EMSCO

It's in a quiet room somewhere in Nigeria, surrounded by the humming of a generator choking on ridiculously priced petrol, I sit to write this because our silence has become far too expensive. We are living through another cycle of democratic rituals, an elaborate, multi-billion Naira theatre where the actors change costumes, but the script remains viciously the same. Every four years, we are summoned like desperate believers to the ballot box, told that our ink-stained thumbs hold the key to our salvation. We are instructed to perform our civic duty, even as the very ground beneath us caves under the weight of hunger, insecurity, and systemic plunder. What a sore, heartbreaking spectacle it is to watch a people so brilliant, so resilient, and so deeply deserving of dignity be reduced to mere statistics on electoral commission dashboards. Look at us on election day. Look at the aged mother walking miles under a punishing sun, her knees aching, carrying a battered plastic chair just to stand in line for hours. Look at the young graduate, brimming with vision and fire, guarding his vote as if it were the last vial of medicine in a plague-ridden land. We stand in those queues not out of love for the political class, but out of a stubborn, radical refusal to give up on the idea that tomorrow might hurt a little less. Yet, how are we rewarded? Before the ink even dries on our fingers, the machinery of disinheritance grinds into motion. The ballot boxes are snatched or altered in dark rooms; the results are delayed until the dead of night when the nation is asleep; and by morning, a political oligarchy that holds nothing but contempt for our lives declares itself victorious. They tell us to "go to court," knowing fully well that they hold the keys to every door in the house. And then comes the aftermath, the cruelest part of the ritual. To keep us from burning down the gilded gates of their palaces, they deploy their oldest weapon: division. They tell the man in Kano that his poverty is the fault of the man in Enugu. They tell the woman in Lagos that her trader neighbor from the East is the reason her rent went up. They carve our shared agony into Christian vs. Muslim, North vs. South, tribe vs. tribe. They force us to butcher each other over crumbs while they share the entire loaf at executive banquets, clinking glasses filled with the proceeds of our collective ruin. How many more electoral cycles must we sacrifice our youth to political thugs? How many more times will we watch a mother mourn her son who was shot at a polling unit, only for his death to be swallowed by the news cycle as "minor election violence"? We have normalized the abnormal. We have allowed ritualized betrayal to be called "democracy." And yet, I write this not from a place of defeat, but from a place of deep, fierce, and unyielding love for us, the long-suffering citizens of this nation. Because despite the stolen mandates, the bought votes, and the engineered despair, the Nigerian spirit remains an unyielding miracle. In the face of a state that actively works against our survival, we still build industries out of dust, create music that moves the world, and look out for one another in the dark. Our greatest crime is that we have trusted a rotten system to deliver a wholesome future. We cannot vote our way out of bondage if we continue to play by the rules designed by our captors. Electoral democracy without structural justice is just a periodic renewal of our servitude. It is time to drop the fables of political saviors. No messiah is coming from the political class to hand us a functional country on a silver platter. Our triumph will not begin at the polling unit; it will begin the day we reject the manufactured hatred that divides us. The day the starving youth in Sokoto realizes that his hunger speaks the exact same language as the starving youth in Aba. The day we realize that our power is not in the ballot paper they tamper with, but in our collective, organized refusal to let them govern us into the grave. It is 2:08 PM now. The afternoon heat is relentless, the generator is sputtering out of fuel, and the oppressive quiet of another blackout settles in. But even in this darkness, I still believe in us. My loyalty remains with the righteous, exhausted, and unbroken people of this country. Our triumph is delayed, but it is not denied. May we awaken to build the nation we actually deserve.