President Jonathan is running for reelection in 2015, whether you like it or not. Again, whether you like it or not, he has a good chance of winning reelection, although (thankfully) the chances of his being the first Nigerian incumbent to face defeat at the polls are looking increasingly cheerier.
You may have been grieving over the past several months and years over the lives of your mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers, friends, and relatives which have been lost to the madness that the government likes to call insurgency rather than call it by its true name of terrorism. You may feel betrayed by the absolute nonchalance displayed by this Federal Government to the plight you have experienced, to the rape of our collective sensibilities. You have good reason to. A government whose officials swore to defend the territorial integrity of the nation and the security of the people should have busied itself doing that.
But you should have acted in your interests several months and years ago. You should have started a massive civil disobedience campaign that would have brought the nation to its knees and the government to its duties. You should have closed the streets and sat on the roads after the Christmas Day bombings in Niger state; you should have refused to discontinue the protests until the perpetrators were discovered. If perhaps you were not shocked by that time, by the sheer horror of that act, if perhaps you thought it did not concern you then because it was a church that was attacked, well then, you should have shut down the North in the immediate aftermath of the mass kidnapping of the girls from Chibok, especially when this government pretended like it did not happen, when this President went dancing on the very day the news broke, even as bombings occurred in Nyanya, killing Nigerians muslim and christian, northern and southern alike.
You have watched how the French protest. You should have taken a cue from that. They don't burn houses, they don't kill anyone, they just sit on the roads, arrange carnivals on the highways, and make it impossible for movement to occur anywhere in the region until the government acts. The sheer scale of such French protests usually forces the government to act. In fact, as a British Lord once said, "the fear of French protests has become, for French and indeed for European politicians, the bedrock of political wisdom".
If you had done any or all of that, then maybe, the rest of the country might have been galvanized into action long before now, on our collective behalf. Isn't it rather interesting that till date, the most visible figure in the #BringBackOurGirls Campaign has no ancestral roots in any location directly affected by all this violence?
But you chose to be silent. You chose to wait for this moment. You chose to wait for the elections, and then to make your statement. That is all very good. Very, very good. I have statements of my own I want to make at these elections, with my thumbprint on my ballot paper. I want to send this president back to Bayelsa in 2015. But I want to do it with my ballot paper. Not with stones.
You cannot stone your president, Nigerians. He is still your president. And this is not Palestine. This is not the ancient Middle East. You don't stone people. You really cannot stone your president. He may be a clueless, spineless, useless, shameless, corrupt (add or subtract any adjectives, as you please) individual, but HE IS STILL YOUR PRESIDENT. HE IS STILL OUR PRESIDENT. He may not deserve a second term in office (in my opinion, he certainly doesn't), but he is still deserving of our collective respect. The moment we think he is no longer deserving of our respect as President, we get our legislators to impeach him. Period.
Stoning his motorcade, trying to deny him the right to campaign, the right to be heard (even if most of what he has to say is not worth hearing), is of all kinds of hateful politicking the most despicable.
If you think you can afford to stone your president today just because you don't like what he looks like, where he comes from, or the policies he implements or fails to implement, I hope you don't get offended when our dear friends the Chinese pour lime-water on whoever becomes the Nigerian president tomorrow simply because they don't like the color of his skin.
Put down your stones. They are not as powerful as your thumbprint on that ballot.
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