Serious surveys, star gazing prophesies, analysis and permutations continuously dominate the pages of newspapers and social media concerning forthcoming Presidential Elections in Nigeria. And as to be expected in a country struggling to come to terms with the stark reality of its own predicament, emotions rather than reason have carried the day. For supporters of the two main and major contestants; incumbent President Dr Ebele Jonathan and APC presidential candidate General Muhammadu Buhari you are a saint if you support their candidate or a devil if you dare raise a voice against their beloved choice.
Newspaper columnists and commentators as well as political pundits have based their calculations and predictions on religious factors, ethnic polarisation, and the predominance of the fed and the unfed as distributed round the geographical spread. Sure, there could be merits and demerits in their postulations and it is only the outcome of the February Vote that will vindicate the stand of every one.
As for this columnist, what will determine the outcome of the much publicised and eagerly and bitterly fought contest is the Vote of the Unemployed. What will determine which way individuals vote on February 14 is the social and economic environment each and every one has found themselves.
Figures like 40 million, sixty million, and even higher had been released at one time or the other by the very Federal Government as the numbers of the unemployed in Nigeria. Of course such figures are most likely to be conservative since no proper record of anything is ever kept in Nigeria. As we write this piece nobody, repeat nobody knows the actual figure of the many mouths fed daily in Lagos or Kano cities. The National Population Commission comes up with its own figures, independent agencies sponsored by dissatisfied states or communities announce their own and what they believe are authentic figures.
Be that as it may, simple calculations of graduates being churned out of tertiary institutions year-in year-out and are on the queue in the labour market every year, the hundreds of thousands who complete their National Youths Service, the millions that finish their School Certificate Course, pass JAMB examinations for admission into Universities, Polytechnics and Colleges of Education but could not get space, another hundreds of thousands who get space but could not come up with school fees, when all are added up, we are talking of over 40 million in accumulated space of six years!
We should add this huge figure to the several hundreds of thousands that are thrown out of job at federal and state levels. There are millions who lost out when major industrial complexes folded up or relocated to Ghana or other more stable and more vibrant economies.
Another group consists of semi-retired graduates in their middle ages of 45 to 60 who could not find capital to establish any gainful business of their own and remain perpetual hangers-on and glorified beggars in their neighbourhoods.
These are the people who are going to determine the fate of both Jonathan and Buhari. And it is not those personally affected by unemployment, the parents who struggled through thick and thin to see their children and wards through tertiary institutions and still have to provide simple necessities like bus fare and money to buy tissue paper and the female hygienic pads are also agonising and bitter. Nothing in this world will persuade them to retain the status quo as they watch nincompoops stealing the money meant to better the lots of the whole country.
Unfortunately for the Political Parties contending for power and supremacy the Vote of the Unemployed is present and prevalent every where in the country. Those who have no job and are hungry and angry are not bothered about the sentiments of religion or ethnicity or even party affiliation.
This is where and why pundits rooting for the PDP-led government in Abuja are laughable. The Peoples Democratic Party has ruled and misruled this country for about sixteen years. The PDP has bled this country dry, and to the bone. This is an incontrovertible fact. The only people that will vote for the continuity of this reckless plunder and insensitivity are those feeding fat on the collective exploitation and impoverishment of the Nigerian masses. They and their cohorts who feed on the crumbs off the table are less than five million in a country of 180 million with people of voting age in the region of 100 million.
The problem is largely with the Federal Government at the Centre and the presidency. Some PDP governors have performed creditably in a few states. And there are states where the APC governments have performed much below expectation. But the centre is Key. The Presidency in Nigeria is next to God. And what is at stake and what has created the Unemployed Masses is the Federal Government that stubbornly stomachs the more than lion share of all the resources accruing to the country and woefully squandering it.
The unemployed is very much aware that as long as the PDP is allowed to continue its stealing spree in Abuja his life would have no redemption.
Jonathan may be right in saying he did not create all this mess. Yes, he did not. But his Party which is seeking a continuation and perpetuation of the mess did create most of the mess. And in any case, a government or leader is voted into office so solve it/he did not create. President Barack Obama of the United States was massively voted in to clear the mess created by the murderous Bush and war-mongering Republican Party.
The Unemployed, their fathers and their mothers, their sisters and their brothers, their uncles and their aunts as well as relations in the Diaspora that are compelled to remit hard-earned money to keep their dependants alive will in one voice vote out the PDP at the centre, and with that end the ignominious 16-year stranglehold on Nigeria of a cabal of a most vicious, selfish, arrogant and heartless vultures. The Thieves Ambassadors of Nigeria otherwise known as TAN shall be made to eat dust, when the real owners of Nigeria, the suffering down trodden masses and the army of the unemployed descend on all of them on February 14 2015.
What is about to decide the fate of Nigeria is not the quantum of English in your dictionary or the length of your chain of degrees, but the Vote that will issue from the aching belly of the dispossessed.
Analysts, pundits, you are hereby invited to go back to the drawing board, Those who seek change, want change, thirst for change are the Unemployed masses spread throughout the length and breadth of this doubly unfortunate country who will echo Mark Anthony’s agony and cry ‘Havoc!’
Nigeria must be free. The key to its freedom is the Vote of the Unemployed.
