Serious surveys, star-gazing prophesies, analyses and permutations continuously dominate the pages of newspapers and social media concerning the coming presidential elections in Nigeria. And as to be expected in a country struggling to come to terms with the stark reality of its own predicament, emotions rather than reason have carried the day.
For supporters of the two main and major contestants – incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC) – you are a saint if you support their candidate, or a devil if you dare raise a voice against their beloved choice.
Newspaper columnists and commentators as well as political pundits have based their calculations and predictions on religious factors, ethnic polarisation, and the predominance of the fed and the unfed as distributed round the geographical spread. Sure, there could be merits and demerits in their postulations and it is only the outcome of the February ballot that will vindicate the stand of every one.
As for yours truly, what will determine the outcome of the much publicised and eagerly and bitterly fought contest is the vote of the unemployed. What will determine which way individuals vote on February 14 is the social and economic environment each and every one has found themselves.
Figures like 40 million, 60 million, and even higher had been released at one time or another by the federal government as the number of the unemployed in Nigeria. Of course, such figures are most likely to be conservative, since no proper record of anything is ever kept in Nigeria.
At press time, nobody knew the actual figure of the many mouths fed daily in Lagos or Kano cities. While the National Population Commission (NPC) comes up with its own figures, independent agencies sponsored by dissatisfied states or communities announce what they believe are authentic figures.
Be that as it may, simple calculations of graduates being churned out of tertiary institutions year-in year-out and are on the queue in the labour market every year, the hundreds of thousands who complete their national youths service, the millions that finish their secondary school, pass matriculation examinations into tertiary institutions but could not get space, another hundreds of thousands who get space but could not come up with school fees add up to over 40 million in accumulated space of six years!
We should add this huge figure to the several hundreds of thousands that are thrown out of job at federal and state levels. There are millions who lost out when major industrial complexes folded up or relocated to Ghana or other more stable and vibrant economies.
Another group consists of semi-retired graduates between the ages of 45 and 60 who could not find capital to establish any gainful business of their own and remain perpetual hangers-on and glorified beggars in their neighbourhoods.
These are the people who are going to determine the fate of both Jonathan and Buhari. And it is not those personally affected by unemployment; the parents who struggled through thick and thin to see their children and wards through tertiary institutions and still have to provide simple necessities are also agonising and bitter. Nothing in this world will persuade them to retain the status quo as they watch the common wealth being frittered away.
Unfortunately for the political parties contending for the vote of the unemployed, those who have no job and are hungry are not bothered about the sentiments of religion or ethnicity or even party affiliation.
The unemployed is very much aware that as long as politicians are allowed to continue their stealing spree in Abuja, his life would have no redemption.
Jonathan may be right in saying he did not create all this mess. Yes, he did not. But his party, which is seeking a continuation and perpetuation of the mess, did create most of the mess. President Barack Obama of the United States was massively voted in to clear the mess created by the murderous Bush and war-mongering Republican Party.
The unemployed will in one voice vote for change, and that will end the ignominious 16-year stranglehold on Nigeria of a cabal of a most vicious. The thieves shall be made to eat dust, when the real owners of Nigeria, the suffering downtrodden masses and the army of the unemployed descend on all of them on February 14, 2015.
Analysts and pundits, you are hereby invited to go back to the drawing board. Those who seek change, want change, and thirst for change are the unemployed masses spread throughout the length and breadth of this doubly unfortunate country who will echo Mark Anthony’s agony and cry “Havoc!”
Nigeria must be free. The key to its freedom is the vote of the unemployed.