How to win an election in Nigeria

In Nigeria, election is not won at polling booths

By Lechi Eke

Leaving early in the morning

Helping INEC set up tables

Buying pure water bags and snacks for their staff

Being in the queue under blazing sun

Explaining to others how to fold the papers –

Horizontally, not vertically –

Don’t let the ink touch two parties,

Staying back after voting to chat with others who voted –

Speculating how it would turn out because

You all voted the same candidate –

So, you chanted the numbers as INEC counted and –

Watched the official scribble them down in a book –

So, you captured the counting and the scribbling with –

Your smart phone sending out to your friends and families;

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How 18 candidates shared 25.3m presidential votes

What you do not know is –

In Nigeria – 

Election is not won at polling booths –

They’re won through trade by barter –

It goes to the highest bidder

The purchased being the umpire.

Written Wednesday, 1^st March, 2023

A continent under siege

Africa is a continent under siege

Where the leaders borrow to feed their greed

Busy leaders carting away loots for personal gain,

More vital to life a palatial home in Dubai than

Pipe borne water and good roads to nationals,

Africa, plundered and scrambled, divided, shared and mutilated,

With colonial hands still in the plough held up by –

Native African hands made strong by greed and gain –

Insatiable heaping more than can be used in their lifetime –

Denying children, women, and good men of sustenance;

Hunger, malnutrition, sufferings and pains afflicted;

Diseased nationals beg and lack;

China, economic colonials with no religion –

Sign dotted lines with politicians pregnant –

With dead consciences basking in opulent –

Glory from loots while the people mourn and die!

The way to love me     

If you love me pave me roads and announce my wares,

If you love me build me waterways and teach me what I should know,

If you love me build me electricity and let shine around me

Light night and day;

If you love me give me drinking water –

Pure and safe;

If you love me build me large farms and

Turn my wastelands into wetlands –

Arable lands of commercial farming;

If you love me quit cheating me.

I need help to grow my potentials

Into sustainable businesses –

View me and treat me as a partner.

 2^nd and 3^rd poems written, Monday, June 1, 2020 from Satiric Poems and Other Cogitations