Maybe I wasn’t clear enough. So let me try to clarify.

With hindsight, they were 2 bad choices. Voting out GEJ was not a bad move at all. It was worth it if only to be able to do the same thing to Buhari later. For that, there is really nothing to apologise for. Nobody would have been able to convince Nigerians to vote out a government that was doing ok.

But some of us who have the luxury of being able to think a bit clearly (thinking clearly is a luxury to majority of Nigerians who fight a daily battle with poverty) could have done better. We could have been a bit more skeptical. We could have asked more questions. We could have been more assertive. If enough of us did this, who knows, maybe they would have behaved with more care since they got into government.

Not asking those questions may have convinced them that they were right and we had nothing to disagree with. There is a certain arrogance with which they’re going about policy today that bears this out.

I want to hold myself to a better standard. Even I am surprised by a lot of what I’m seeing. Yet the signs were there perhaps. So I hold myself responsible for telling people to buy food that I had not even tasted myself. This is my personal position.

I feel I could have said

look, we are in a bad place. If we continue with GEJ we might not have a country in 4 years time. But the option we have right now has a lot of asterisks too. They can start doing all the crazy stuff they did in 1983 again. There is a lot of risk to voting them in but I think we can take that chance on the future of our country. So get ready to fight from day one

Ultimately it probably won’t have changed anything and it’s not a particularly sexy argument to make. But it would have been the right thing to do. After all, Nigerians were not voting for an unknown quantity who had not been in office before.

If it was just my own personal decision and I didn’t canvass anyone to vote for him, no biggie. I would just chop the lesson and try to prepare better next time.

Most importantly though – the fundamental question here is how do we prepare for the next time Nigeria throws up 2 bad options again? It is guaranteed to happen. How do we control more of our own fate and reduce the space for individual foolishness? How do we have a system whereby even if a politician is mad, he will go into office knowing that his madness has to have limits that have been set for him?

For me I think if we start early and come together under a set of agreed upon ideas, we can do that. I wrote a post on this recently and I plan to expand on it a bit more shortly.

– This article was first published on Aguntasoolo.co

Isime Esene