not to declare a different result.

Rather, I’m worried about a certain Attahiru Jega. Or, better still, I’m scared on his behalf – since he seems to have lost the capacity so see beyond the surface.

In the part of the country where I come from, conventional wisdom has it that when you wake up in the morning and an otherwise harmless fowl begins to pursue you, the wisest thing to do is to, first of of all, run for safety. For that fowl may have developed teeth overnight.

It is this fowl analogy that readily comes to my mind as the seeming theatre of the absurd continues to unravel ahead of next week’s general elections. Of course, a lot of it is targeted in the direction of the electoral umpire and its under-fire headship. However, unlike the proverbial wise man and his charging fowl, the electoral umpire is (or is acting) unperturbed.

In fact, there is this confidence (or is it defiance?) that Prof. Attahiru Jega and his Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) exude that scares me. Despite the fact that everyone is apprehensive ahead of next week’s elections, Jega and INEC seem to carry on as though all is well.

Listening to the INEC chairman on Monday, at the town hall meeting at the Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre in Abuja, I came away with one conclusion, it’s either those of us outside INEC are too agitated over nothing, or Jega is too blind to see what we’re all seeing, or he knows something we do not know. Or, worst still, he has his mind made up on who would win what seat come March 28 and April 11.

So, when we complain about not getting our PVCs, he reels out across-the-states the percentages of those who have collected (putting it at above 80% nationwide) and reminds us that INEC does not have to deliver all PVCs before we can vote, or before an election can be adjudged free, fair and credible.

When we ask the INEC men to go beyond the percentages and look closer, to see if some people have not collected other people’s PVC and warehoused them for sinister purposes, they insist that it is illegal to collect PVC by proxy, that whoever does it would be made to face the music. But the truth remains that this law forbidding collection by proxy has not stopped it happening, even as INEC plays the proverbial ostrich and is waiting for the beneficiaries ( or victims) to come and make formal reports and file complaints appropriately. Even when one person (from Rivers State), who actually sighted his PVC at some point was later told that the card could no longer be found, Jega did not take up the case as a case study. Instead he queried the man for not making a formal report.

When we tell them that politicians are buying up the remaining PVCs that their thugs could not snatch at gunpoint, the INEC bosses say the stolen PVCs can’t be used; that they are useless to whoever steals them. They never take a moment to ponder on why the theft persists, despite INEC’s conviction that the cards are useless to the thieves. They also presume that the objective of stealing other people’s PVCs is always (and only) to use such cards to vote. Has it not occurred to anybody at INEC that there could be other uses? Or is multiple voting the only form of rigging that exists? As a politician, is it not possible that you hijack and withhold the cards of those who don’t support you? So that even if they can’t vote for you, they won’t also be able to vote against you? But Jega and company are not looking in that direction. They have their minds fixated on the old rigging system of stuffing the ballot boxes. They don’t know that as INEC is developing new technologies to  check rigging, so also are the politicians and their ICT whiz kids devising new ways of compromising the technology and circumventing it. Today, when politicians perfect a technology to jam the card readers and make them ineffective, it is not always to give them more votes through the back door. It could well be to rubbish and discredit the process and create the rationale for discarding whatever result it produces. But Jega is not looking in that direction.

We tell Jega that there is a groundswell of opposition to his remaining in office to conduct the election, and he dismisses everything with a wave of the hand. He says he’s not under pressure to resign. Yet, MASSOB, who, by the way, are not supposed to be Nigerians (and, therefore, should not give a hoot about how we rule or ruin our country), are the ones now calling for Jega to resign. And just as we were still trying to digest the MASSOB interest, their Yoruba counterparts, the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) joined in the macabre dance. They too, want Jega to go.

Of course, neither the MASSOB nor OPC is working for Jonathan. It is just that pro-Jonathan elements have a way of turning up at these curious demonstrations.

Very soon, I’m sure, we will hear that the ACF (or even the stillborn Arewa Peoples Congress) has split and that one faction is also carrying placards seeking Jega’s ouster. Strange things are indeed happening!

And that is why I’m discomfited by Jega’s smug confidence. I hope we would all not have been taken for a ride before we realise what hit us on the morning after March 28. I’m really really scared

But then, there are still a few things to cheer about. If the PDP and the APC have run out of new stories to tell us, the same cannot be said of Mama Peace, our very own irrepressible First Lady, Dame Patience. She has kept up with her own rallies and, from Benue to Ekiti, through Edo and Akwa Ibom, she has continued to provide us with the much needed comic relief, irrespective of what the eggheads at ICC think. They can come back later to educate her on what their too many books say about hate campaigns and incitement. For now, there is an election that must be won, and the Dame is determined to win it.

She has continued to rub in the issue of Buhari’s age – at one point, telling the aged mother of Gov. Ayo Fayose to go pick a presidential nomination form, since it was now clear that every party is bringing out its old men and women to stand for election.

And while we were still choking on the morbid humour, she suddenly turned prayer warrior. “Fayose, I will not bring food for you in prison… Holy Ghost… Fire! We will not take food to our husbands in prison… Holy Ghost … Fire!” It was her comical way of telling the people that Gen. Muhammadu Buhari would throw people into detention if elected president. And then, she would punctuate her talk with a song and matronly dance steps. Of course, she does not need another speaker at the rally. If you allotted three hours for speeches, she can take up the entire three hours, singing, dancing, praying, cursing, just anything that catches her fancy.

In another breath, our digital Mama Peace would dismiss Buhari as “analogue”, reminding the 73-year-old APC candidate that we are no longer using “taparata”(read that as typewriter). As we say in Lagos motor parks, ‘idea is there’.

Yes, you might accuse her of murdering grammar, inventing ‘new Englishes” or even thinking in her mother tongue and imposing the thoughts on the English language, but she’s giving us the much needed soapbox that is lacking in both PDP and APC. Whoever does not like her style can go bring his own wife. After all, Buhari too is married and Osinbajo has a wife too.