RICE FOLLIES

By Joseph Edgar…

If you have not seen the video of the distribution of rice by the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate at Alausa, then you should go look for it. Throngs of people, some have alleged are Civil Servants, could be seen clustering over a huge truck filled to the rafters with edible rice being thrown at them from the top of the truck. This to our people is the manifesto that should deliver them continuous power in the sixth largest economy in Africa.

Nigerian democracy has come of age. It was Ayo Fayose, the controversial and loud former Governor of Ekiti who popularized this style of politicking which he had called Stomach Infrastructure. He was lampooned and derided, but the initiative worked wonders as it carried him all the way into the State House.

Today, the system had been adopted by no less an entity than the Federal Government, although cleaned up and redesigned with a very strong branding and calling it Trader Moni. On the surface, this according to the Federal Government is a social service that was meant to support and trigger the economy at the retail level. But it is for all intent and purposes a soft ploy to garner electoral support at that level of political participation.

However, the APC in Lagos not being interested in any niceties has taken the stomach infrastructure to the bones. They have blatantly dropped bags of branded Rice at an impoverished population, expecting to curry votes thereby further institutionalizing the continued hold on to powers by those who know.

The brilliant thing in all these is the fact that our leaders at that level have come to the realization that the people are restive, the cloak of mass hypnotism as embodied by the leadership of the elites have been removed and both sides know that to ensure the continued entrenchment of status quo ‘initiatives’ like this must emerge.

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Gone are the faux attempt at holding down the people with opaque visions of utopia, gone are the niceties of leadership by vision, gone are the pyrrhic attempts at ensuring social mobilization and cohesion through the provision of quaint policies and the execution of such. The restiveness of the people is clear, they have seen that people have started waking up from the slumber of collective bliss and are beginning to ask questions as to why we are being led by these set of people and why we are not getting our fair share from the huge resources that Lagos throws up regularly.

In response to this is the rice being thrown at us. This shows a marked desperation to hold on to power no matter what. It is very clear that power can be lost if the situation is not handled very well. So the strategy to leverage on mass poverty, poor voter enlightenment, bare faced bullying, ethnic marginalization and voter intimidation is to foist on the weak this policy of throwing rice and other such inducement into the morbid crowd of economic disenfranchised citizenry.

This policy is wildly successful as it feeds into the short termism that is our political configuration. Our prayers on all sides- the led and leaders are in it for immediate gains and this leads to the imposition of vacuous leadership who are not driven by any higher mantle to deliver but to support the process that threw them up and continue to feed it in a bold attempt to ensure continuity.

So, what we see is a turning tables of actors who get replaced due to their ability or otherwise to play the game. Competence is sacrificed on the table of avarice and ability to take orders, balance interests and play the game are the major requirements or qualification for leadership.

Who suffers in the long term? All of us! What do we get? We see midget development, governance suffers, infrastructure decays and despite huge resources, the polity continues to look like a war zone with everything collapsing while we continue to be assailed by a vexed mantra that ‘tax payers money is working’.

The positives in all these is that fact that there is a natural reordering emerging ever so slowly. The gains of this reordering might not be felt in this generation but it is slowly and surely emerging. This electoral season has shown that the polity is beginning to awake to the realities of civic participation. Engagements are beginning to rise above the mundane and our leaders are slowly but surely beginning to be tasked based on the promises they have made.

We will get there; the giant is awakening and they know, hence the very urgent need to throw rice at it. Let’s be patient.

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