Thread by @segalink

Yesterday, I visited one of our key strategic partners, who also doubles as my Rabi. Usually after the normal business talk and mappings, we spare some thoughts for our beloved Nigeria. Let me just share a bit of some misconceptions that is killing us as a people. (Thread).

Democracy; In its origin (Greek)& etymological sense, it means a composite of demos & kratos. Demos can be translated as “the people” (qua “native adult residents of a polis”) & kratos as “power,” democracy has a root meaning of “the power of dPeople.” But power in what sense? 🤔

Let me back track a bit to point out that when Democracy was first envisioned, it was designed in such a way that only educated people within the society were able to vote. Women and slaves were not allowed to vote. This wasn’t due to racism or misogyny (sexist).

The reason behind this was that, to be able to vote, you must be a land owner. This is bcos it was believed & held true that people who are land owners were the ones with the access & means for education. It wasn’t so much of land ownership but more-so for their education.

Land ownership then also confers some degree of social responsibility that they already had because they were land owners. Women/Wives were not allowed to vote because it was believed that they will vote the way their husbands voted and it was considered redundant & unnecessary.

Also slaves were deemed to act as instructed by their owners (same way women voted), which means wealth became the determining factor for victory if going by the numbers (people with more slaves will always win). Money then will become the determinant of Right or Wrong.

In lieu of this, the term democracy is one of the most elusive terms with its meaning riddled with ambiguities, (who are the people? Why are they choosing to be ruled if they are free?) which can sometimes be impossible to assess philosophically.

This begins to show that our sense of value is always going to be tied to the level of exposure and education. Until we can fix the education in the country, democracy will always be an irony of choice...a farce and exercise in futility (a political puppet show if you like).

This is corroborated by H.L. Mencken “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard with the pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”

Over the years the escalation & the increase in equal rights/rights to vote by all & the de-emphasis on education created a scenario where the average IQ of the population decreases every year bcos more people who are uneducated are coming into that population.

So the choices that that population is making are reducing. A group of fools is no wiser than individual fools that came together to form the group. No sudden wisdom falls upon them by their alliance.

If you have ten people in a room with only one being wise, unless the wise person can subjugate the will of the foolish people, the decision that comes out of that room will mostly be foolish.

This is true for the Senate, House of Reps, the Presidency & also holds true for committees, Professors & learned people in the midst of a parochial, provincial & primitive village of fools.

You can dazzle in eloquence but going by the ambiguous provisions of democracy in that conundrum, you only have one vote.

If you substitute Aso Rock for White House in the quote below you will still be perfectly correct. 🧐

Note that there are far greater illiterate folks than the enlightened. The statistics of educated people doesn’t take cognizance of sub-literates, the easily brainwashed as political tools and summarily abandoned after elections.

Poverty is a tool skillfully deployed over the years by politicos. If you don’t know, you can’t make a decision in the know. If you are hungry, it is easier to buy you.

But We are mostly asking the wrong questions.

Only genuinely intelligent people will quieted their minds and stop focusing on the problems and direct their attention to those benefitting from the ills.

Why is uninterrupted Power supply forlorn? Despite the available technology, strategic cum fortuitous positioning of Nigeria? Even the elements Wind, Water, Solar, are in our side with opportunity to convert our Waste into energy...what about nuclear energy etc? 🤔

Suffice to say we have all the means necessary for every method of generating power in Nigeria. The technology is there and the partners are there. So why can’t we have uninterrupted power? It is simple....Check those feeding off importation of generators and dealers in petrol.

Uninterrupted power will radically progress the country towards industrialization which will rapidly empower the individual, thus increasing the exposure, education/knowledge base to the point where we’ll be enlightened, easy to govern, difficult to rule & impossible to enslave.

This however is a threat to our version of democracy.

It’s no longer a secret that the legacy political parties have been in crisis for 3yrs running now. The loss of the election almost destroyed the PDP & the success of the ruling APC has traumatized them to the point of ripping it into shreds in factional politics of interest.

From the human nature/behavioral perspective, the fortunately unfortunate outcome of the 2015 election is that;

President Buhari and his camp sowed a lot of seeds of distrust with the way they handled his power and the way they dealt with the alliances that got them to power.

