The new word I put in the Dictionary recurs: Buharigging.
It simply means deploying every apparatus of state – military, police, the secret service and the electoral commission – to manipulate an election.
It is a word for an “anything goes” election where the figures of the agents of the ruling party and the opposition may not be in sync with the declared results.
In buharigging, the winning votes can be larger than the number of registered voters or even the population of the state.
You can use the word in sentences like:
1. Buharigging was all the rage in the presidential election.
2. He is a master buharigger.
3. Our party shall buharig you out of existence.
There are many more examples, but I have to stop here for now in putting out examples of the usages of the new word in the lexicon.
It only suffices to stress the irony that the world came about from a regime that promised change in the nation.
Things change only to remain the same in Nigeria. The Kogi and Bayelsa elections point to the sure fact that Nigeria has indeed moved to the next level, that is, Democracy without elections!
It suffices to state that change in Nigeria appears to be happening backwards.
All that jazz of the elections being free, fair and credible must be taken with a heavy pinch of salt.
The credibility of it all must be in the realm of fake news.
The media as the acclaimed Fourth Estate of the Realm can be seen in many quarters being more party-pliant than the partisan politicians.
The watchdogs have thus been reduced to lapdogs of power.
The due process is thus suborned in service of filthy lucre.
It does appear that the country is not in any hurry to pass the stage of “nascent democracy”.
In the real scheme of life, a student is expected to pass his examinations to get to the next class.
It is remarkable that late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua publicly admitted that the 2007 elections that got him into power were severely flawed.
The 2011 elections showed marked improvements on the previous ones.
The 2015 election in which the incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan was defeated gave Nigerian elections a fresh charge of oxygen plus electricity.
Armed with this historical background, unfortunately the 2019 version sent Nigeria back to Egypt, as they say.
Nigerian elections which ought to win the respect of the wider world has turned this benighted country into the laughing stock of civilized humankind.
The “One Nigeria” dream is on a knife-edge.
Toying with the destiny of the nation as is happening now can only lead to unimaginable tragedy and anarchy.
The Machiavellian ethic of the end justifying the means cannot hold true in the 21st year of Nigeria’s arrival at the Fourth Republic democracy.
Tension has overwhelmed the land.
In this dot-com time of the www age, the umpire, the Independent National Election Commission (INEC), cannot hide behind a finger.
The head umpire is more underwhelming than a heedless clown.
Nigeria may lay claims to being the Giant of Africa but the practice of the so-called “nascent democracy” makes the country quite small in the eyes of the world.
Little wonder the international observers are quite cynical about this country’s electoral advancement and concomitant lack of survival.
My prayer is that the country should not end up in the manner of Aboliga the Frog as depicted by Ayi Kwei Armah in his classic novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born thus: “Aboliga the Frog one day brought us a book of freaks and oddities, and showed us his favourite among the weird lot. It was a picture of something the caption called an old manchild. It had been born with all the features of a human baby, but within seven years it had completed the cycle from babyhood to infancy to youth, to maturity and old age, and in its seventh year it died a natural death. The picture Aboliga the Frog showed us was of the manchild in its gray old age, completely old in everything save the smallness of its size, a thing that deepened the element of the grotesque. The manchild looked more irretrievably old, far more thoroughly decayed, than any ordinary old man could ever have looked.”
Elections can kill or make a country.
After the massive rigging of the 1983 General Elections by the incumbent National Party of Nigeria (NPN), Nigeria’s first President Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe wrote an ominous letter in which he stated that “history will vindicate the just”.
Shortly after Zik’s letter, the soldiers struck, installing Major-General Muhammadu Buhari as the country’s leader.
Incidentally, Buhari is the incumbent now.
Zik was equally fond of saying that “Nigerians have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.”
Plotting to rule Nigeria via rigged polls all over the place can only lead to disaster.
Let’s hope things do not turn out irretrievably bad like the “Aboliga the Frog” monstrosity.
Buharigging is definitely not the way to go especially in this totalitarian Nigeria where the legislature and the judiciary have been turned to pathetic rubber-stamps.
Which way Nigeria? I cannot but lament like my old friend, Sunny Okosuns of blessed memory.
