2023 and the value of political mercenaries

Tuesday, April 12, 2022 12:02 am

Ifedayo Babalola

By Ifedayo Babalola

It is Nigeria’s locusts season. Political mercenaries have descended on the vast wasteland between the befuddled populace and the nation’s unhinged political parties. Some among them are unofficial spokespersons for a government so detached that it shredded its social contract with the citizens from day one. The rest attempt to market candidates overdozed on intractable messiah complexes to a nation that is principally in need of a workable structure.

They are, like their military counterparts, fortune soldiers of sorts. They are not openly party members, otherwise they would have an inherent right to their outpouring of deception. Their preferred modus operandi is rather to hide behind veils of neutrality to ply sordid wares. Maintaining a facade of neutrality is advantageous for another reason. It makes their switching of loyalties seamless whenever new highest bidders come calling.

Unlike their military parallels, they have no guns and use no grenades. Nevertheless, the weapons of their warfare are similarly deployed to damage the polity.

These hired hands have been active over the span of the current administration. Now that 2023 is at our doorstep however, they have multiplied and have begun to identify with individual candidates, especially those in the race for Aso Rock.

They are everywhere now, like locusts in the harvest season. On Facebook, on YouTube and in beer parlours. They have infiltrated WhatsApp forums and no social media platform is spared.

Because they have varying degrees of formal education, these hirelings are different from political thugs, but only just. Of course, their territories are different. One is generally assigned to operate on the social media space, the other on the street. Their mission is nevertheless similar – to kill the body or to shoot down ideas. Neither of them has any permanent loyalty other than immediate reward and the projections of selfish gratification. National interest is not their forte. All things begin and end with their individual principals.

Ideological and socio-economic debates only exist to plaster a facade of perfumery on a putrid election ritual. Here, the motor park tout is of more value to the candidate than the newspaper editorial writer, and the body language of ‘oga patapata at the top’ supersedes the collective will.
On our end of the humanity spectrum, electoral victories flow exclusively from a sordid alchemy of tribe, violence, stomach infrastructure, statistical hand sleight and the occult.

In short, political mercenaries are the literate and barely literate equivalents of political thugs. Hired to shoot down and heckle all contrary opinions, they, like their motor park counterparts, are imbued with vile language, devoid of logic. For what logic can you muster when you defend with your entire life a candidate who has no manifesto or one that never kept a word of his campaign promises?

These ‘dogs of war’ speak from both sides of the mouth like double-barrelled shotguns.

When it suits their positions, they are quick to inform you about how better things are in other countries, but when it works against them, when you give examples of other places where things work, they ask you to emigrate and pursue a change of nationality.

Short-fused and possessing tongues like poisoned dagger, they have inexhaustible stocks of abuses and curses. Even the normally controlled among them are not above the occasional staccato reactions when faced with anything offensive to their interests.

It does not matter if the heavens fall and the mountains are cast into the middle of the oceans, these soldiers of fortune see no evil and hear none. They are programmed to call white black and to describe dogs as monkeys. Their tinted pupils see blood on our streets as morning dew, and the corpses of terror victims as manure for the nation’s accelerated growth.

And they have a standard floating raft that keeps them from sinking under the weight of superior argument. “Can you do better? Can you run the government better?”, they ask you.

Then you start wondering why such inquiry is relevant as you have never begged anyone for votes, neither did you once grow campaign billboards across the nation. You did not litter the streets with hand bills promising to give twenty-four hour electricity and to secure the lives of Nigerians. You do not sit atop the nation’s resources or possess the power to hire and fire military commanders. So, why should it be up to you, you wonder, to proof you can be a better president or governor?

Talk of trying to eat their amala and having it. What a scam!

But what is really the value of political mercenaries to the candidates, the governments at various levels and to political parties that engage their services? The answer, in my opinion, is zero.

Sometimes, you wonder if they just love the sound of their own voices or if they really think they are gaining converts. Someone suggested that they do not need to be convincing. All they require is to screenshot their combative posts to their principal’s mercenary clearing houses in order to earn their points.

Evangelists without converts they are. But they do not care. And because their lives depend upon the screenshots is the reason they drag arguments unnecessarily and spam your space with all manners of posts.

Yet, in our predominantly illiterate and money-driven society, political mercenaries on social media have no electoral value. Intellectual contests between patriotic commentators and hacks are therefore mere distractions. Ideological and socio-economic debates only exist to plaster a facade of perfumery on a putrid election ritual. Here, the motor park tout is of more value to the candidate than the newspaper editorial writer, and the body language of ‘oga patapata at the top’ supersedes the collective will.

On our end of the humanity spectrum, electoral victories flow exclusively from a sordid alchemy of tribe, violence, stomach infrastructure, statistical hand sleight and the occult.

To the social media mercenary therefore: Rest! That candidate’s win or loss does not depend on your Twitter battles and WhatsApp wars. To have an impact, you are better off joining a road transport union or a market women’s association. Alternatively, become a party agent on polling day if you can not aspire to being a returning officer.

Your will have me to thank for this advice.

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