A LETTER FROM NIGERIAN POLITICIAN TO HIS SON

My dear Son,

You were born and raised in a life full of greatness, esteem and adoration by the people around you, you knows nothing sort of tribulation, misery or vexation. You attended the first class private schools for your primary and post primary education, fully equipped with modern teaching and learning facilities and now sent to US for your University where there's nothing like ASUU strike that might hinder you from graduating within your stipulated time. 

All this are my plans to make your life the most fortunate so that you will not be like those sons of poor men, the thuggs that we use for our campaigns during elections or the worst of that, the homeless ALMAJIRI hopelessly meandering on the streets of the north. 

My dear son, I do not intend to write you this letter simply to tell you about the aformentioned fortunes, nor am I writing to remind you of them, for I know you quite know them well and you need not a reminder about them. Rather, I have calculated that all what I have done for you might not be enough to accomplish my dream on you, thus I write to tell you the manipulations that we use as our ladder and become what the world seeing us to day.

My dear Son, we live in a country where politics is more or less an act of business, a matter of investing money and getting a profit in return, a type of profit that makes one affluent at instant, within the blink of an eye, infact politics is the most successful of all the type of investment that exist here.

We are the players of this bussiness, we are the people of high level of cleverance, we are well organised, highly distinguished and we know very well, how to handle the game with extraordinary caution so that it cease not. We are the great manipulators, the POLITICIANS!

We understood perfectly, the psyches of our innocent customers, they are hopeless, naives, and disorganized, they are the POOR MASSES! 

You may not help wondering how we could be able to control such an immense number of men, despite us being ordinary people like them. The answer is simple as this my dear boy, we are people like them of course, our only difference is that we use our brain whilst they don't.

We make the use of two powerful tools to keep them in our aboslute control: their  gullibility and ignorance, we snared and tight them with another potent tool: the aritifical poverty that we created for them, This are our powerful weapons against them.

Thus they see us as thier mortal gods, they thought it is impossible to escape our trap, they become hopeless, lifeless asholes incapable of doing anything against our adroit oppression.

They get no any form of esteem from us, nothing valuable unless it is the most important hour, the autumn of politics when it is time to invest. At that, we will plea to the best we could for this naif patrons to give us more chance, to patronize us, to let us ascend into the throne of power. 

We make the flatter more efficacious by adding with some little provisions and money that cannot even satisfy the need of this gullible poor masses for a single day, as extremely starving as they are, they have no option other than to accept our offer with immense gratitudes.

 We manage to lower ourselves from our high rank of mortal gods to somewhat close to that of this poor masses, we try to wear the same type of cloth they wear, we attend their events, their rituals and funerals. We kneel before them and beg for their vote, we weep in pretense to being sympathetic about their sufferings, can you imagine the phony sympathy when we are the cause of the bedevilments 😃?  We send our wives to their communities, to beg their votes for us, they enter house to house, pleaing to thier wives, sometimes even helping the poor widows prying akara by the street sides. But this happens only one in four years, during the most important political hour, whence election is around the corner.

And we do  all this  to wipe away from their minds, the four years they have suffered in our hands. And do you know what? It really works.

My dear boy, let me not make you sick by making the letter a very lengthy one, meanwhile, I will stop here but expect the second part of the later any time soon.

To be continued

Nura Auwal Fagge

 13-05-2020