What this has done is that it has made the prospect of long distance alliances (when dealing with people who are not in your immediate camp, a lot more risky and a lot less likely) the unfortunate aspect of that is that it damages the south more than it does the North.

This is bcos the North (benefitting faction) has steadily been accumulating its wealth over the last 2yrs & it’s easier for them to come to a consensus of power than the south bcos there are too many progressive interest parties in the south.

These are people, who struggle to see why they should stand down for somebody else. And in the absence of any of these parties to be able to reach up North & form alliance with the power blocs, it means that we have a more splitted southern efforts than we have in the North.

Note this critically citizens; Without strategic cohesion and alliances that make sense void of self...President Buhari may be gifted another 4years by implication and I will explain further...

With the abuse of power of dBuhari admin, dNorth may not be as united as it could be & there are interest groups in there, who while they may not be as altruistic as we think a leadership group should be, are nonetheless dismayed at what is happening under the current aberration

This might be partly because of the modicum of conscience or more-so because of a lack of inclusion with the power arrangement thus making it easier to develop fault-lines in the power bloc that currently hold leadership as evidenced by the current fragmentation taking place.

There’s also the seemingly contrary to plan of GMB’s core group, who have suddenly awoken to the reality that they have a lot more powers than they realize they will have bcos of GMB’s inability to actually function (what is merely read as incompetence by the public)...

...thus they will rather hold on to power for another four years than to give power up. Suddenly a handful can now see that within a few people they are the de facto president of Nigeria, without having to actually run for office/election.

Why not consolidate more powers, so that going forward they can become a force to reckon with in this political game? This however goes contrary to the over-arcing plan that the brokers put forth for the North to take power.

“The conscious intelligent manipulation of the organized opinions & habits of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible govt which is the true ruling power in most society”- E.Bernard

Some of the purists amongst the apparent legacy power hegemony (OBJ, IBB, Abdulsalami, etc) as tyrannical & as dictatorial as they are in their thinking, genuinely believe they have the country’s best interest at heart & that they’re the only ones capable of managing the country.

Just as genuine as white people arguing that there is no such thing as white privilege. This is not coming from a racist’s heart but a heart that genuinely believes. (Call It delusion but they believe in that bubble).

In the African context, when you have this mindset, especially in power circles, it is the same that suggests that “these citizens can’t choose a credible leader by themselves...we must help them!”

To a degree, this may be agreeable based on the statistical logic of numbers beyond which those people believe that the country needs to go a certain way & the village of ignoramuses would need to be steered.

Yes they are corrupt. Yes they steal, but...

Their corruption & stealing has some homeschool guidelines that govern it, so that it is a known secret but a Secret nonetheless. They have a means of accounting for what is stolen with certain percentages allocated to lubricate the interests of the purist & regional power blocs

What Jonathan’s Administration probably did was that they broke those guidelines and got blindsided to allow stealing with reckless abandon and foolishness, which now turn the public eye unto what should have been a secret.

What Buhari’s administration have done was being able to a degree, restore a measure of secrecy but they’ve not done away with the impunity. And because the public can not unknow what they now know, it is all the more difficult.

So the old guards believe that there’s a way that only they can restore the balance of power.

That is a dynamic, that given the “power by all means” mindset that has slowly seeped into the country because we no longer have people who have day jobs and then make political money on the side, thus making political money on the side, has become the day job.

We no longer have pure careerist in political circles (Accountants, Bankers, Professionals etc) but career politicians (basically aspirants rabidly seeking power -share of national cake) with making political money on the side as a day job.

So if you remove their political money making side business, within one generation, their families will suffer the consequence because there is no other business that they are engaged in. This is the threat that confronts eRats trading in lies as well.

Based on this, they are always found fighting for their job just as ardently as professional Doctors, Civil Servants etc within the labour circles, are fighting for their right, because the side political money making job in political circles have now become their right.

Note that owing to this, most aides don’t even have salaries, but their money making side business is more than profitable. This however put diligent senior aides in a fix when the option of no salary remains unresolved under the assumption that the side biz & tips are enough.

