FEELS LIKE A DREAM

Just about three days ago, Professor Atahirru Jega, Nigeria’s chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission announced General Muhammed Buhari as President. President Buhari, after three failed attempts, had finally landed himself a place within the presidential villa. Muhammed Buhari after numerous abortive attempts had successfully put an end to the 16 year democratically oppressive regime of the People Democratic Party. President Buhari, a former military dictator turned “democrat,” has finally kicked the incumbent, President Goodluck Jonathan’s out of Aso Rock, our presidential villa stationed on the hilltop. Buhari with the massive support of Nigerians had pushed Jonathan and his “Patience” to the valley with no possibilities of a comeback or a second chance, at least not on the watch of Nigerian citizens. Jonathan in this valley remains the only incumbent president voted out of office in Nigeria’s political history.

Today, the 31st of March, 2015, Nigerians had pulled Buhari with all the strength they could muster to the topmost elected office of the state. Nigerians through the powers of their votes had called corrupt leaders to order. Nigerians had made their voices, the voice of God and that of democracy. No corrupt leader, no electoral rigging, no performance of buffoonery could obstruct the visible hands of the masses. No irritable mediocrity, no unsolicited advices of barely literate humans could take center stage in our nations’ political history ever again. Nigerians had taken their destinies into their hands and rejected, quite forcefully, leaders that had made spectacle of the important electoral offices. Today, despite sneak peeks of electoral rigging in desperate spaces, the conscience of the Nigerian people won. The justice denied Nigerians after numerous years of corruption had finally been attained through the power of our votes. As young men and women stuck by voting polls, ensuring their votes and voices mattered, frail citizens rejected another fall to political oblivion. The weakness of their bodies could not obliterate the strength of a thumb print. Their frail bodies did not erase their embodiment of justice and strength. Nigerians that had crossed many oceans and rivers equally offered solidarity by staying glued to their laptops and shouting “Yeah” after every Buhari-Osibajo victory.

googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content1'); });

 In these past days, to be Nigerian eluded rigid geographical definitions. To be Nigerian evaded ethnic peculiarities. To be Nigerian, in these few days, cared less about religious affiliations. Instead, to be Nigerian became an ideal- one that sort for justice in right places and at the nick of time. To be Nigeria became a spirit, a force that swam from the ends of the Niger through many seas, oceans and sands; a force connecting the consciences of Nigerians across the globe in their desperate search for justice, fairness and equality.

 To be Nigerian in these few days meant we were the cynosure of international onlookers- onlookers, who envisaged rigging and violence in the conduct of the elections. Onlookers, who talked and preached peace and democracy to a state at the verge of collapse. In the past few days, however, the international gatekeepers of democracy realized that Nigerian citizens had in fact embraced justice and fairness as a second skin.  Today, Nigerians citizens had single handedly secured their democracy and future. Nigerians in their typical hustler fashion took the bull by the horn by making voting a one person-one-vote experience but beyond this, a communal legacy. Though Nigerians citizens voted individually, they collectively made the democracy they imagined, manifest.

Our election card reader obviously malfunctioned. Mr Orubebe, a Nigerian Minister, gave a dance of disgrace before his “country people” and other eaves-dropping onlookers. Orubebe, at the most important moment in our nation’s history; at the moment when Nigeria’s democracy and unity was about to yield great fruits, decided  that was the ideal moment for throwing ethnocentric slurs at Attahiru Jega. His show of shame barely lasted. His theatrics did not obstruct justice and fairness neither did it in any way arouse more violent reactions. Jega’s excellent performance as the arbiter of justice quelled all storms. Attahiru Jega quietened every raging storm. His performance ensured that democracy and justice panned out beautifully. His performance equally turned Jonathan into a new leaf-a gentlemanly statesman that congratulated his opponent before he was officially declared the loser in the electoral race. In spite of the aggressive and tension-filled campaigning and politicking, Jonathan bowed out humbly, gracefully and peacefully. Jonathan was rebirthed Goodluck and not the Badluck many Nigerians had grown accustomed to.

googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content2'); });

