Old Van in a New Bus

Most people who use the danfo or any other yellow bus to commute through the mad dash that is the average Lagos route are not unaware of the fact that the cars served as a goods conveyance van in Europe, this hardly registers. 

However, even if they don’t know what for sure, they know the tokunbo cars must have served another purpose in their previous incarnation, especially when they contemplate the dress-ripping makeshift seats and rough-hewn windows that just about serve the purpose they were meant for. They know that the iron-rimmed seats are not standard issue, at least from whence the car came, and that the chance of bodily injury if an accident occurs was amplified by their addition. They know the drivers are largely reckless—early morning shot of paraga and Igbo reckless—and the buses disasters waiting to happen. They know this, but throw their lives into the arms of in-time-of-trouble-and-need-gods as they clamper aboard the buses every morning, afternoon and night. The need to transit overshadowing fear, caution, and whatever sense of impropriety they might feel.

In a similar vein, across much of Nigeria, the fact that the political class mostly consist of recycled political jobbers whose major raison d’être is to have a part in whatever government rules the day is a well-known fact.

Also largely known is the fact that the politicians direly need the masses to be relevant, to achieve their dream status. It is a given that the political class, to become, draw from the masses the army with which they perpetuate themselves in power. It is from the masses, mostly living below the poverty level, that machete-wielding horde pure into the street to maim and kill to protest another politician’s failure to secure power. It is from them too that clutches of bare-chested grandmothers are seconded to thrust withered glands at TV cameras, again to protest perceived wrongs done to some politician. Still, the same ‘downtrodden’ masses provide the mass of tribesmen, religious brethren and other obscure associates that rush to defend ‘their own’ when he /she is indicted for corruption and abuse of office. They provide the mob soundtrack that has come to act like a force field that shields their principals from the consequences of their rotten ways.

With these attributes, one would think that the ‘masses’, even if only those elements that cleave to the political class, are feted. However, it is a mention worthy fact that the political class tend to turn loose the bulk of their army after elections have been won or mandate stolen. It is a bitter irony that they find these discards readily available when the need arises again, usually four years down the line.

This is Nigeria, we are used to these things; they are norms, common enough to have become mundane, just like drawing air into the lungs.

If Nigerian politicians study anything, it is the psychic of the average Nigerian. They know us better than we know ourselves. They know the power they have over us. They exploit it; ever drumming those elements that they have programmed us to believe separate us. We dance to their tunes, unconsciously, falling into thoughtless ethnic bigotry and blind religiosity. Thus when the corrupt, selfish politician moves from one grime-ridden political platform to another, we notice, we know we are headed to disaster, but we only shrug, the same way we notice but shrug at ill-fitted bus seats and drunk drivers.

A few months ago, at the period when social media was agog with news of the formation of a new political party that may—many hoped—have the clout to challenge the ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), I began to feel the rekindling of hope that I had thought lost. Yes, after Nigerians showed they are largely incapable of collective thought independent of their ethnic, religious and geographical considerations during the elections that ushered the present occupant into the master bedroom of Aso Villa, I lost hope in the country achieving positive change any time soon.

So, it was my pleasure—temporary, albeit—that some of the political players I saw as possessing some sense of equity were talking about coming together to challenge the establishment. I remember seriously considering registering as a member when the new Party berth. I recall gushing at the thought of Babatunde Fashola, and Adams Oshiomhole et al replicating some of their more positive policies at the federal level.

It was a very premature sense of coming progress or a chance at it. As a Nigerian, who has hoped and was disappointed several times over the years, I knew enough about my compatriots to be sceptical, to assume a ‘wait and see’ attitude. Sadly, the new party came to be—despite PDP’s machinations—and with a speed that astounded even sceptical me, morphed into the behemoth is still insists it is meant to fight, replace, and better.

Perhaps the All Peoples Congress (APC), as the new party is called, truly aims to better the PDP, not by providing basic amenities to Nigerians with the hope of, for the first time in decades, improving the lot of the common man, but to outplay the PDP in the game of raping Nigeria and Nigerians. At least that is what their rush to dally with people who only recently were neck deep in PDP muck.

Truth be told, the first politicians that cleaved to the APC were of the more progressive ilk, but as the new party expanded, it began to absorb cross-carpeters from the PDP. At first, the absorption was in trickles, few enough to be ignored or considered expedient in the type of political environment we find ourselves in—a wedding, later on, would have taken care of this. As the PDP began to crumble under the weight of political in-fighting occasioned by the inept handling of an internal conflict by party bigwigs, disenchanted political jobbers of all kinds flooded into the new party and the trickle became a flood.

The question, muttered on pothole-ridden streets across Nigeria, is not whether the APC will live to become like the party it was supposed to fight, but how worse it would be. By taking in people who saw nothing wrong with using the massive PDP machinery to feather their nest, the APC has proven that it is no better and does not intend to do things any different.

Like the danfo bus, Nigerians already know that the APC is a tokunbo masquerading as a brand new car. Despite the gaudy new paint, inside, it is still the same old story: a mask, a construct, a wreck waiting to happen.

This knowledge does not change anything, come 2015, Nigerians are still going to promote, kill for, die for and vote for the same old story and the rape will continue. In Nigerian politics, the only thing that is not constant is positive change.