With this kind of mindset a new level of desperation is ushered into the game, defenestrating the rules of gamesmanship and sportsmanship. We now have a political breed or aspirants, who do not have guidelines as to what they will or will not do to retain that power.

This creates a very very frightening scenario. So where we will have agreements that is to be upheld or alliances that will have to be honored...this is no longer the case.

So it makes the process more fractured, dangerous & potentially violent than ever before especially if you add to the mix, a situation whereby everybody believes that they & they alone have the answer & are best suited to hold unto power & perpetuate themselves.

This is almost becoming tantamount to a religious war. People are now fighting for their right to be right. This is not to say that they are right but that they have a right to say that they are right.

Just as People now focus more on their opinion of who and what they think God is and defend that opinion to the death.

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion of Knowledge” - Stephen Hawkins (May His Soul Rest In Peace). This thread is not for everyone but for a few that can think.

I have said many times over that our situation is not fatalistic. But what can we do going forward?! 🤔

...This is not the end of this Celestial Observation... stay tuned.

The concluding part starts shortly....

Quieten ***

This is where people start calling me names. Please don’t read further if your biases are not checked at the door. These are results of deep analysis of many years. Trust me I don’t like the results as well. There are many things I wish could be different but Truth is Truth.

If you have any candidate for 2019, tag them and let them read up. The situation at hand is not about the ego of any individual. Anyone who is not ready to make sacrifices or serve need not waste the space. It’s going to get a lot interesting. But here’s the thing...

We have short memories in Nigeria especially on political issues but God has delivered us many times from the jaws of principality possessed rulers. Even those that defied exorcism and had to be taken out with a Pineapple...I’m sure you know the one who “didn’t steal a kobo.”

Unless we have some major alliances, we are approaching a deluge of cancellation of efforts. Because we have different people who attract the same kind of persons running, each cancelling out their votes systemically.

So once we have two people that are similar running, each will get a fraction of the votes they would have gotten if they were aligned because you are forcing people to make a difficult choice.

Asides from the incumbent (GMB) and Atiku (hounded by OBJ whose new life purpose/mission is to ensure He doesn’t become President) there are Dark Horses, Grey Horses & there are others. This is where the veracity of Democracy comes into play and whether or not it is right.

I feel the greatest ill of the world today in its current form is the belief and the fight for equality. This is one of our greatest challenges. What must be fought for is equity, justice and righteousness (what is right) in fairness.

The equality & the belief that all states should have the same right begins to move rapidly into error when it comes hand in hand with the right to choose what a state is. We still don’t know what restructuring means to most people chanting the term.

Recall the rationale for limiting voting rights to the enlightened, recall the creation of states in Nigeria and how we moved from 12 to 36 while multiplying our issues.

Globally, we have the issue of gender, where the belief & the fight for all genders to be considered equal is coming hand in hand with the right to decide what gender one wants to be, which then throws up a growing list of alphabets that are now entering the fight.

It is only a matter of time before sane people are grossly outnumbered in the demonstration of craze and our civilization becomes a shadow of itself.

It is already ominous, as we move from one election year to another in the cycle of elect and regret while harnessing our turn by turn politics of ethnic extraction. We need to do something different to beat the madness or another 4year disaster is upon us. Won’t say more.

Been told I’ve revealed enough. 😇 I thought I was gonna do a bit on those enslaved by the bourdillon forces in the SW but that will have to be another thread. Thanks for reading. There will be more.
...End of Celestial Observation...

NB: Like the gender confusion as an answer to gender equality like the plethora of political parties as an answer to true leadership. Who suffers in the end? The people. The irony of choice may be upon us if we don’t come together & combat the common enemy. (The Puppeteers).

Don’t hate anyone this time over any politician or aspirant. Those who love NIGERIA and are ready to serve will soon be revealed. And those who will go ahead and fail with 10Votes Nationally will face their shame. It’s time to be strategic. It’s time to be wise. If not...GMB Wins

Will talk more about Dark Horse, Grey Horse and others as well as the major contenders by weekend. The Aspirants should not miss this. It’ll be great to know what to expect as we proceed before I start charging for Celestial Observations.

Please @threadreaderapp unroll