“We have nothing to fear except fear itself.” – FDR
by Dr. AUSTIN ORETTE
ABUJA, (CAJ News) – THE All Progressives Congress (APC) primary election was an exercise in how to control the people with fear. The party primaries yielded significant victories for political heavyweights alongside massive upsets for several incumbents.
In a democratic exercise that was supposed to be peaceful, there was gunfire, mayhem and murder. As usual, the police will not investigate these assaults on citizens because lawlessness is their insignia, and this is also a reflection of the most powerful weapon of incumbent politicians of the APC stripe.
Fear is their weapon, and they will deploy it for the harvest of power. They have nothing to show for the high offices they hold. Fear has always been the weapon of dictators and outlaws. This is also the weapon kidnappers have used effectively in Nigeria without any hindrance despite overwhelming electronic signatures and footprints. The colonial masters used it. The military used it and threw the country into a civil war that we are still grappling with. They made Nigeria a fear-based society. Fear-based existence is a mechanical existence that makes every citizen interaction adversarial. This is who we are now. We have become a people with contracted dreams and limited aspirations. Our limited dreams take us everywhere but here.
Any kind of leadership that induces these kinds of behavioural changes must be voted out to save our republic. This is what patriotism demands. We have a duty to vote out this bunch of leaders who have no understanding of constitutional order and a democratic society. They perambulate like peacocks and want us to consider their irrational drivel as the law of the land.
After many years of civilian administrations, you would expect that those who rule would abide by the laws and govern with reason. Not so fast. The people in power today were the acolytes of the military cadre that ruled and destroyed Nigeria. They have adopted military tactics to force obedience. Damn the law and damn civility. Nigerian leaders are yet to come across a situation they cannot resolve without violence and intimidation. The citizen must be made to be afraid, very afraid and pliable. Keep him hungry and he will always be afraid. There is no law they cannot break in order to physically maim or kill a citizen who is not in tandem with the “obey before complaint” format of governance.
If you close your eyes and listen to the way some of these politicians talk, you would think they got their positions through a military coup. They use sirens to drive citizens from roads they did not construct, and they have thugs on their payrolls. They use the army and the police to harass citizens during the day and use their thugs to harass them at night. This is Nigeria, where fear has been distilled to render the citizen impotent and unreasonable.
Activities in most cities come to a halt at about 5pm because citizens have become very afraid of the dark. The night now belongs to kidnappers, robbers and thugs. This anatomy of fear envelops the whole nation so that everyone is distrustful of one another. This atmosphere has created a situation where we think the worst of each other, and we become easily offended and manipulated.
Without a little nudge, we become participants in an orgy of hatred for anyone who does not share the perimeter of our thoughts. The defensive actions we take in response to these fears cloud our judgement and become out of proportion to the point of irrationality.
How do you explain burglar-proof bars on the windows of the fifth floor of a building? Which robber will come at 2am with a ladder to climb into the window of the fifth floor and descend with his loot? That is the irrationality of fear.
There was a time in Nigeria when criminals were afraid of citizens. At the time of writing, Nigerians are afraid of criminals. The fear is so morbid that a lynch mob assembles immediately to kill a hungry person who stole a loaf of bread. No one has empathy for anyone anymore. That is how a society dies.
We are too afraid to come to rational judgement. How do we deal with ourselves when we have just taken the life of someone who needed our help? In the same breath, we celebrate leaders who created these conditions. These contradictions push us into a state of mass psychosis because we cannot rationalise these behaviours.
Fear has made our society afraid of human compassion. Whether we know it or not, we have become dogs in Ivan Pavlov’s experiment, where our reactions become instinctual and rationality is held in abeyance. We begin to equate the ability to induce fear with the strength of politicians, and we regard the ability to hurt or kill people as ennobling. Sooner or later, we surrender the society we love to the psychopaths among us. They will mimic our civility and make laws that will set criminals free and imprison the innocent. This is what guarantees the silence of the masses in the presence of overwhelming criminality.
A person was killed during a primary election. No one is talking because they have been enclosed in a cocoon of fear. These fears keep us divided. As long as we are afraid of something, mediocre leaders are empowered. Fear is their oxygen. A village is wiped out by marauding soldiers, and my governor pays a courtesy call to the president. Dead voters are of no use to him as long as those alive are still afraid. The leaders who enable this kind of atmosphere should never be entrusted with power. They are the problem, and we should vote them out.
We must wake up and remember that even though the road to Samaria was very dangerous, there was a Good Samaritan who chose love over fear and saved someone he did not know.
Fear is a limiting factor that stops the growth of a people. People who are afraid cannot dream or be creative. We must get rid of these fears because fearful people cannot be free. This fear precludes us from knowing each other and doing business with each other in a terrain that lacks legal safeguards.
These leaders who love power without any sense of responsibility must be voted out. They have used their limited vision to put our people in bondage through ignorance, disease and poverty.
We are obligated to reclaim our humanity. Voting them out will remove the blanket of fear that has stifled the energy and productivity of Nigerian youth. We must remove this fear that has programmed us not to be kind to each other. We must make them answerable to us. This is what the 2027 election is all about. They must be held accountable for the decay in our society.
NB: Austin Orette writes from Owhelogbo in Isoko North Local Government Area.
– CAJ News