NOTES ON EKITI | Prof Pius Adesanmi

Many of you are asking why I have not written about the Ekiti election coming up tomorrow. I thought it should be obvious that I have refrained from commenting on it because I lost interest in an activity that has once again shown that we have no clue how to find our way out of the 19th into the 20th century. Admission into the 21st century is not feasible, not attainable for us in my life time. So, let us continue to struggle to find our way out of the 19th century. Luckily, too many of our compatriots have no clue what life is in the 21st century. They have never experienced it and are not missing out on anything. What you don't know can't hurt you.

That is why they do not know that none of us can come out smelling of roses no matter the outcome of the election in Ekiti tomorrow. Beyond politicking and the brass tacks of voting, elections are fundamentally a narrative about a people. The narrative comes complete with certain idioms and symbologies. We have seen rice, cooked and uncooked. We have seen presidential brigandage and irresponsibility bordering on lunacy on the part of Aso Rock (I had warned that man in my essay. "What Does President Jonathan Want for the Southwest?"). We have seen soldiers all over Ekiti. We have seen guns. We have heard of fake ballot papers. We have heard from those who claim to have been victims of presidential fascism but who couldn't resist the urge to insert half-truths, untruths, and lies in their otherwise largely true narrative of presidential brigandage.

Beyond the election tomorrow emerges this shameful and disgraceful picture of a country boasting that she is Africa's largest economy. Yet she treats the world to an election in just one state in which the dominant narrative is delivered in two gangrened idioms: rice and guns. If, in the 21st century, you are conducting elections defined by rice and guns, if soldiers are the dominant image of your elections, then there is reason for the rest of the civilized world to fear that you will make a mess of the 19th century as the only remaining real time inhabitants of that temporal fragment of human history.

Sshhhhhhhhhhhh,don't let the world know that this election that is defined by rice, guns, and soldiers is taking place in one of the most advanced corners of your country where every household boasts professors and every family boasts PhDs. The rest of the world may ask: if you cannot conduct an election in this very cosmopolitan and sophisticated and educated part of your country, how would you do it in the wild and ungoverned Boko Haram Territories? Think about this bigger picture, about the narrative and idioms that have come out of Ekiti to define us all and stop disturbing my World Cup.