Poverty Decided 2019 Elections By Kolawole Emmanuel

Nigeria tales has been rehashed but badly the more. The addendum has proven to be a sad composition, repulsive and stench. Just within this, a friend of mine became perplexed asking him about his thought as regard the just concluded election — 2019 Presidential Poll .

“We are yet to get it right. I have seen from afar and  by doings, the malady of the poor. The citizens are identities of what they are, within a money-demanding cultured polity, centre-staged with symptoms of  deficiency ranging unabatedly time following times.

“The remedy for this ailment has been swinging to and fro like a pendulum, it’s unsettled. All the mystery behind this revolves round the scary deity of POVERTY”, he said.

Peradventure we shoulder up that the policies against grassroots poverty has never been a success.

I had ruminated on making my voice a soothing balm for the masses. Luring them back to the deserted sanctified lane had been my choice amid situations . This I’m sure of is desired by many other Nigerians.

Then, the above illustration is synonymous to how indigents people live their life. You can wash them, speak a lot about revolution to their ears but it becomes strenuous for them to acclimatize. Especially with what you want them to see and understand.

Then with this,  chiefly would I agree I decode what truly indoctrinate the poor citizens, what’s got over their wit from doing the rights when they got to the polling unit. What more is right than being true to one’s conscious conscience without polling intimidation.

Back to our annals, 2015 like 2019 where promises and objectivity of Buhari administration was clowned with speeches  suited in cranky and lively propaganda. One promise stood and that firmly would strengthen INEC to reduce or  possibly eliminate electoral malpractices in team work in the check of Nigerian’s political life.

I had hoped and never envisage to see thing falling apart this further especially in resulting inflation of poverty even if it is quite stultifying as the flame of electoral gross misconducts breaks out from the camps of major parties. Money bag politics deciding our polity. Why?

Politics is a game played by the fittest. Those who hoard money in their barns and were ready to flaunt it lavishly can play it. That is the new in-taken ideology we carry about. It’s beyond the cognizance of paupers but ballot papers printed for them.

Go to your different villages, check out all your moribund infrastructures, let us know how excellently-bad your potholes are,  how are your people living ?

Don’t you ever think of it, that,  politrickers keeps those ill-developments in place for the sake of recurring campaigns. Poverty was head over heels with us as  citizens, we are exposed to threat and unlawful killings.


You can preach. Preach from dawn till dusk,  expecting change to reincarnate in the heart of the masses. No, it won’t happen. A poverty stricken man is a dog slipping over again countless time in his vomit.

Youths are dumb. As many people would say – youth are the strength of a nation. I think in Nigeria the statement is totally amiss. The P3 (pride, power, poverty) had shoved the youths to a corner, it has suffocated them and outwit them.

Politicians had outsmart youths and propped them to the verge of been brainwashed with fallacy. They decide not for themselves, their decision had been chosen solely by poverty. #1500 had made a decision in various polling unit on Saturday.

Meager and shaft from the desk of political echelons had successfully succeeded by assisting us in making the useless hellish decision that will back fire and incarcerate us back again into the darkest room of suffering.

News reportage during the general election, shows notable politicians coming to the polling unit to cast their vote only with their wife; the likes of Buhari, Ajimobi, Oshiomhole and others. We should have asked them why they did not come along with their children.

Maybe their children are all not eligible to vote. Maybe they were afraid of stray bullets that pierce innocent soul into pieces. Or are their children not part of the eligible Nigeria citizens ? This thought keeps pouncing my heart.

Mostly,  all those impoverished  en-masse were not conscious of voting, many inbuilt aim was just to queue for dough, charges that leads to additional suffering. Maybe!

PDP here,  APC there. All these top media-centric party are coffer-centric and not masses-centric. The poor must not prioritize penury by succumbing to the juicy flow of stipends dole out to them by these politrickers in government.

Nigerians are yet to make their personal decisions in any election come true even thereafter, hunger taunts, abnormal belly makes even the fainting and gullible decisions.  We can never get it right until we think outside the box, above the compound substance of poverty.

Unfixing our gaze from the exchanging thieves in ‘Agbada’ will be the only antidote that can salvage and sail us straight to the peak of having a remedial and solution to these lagging plight of ours. When will Nigerians be liberated ?

That will only be when we rise above infirmity of poverty and open widely the door of rationality by musing deeply and choosing between lengthy life of an eradicated poverty or a beaming death.

Kolawole Emmanuel Tayo writes from Ibadan. He is a Citizen Journalist.