2023: The omens are not too good

• Published date: 22 January 2023
• Publication title: Nigeria - The Nation

GENERAL election in Nigeria, especially the make or mar presidential election that is presently convulsing the country, is only five weeks away but goings-on in various parts of the country call for a lot of caution if the prediction of Nigeria breaking up, which thankfully did not materialise in 2015, is not to come upon us like a thief in the night in 2023.

Post election events in both the U S and Brazil, two countries that are economically far ahead of Nigeria, and with no obvious religious altercations further complicating their circumstances, should serve to remind us of all the possibilities.

I refer here to the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol in the US, and its repeat in Brazil a few days ago by supporters of former President Jar Bolsonaro who was defeated in that country's presidential election in 2022.

Nor can we forget, nearer home in Africa, the fact that Kenya's presidential election of August 8, 2017 was marred by violence, including killings, arson and beatings by police during protests and house-to-house operations especially in Western Kenya. And if recalling those examples seem like Afghanistanising, then we certainly could not have forgotten the deadly post - election violence which followed the April 2011 presidential election in Nigeria and left more than 800 people dead in 12 Northern states. The dead, unfortunately, included young Nigerian youths who committed no offence besides serving their fatherland by observing their National Youth Corps service year in that part of the country.

A direct consequence of how that event was handled, with government agencies turning a blind eye, and ensuring that none of the killers was made to face the legal consequences, as has always been the case in Northern Nigeria, is the emergence, and virulence, of the various killing gangs that have literally overtaken the entire North, resulting in daily kidnappings, as well as the killing, even of several school children.

Things are, of course, far worse in Nigeria today than they were in 2011 and if the colossal disaster of that election year had been attributed, by some people, to loose talk by politicians, it can only get far worse now that some elders, in order to, forever, remain politically relevant in Nigeria, nay the world, are deliberately stoking the fire, needlessly haranguing Nigerian youths, and trying to lure them into supporting a political party that only they cannot see, has no path, clear or not, to victory in an election in which the...