Some stories and reports are uniquely Nigerian, and we know that because when we tell them among ourselves, we have no need to explain ourselves to ourselves. Everyone just understands. The many assumptions within those stories and reports go unspoken because we know what they mean. The accounts are meaningful to us as Nigerians and do not confound us. Told in another context, people would raise legitimate questions; much ink would need to be spilt to clarify the meaning of such accounts to a non-initiate into the norms of being Nigerian. Among our Nigerian selves, much can be taken for granted.
A good example is a statement attributed to Dr Adedeji Adeleke at a ceremony celebrating his younger brother’s victory in the Osun State governorship election on Saturday. He stated, “On the day of the election, when I heard about the kind of money they were spending, I went back to my little corner in my room, and I knelt down, and I prayed to God Almighty, and I said, ‘God Almighty, let people collect their money but still vote for Ademola Adeleke.” You already know that the law specifically proscribes vote buying, and it is a punishable crime for both the buyer and the seller. But here we are with someone praying the transactions should go through, and the irony of soliciting divine power to facilitate a crime did not even register. If we too did not get bewildered by the cheapening of prayer, the electoral crimes taken for granted, and the lack of self-awareness of self-indictment, it is because the truth of our social character he told is over-familiar to us.
Outside Nigeria, a story like this would warrant some questions about two supposedly irreconcilable things—piety and illegality—walking side by side without exploding in tension. In Nigeria? The story did not even move the needle on our offence meter. We are too familiar with the nature of our society—value system, religious culture, political hypocrisies, impotence of our legal system, and how they all come together to define the many wrongs that define us—to be scandalised. I came upon the story because people gleefully circulated it as an illustration not only of brotherly love and family support but also proof that the rich and influential, in fact, do have private religious devotions.
Only a Nigerian implicitly understands another Nigerian praying to God for an electoral crime to go through because it goes right through to the heart of our value system, political culture, and social development. Without the right calibration of these things, a society operates with a broken moral compass. Which is why we are a society with so much religion yet with very few values. God, for us, is nothing more than a tool to manipulate the gullible majority during elections. We are also a society full of laws, but also habitually lawless. That is why the electoral crime of vote buying has become a matter of prayer. Did you know that Nigeria has the second-longest written constitution globally, after India? While India’s constitution contains roughly 146,385 words, Nigeria has approximately 66,263 words. Those are lots of arguments eventually condensed into the pages, only for the receiving society to observe laws in breach.
Every other day, our lawmakers come up with laws that ultimately trivialise the legislative process.
It is in Nigeria that they write useless bills such as the one that proposed 10-year jail terms for refusing to recite the national anthem, five years for “illegal roadblocks”, and three years for disobeying “constituted authority”. Coming from unruly lawmakers, three years for disobeying constituted authority is rich! It is in Nigeria that a lawmaker wakes up after a drunken weekend and decides to write more laws to curtail human rights on social media. Lawmakers can make it a priority to write laws against preaching or hawking in commercial vehicles because, apparently, we have run short of legitimate issues that require legislative attention. Yet a disconnect exists between the laws that supposedly guide social conduct and the reality that defines the country. For example, Nigeria has laws against handing money to kidnappers, but the government itself has made some of the highest ransom payments to them. People solicit money to pay kidnappers on social media while the state looks on with the passivity of a disinterested observer. When lawmakers who lack personal and professional integrity routinely prescribe laws without considering either their necessity or enforcement, what else results but a mockery of the law?
The Osun governorship election is the second to take place within two months and is tainted with allegations of vote buying. It was the same story in Ekiti, where voter inducement included weaponising the impoverishment of the poor folks against them. They handed out cash of N5,000 to N10,000—a sad offer to buy people’s civic rights. You look at the denigration of the people and the devaluation of the entire cultural system taking place in that transaction, and your heart weeps. Whatever happened to Ekiti, the much-vaunted historic place of knowledge’s enlightenment? The story is not that different in Osun, where we are told that people were offered as much as N50,000 per vote. Between Ekiti and Osun, the stakes increased for vote buyers, and it showed in the amounts they offered.
Laws prohibit these practices, but who has the integrity to enforce them? Which agency in Nigeria dares go after the APC for voter inducement? And because they cannot stand up to the ruling party, they have no moral grounds to pursue the opposition either when they commit similar infractions. It was bad enough that voters were being induced; it was far worse that no one tried to hide it. You can do wrong and flaunt it in public because, as an Igbo proverb states: A child whose father sends him to steal from a house breaks down the door with his feet. When you know you are protected by the power of the state, nothing stops you from announcing your crimes.
The receivers were no better either. They also made videos to proudly display the loot they raked in during the days leading up to the election. They gleefully boasted, “Look at how much rice I collected!” “See how much money I made from them!” There was no shame, no sense of internal restraint, no fear of censorship. People are willing collaborators in their own denigration. I cannot blame them in good conscience. In an ebi ń pa wá economy, in a political system that does not oblige itself to the electorate, you are better off collecting your dividends of democracy upfront because you will be forgotten even before the swearing-in ceremony. This is a disheartening glimpse into the brazenness that will typify the vote-buying that will happen during the 2027 general elections.
Let me conclude by saying Adeleke is not the bad guy here. The story he tells is the truth of our Nigerian condition, reflecting everything wrong with our social systems. His story is uniquely reflective of us; the way crime and piety willfully collaborate is understandable to us precisely because we are Nigerians. The crucial moment of recognition the story contains is when it dawns on us that our politics is not about to be saved because even a man of reputed economic means has resigned himself to the system’s corruption and sees no point in challenging it. We say so much about the learned helplessness of the disenfranchised and impoverished masses who go along with a hostile system while hoping it works for them somehow, but what we also see here is a startling example of the well-resourced who can fight for a correction of a perverted system also going on their knees, taking the path of least resistance.
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