Despite this, it all feels like a dream. It all still feels like a fuzzy dream. I don’t drink Vodka neither do I take shots of Jamaican rum but my head feels light and my vision, blurry. Can a political history that had reeked of massive injustice, corruption, dictatorship, electoral violence and rigging, encounter a drastic turn in just a matter of hours? When it is written in books that history has been made, is this the kind of feeling it deposits- a strange kind of excitement that glues you to your lazy suzzy? A feeling that keeps you up for more than 24 hours and five hours after you’ve heard the news, it feels impossibly hard to swallow? Is this the feeling? One that feels like an entire Hollywood production is panning through your distressed and happy head. One that feels like the Messiah in the beauty of heavens had suddenly revoked an apocalyptic history. Your brain pans through, in split seconds, the memories of June 12, 1993, the fairest election in Nigeria’s history that never guaranteed our freedom. Your memory reconnects with that very moment in your childhood, that moment when your eye teared and became bloodshot from the liters of tear gas that littered every streets. Your memory in a quick flashback remembers how as a child you stood by the patio, trying to look through your teary eyes, the mass of confused heads, running, wailing, bumping into each other amidst the clouds of gas and chaos that defined the repercussion of a free election, tyrannical. Your head remembers the dictatorship and financial crisis that the General Babaginda era aka Maradona, invited into your reality. As Babaginda made Nigeria’s economy and politics, a game of football, in which he was the sole player and Nigerians, the onlookers, Mama replaced your weekly delicacy of strawberry milk with refined powered milk that never tasted the same. Papa replaced your dominos ice cream with the liquidy creaminess of cooked corn meal. Your luxuries were quickly replaced with markers of gradually penetrating poverty. Your life dwindled from elitist to middle class and still continued to dwindle. Maradona had dribbled Nigeria’s finances, economy and more tragically, Nigerians themselves.

Is this the same feeling? Could it be this feeling that makes the crimson red blood that flowed in Baga stares you right in the face with aghast? Could the bloods soiling Baga remind you that Boko Haram’s tantrums might finally meet its very end?  Is it the same feeling that makes the voices of the Chibok girls, in their many hundreds echo into your earlobes as if they  mournfully celebrate a victory that would journey them back home or render them nameless and faceless in the annals of world history. Is it the same feeling that make your mind-eye remember the effective display of buffoonery that defined President Jonathan’s administration as the tragic comedy it really is. At least, Mama Peace patiently and peacefully interfered our democracy with comic reliefs that made tragedies milder to swallow. At least, Mama Peace’s stones did not hit her targeted audience as she presumed. Instead the stones, through the incredible power of Eledumare, the supreme deity, turned to votes. Her many stones became the two million plus votes that sent Buhari and ever-smiling Osibajo on the road to victory.

Yet it all still feels like a big dream. I am here in my slightly cold room, unable to sleep, thinking, asking myself critically and emphatically if the change I had always hoped for had eventually taken its nascent steps. I am here asking myself how Buhari and Osibajo would need to make a stack of brooms, sweep out corruption while ensuring corruption does not sweep them out. I am imagining Buhari would search through all of Sambisa, Niger, and other spaces where Boko Haram find room to function. I am imagining he would render them silent, lost into thicket of lushly green forest never to recover again. I am imagining that as Boko is swept into the forest of oblivion, mass corruption, gerrymandering and injustices are buried into Igbo Irunmole, the forest of our much averred deities, never to return again. I sincerely hope and pray that “UP NEPA!” our excited response to the return of light after intermittent power outages, our reminder that electricity is a luxury for a few, would be permanently erased from Nigerian lingo. I hope that Lagos-Ibadan highway will not be the occasional breeding ground for oil and blood, wealth and death, as it has come to be known. I hope that Nigeria will be the home of citizens and not enemies whose citizenship is constantly chipped off by dissidence. I hope that our fuel would never ever take on the price of diamonds and never again will it take on blood as an oxymoron.

As Buhari rose up his fist in the air today, I hope he celebrated not only his own victory. I hope he raised that fist in unison with Fela Kuti and Mandela, Huey Newton and Mahtma Gandhi, Leymah Gbowee and Martin Luther King-in unison with fighting the struggle and restoring peace, like the seaside evening breeze to a troubled Nation.

googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('comments'); });