Of Nigeria’s Presidential Politics and Impending Hysteria, By Bamidele Johnson

Bloodbath looms. The digital militias are already mobilised, keyboards cocked, timelines mined and narratives weaponised. This will not be a civil contest of ideas. It never is. It will be a three-way fratricidal brawl dressed up as democracy.  For lovers of blood and gore, this is it!

Nigeria’s presidential politics triggers massive chemical imbalances in the brain, flooding it, scrambling it and turning otherwise rational people into high priests of their preferred candidate. Facts become negotiable and doubt becomes treason.

Every post is a sermon just as every thread is a battlefield. In the middle of all that noise sits an inconvenient rule that almost nobody observes, which I think is best captured by my remake of Daniel Dennet’s famous quote on religion. The rule? You do not get to advertise all the good your candidate represents without first scrupulously subtracting his obviously debilitating flaws. Not airbrushing them or explaining them away, but subtracting them.

The Obi devotees and the Tinubu worshippers are preparing for total war that would feature not just memes and vicious clapbacks, but character assassination, selective outrage, moral grandstanding and historical revisionism. Nothing will be off the table.

The temperature will rise with every news item or video clip. Outrage will be manufactured at scale. Each side will curate a version of reality where their candidate is a comic-book hero and saviour of humanity, while the opponent is a cartoon baddie and an existential threat in real time. The inconvenient truths will be buried under hashtags and applause.

I do not expect the Atiku camp to sit this one out quietly. They were relatively restrained in the last cycle. That restraint is gone. The implosion of the Obi-Kwankwaso flirtation with the ADC and their migration to the NDC have compromised Atiku’s prospects. That kind of setback breeds aggression that would see Melaye and and Buba Galadima, swap insults with abandon. Expect a sharper, meaner operation from an Atiku camp eager to prove relevance and reclaim ground.

Somewhere beneath the noise, the actual issues and the offices that quietly determine daily life, will struggle to be heard, like a whisper in a crowded room that has already chosen.

Then, there will be personal fallouts. Former allies will turn on each other with a zeal reserved for heretics. We have seen a hint of that with Datti on Obi. I expect some from the pathologically incontinent Kenneth Okonkwo. The language will be relentless and repetitive. Gaslight. Bigotry. Bigot. Betrayal. Betrayer. The last two will be used interchangeably.

All of this frenzy comes with a distortion that should worry anyone paying attention. The presidential race has swallowed the entire conversation. It is treated like the only election that matters, as if governors and  legislators at the federal and state levels are extras in the governance story. Well, they are not. They write budgets, shape policy, influence or control security at the local level, decide whether schools and hospitals function. A president, however high his quality is, will get nothing done without a capable supporting cast. I know there are people who think their candidates can turn water into Four Cousins. Such people are not just wrong, but stupid to boot. Reducing the other levels to footnotes while the presidential spectacle consumes the oxygen is foolish.

It is not just politics, but identity, grievance, ambition and ego colliding in public. The timelines will burn and the algorithms will feast. Somewhere beneath the noise, the actual issues and the offices that quietly determine daily life, will struggle to be heard, like a whisper in a crowded room that has already chosen.