The 2023 general elections have come and gone and like every other election, the echoes remain. Some people have described the election as the worst electoral heist in Nigerian history. There is never a perfect election, especially in Nigeria where no one ever loses election. Everyone that lost election always claims he was rigged out. His own rigging never counts. This is an issue for another day.

No doubt many things went wrong with the process of the election but I doubt if it’s the worst election in Nigerian history. An election where a party with no single elected member before the election came out with a governor, over 36 National Assembly members and several states House of Assembly members cannot be described as the worst electoral heist. If the ruling APC set out to rig, they would have done that clinically, same way PDP did in 2003 and 2007. This doesn’t mean to say that INEC did a good job. No, they didn’t and should be held accountable.  In Anambra, for example LP won two Senate seats and about seven House of Representatives positions. LP, PDP and YPP shared about 12 seats in the State House of Assembly, leaving the ruling party in the state with just a simple majority. So, who rigged the Anambra election and in whose interest and favour?

Since the election, I have heard people complain bitterly about people who didn’t support one of their own as being saboteurs and all sorts.

In the heat of our emotions, we easily forgot the simple definition of politics as being an association of people of like minds who group together for the purpose of contesting election and forming a government. Therefore, a member of a political party has a duty to help his party win election and not fail election.

Hence, I find it hard to justify the attempt by some people to blackmail others into supporting and voting for an opposing candidate simply because they speak the same language or worship the same way irrespective of whether their interest and values conflicted.

Some golden rules of politics is that you don’t have to be ashamed of your party and her candidates. Once you are a member of a political party, you have a duty to support your party and help her candidates win elections. In politics and elections winning is everything.  A party that cannot win an election reduces itself to a pressure group.

Another golden rule of politics is the command that you don’t have to be sorry or apologetic for supporting or voting for your party and candidate .  To be ashamed of your party and her candidates is an invitation to failure.

Another golden rule which many people observed in breach is that you don’t take advice from your political foes. Your opponent will never give you a good advice because all he wants to achieve is your defeat. In 2023, I saw people taking advice from politicians in opposing parties. Why should an APGA or PDP member take valuable advice from Labour Party or APC? 

Again in politics like in warfare,  you don’t have to be nice to your opponent.

In the South East for example, APGA, PDP, APC etc were nice to their common political foe. The consequence of their nicety was that they all got swallowed by the political tsunami galvanized by angry youths that were hungry for change.

Truth is that you can be civil and polite to your political opponents but being nice is a no-no. I am still wondering if those other candidates that were busy endorsing the LP candidate instead of minding their own elections and parties got back LP induction . They all lost their seats, including Ortom of Benue State. The shocker from Benue is that in Benue, APC won.  PDP was the most disappointing of all the political parties . Not only was PDP eating PDP, the party failed all the golden rules of politics .

I knew the party was programmed to fail when I saw them not able to utilize the assistance of those who genuinely wanted to help them as volunteers .

In 2023, PDP recycled the same old hands, old ideas and old methods hence they lost an election that was theirs to call. I doubt if PDP will ever come to power again in the nearest future. Ayu killed PDP and Wike and his G5 helped bury it. 

There are also things that happened during the election , especially the vilification and crucifixion  of Professor Soludo of Anambra State that made me remember a  very instructive section I read in Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar years ago. For all Shakespearians, I think the narratives I am about to drive won’t be a surprise.   The story that struck with me is that of Cinna the Poet. Remember him? Cina was the poor guy who was a victim of mistaken identity when an angry mob confronted him on the streets of Rome and they asked if his name was Cinna.

But the Cinna they were after was one of the conspirators against Caesar. He had a distinct way of walking. He left one of the anonymous letters for Brutus, and was one of the more enthusiastic killers. So if the mob was intelligent enough they’d know they had the wrong Cinna because of that physical ailment.

But we know that the average IQ of a mob is slightly higher than that of a goat, so an unfortunate Poet with same name was accosted by the mob, and everybody was asking him questions at the same time, and mostly senseless questions. First one asked who he was, another asked after his address, another asked if he was married, another asked where he was going, while another asked if he was Caeser’s friend or foe.

‘Truly, my name is Cinna,’ he replied.

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First Plebian: Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator.

Cinna the Poet: I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet!

Because a crowd baying for blood is out for it and wouldn’t want to disappoint themselves so they manufactured an excuse to kill him by saying he wrote bad verses.

Fourth Plebian: Tear him for his bad verses; tear him for his bad verses!

Cinna the Poet: I am not Cinna the conspirator.

Fourth Plebian: It is no matter. His name’s Cinna.

Pluck but his name out of his heart, and turn him going.

And they killed him.

This simple argument between the Plebians and Cinna the Poet is a depiction of crowd think. When the crowd is unleashed, thinking becomes a luxury they cannot afford. And anyone irrespective of station in life, belief or ethnicity can fall victim.

When Soludo spoke about quality of investments and then wrote his famous thesis, the mob went after him. They invented every reason to pluck his heart out of his life.  They even accused him of envy. Some even said he wanted to be president. He is barely one year in office as governor. If chances permit him, he has seven years to be Governor of Anambra State and never told anyone he wants to be president even though that is a legitimate aspiration if he so desires .

The vilification of Soludo brings me to the works of Gustave Le Bon, especially his classic titled “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind which was first published in 1895.

In the book, Le Bon claims that there are several characteristics of crowd psychology: “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of sentiments, and others…”

Le Bon claimed that “an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself – either in consequence of magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant – in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer.”

Sigmund Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego refer heavily to the writings of Gustave Le Bon. Freud says that as part of the mass, the individual acquires a sense of infinite power allowing him to act on impulses that he would otherwise have to curb as an isolated individual.  These feelings of power and security allow the individual not only to act as part of the mass, but also to feel safe in numbers.

This is accompanied, however, by a loss of conscious personality and a tendency of the individual to be infected by any emotion within the mass, and to amplify the emotion, in turn, by “mutual induction”. Overall, the mass is “impulsive, changeable, and irritable. It is controlled almost exclusively by the unconscious.”

You see some of these traits on social media very often. People easily lose their individuality in an effort to align with the positions of their friends, political affiliations or sentiments, or ethno-religious tunes. The first thing to do during such process is the individual, and it is very interesting that when you engage some of these people individually, you’d be shocked that they are opposites of the songs they sing in chorus with the group.  With the herd mentality of the mob, truth becomes the first casualty.