by Adedayo Ademuwagun

A college professor is teaching first-year philosophy in the movie God’s Not Dead. So he tries to get his students to agree, at the very first class of the course, that God is dead and that there’s no point wasting any lecture time proving the argument.

Taking a cue from that, can we just agree right now that this year’s presidential election is overrated and then you can skip the rest of the story?

Here you go. Five reasons why this presidential election is overrated.

1. There are just two main choices.

Of course there aren’t just two choices. There are actually 11 choices but people don’t even know who the nine other candidates are. So effectively they think they have only two choices, and some people even admit that none of these two choices is good for the job. However, they feel they HAVE TO choose between them anyway.

What do you call a presidential election where people feel they HAVE TO choose between two unsuitable candidates?

2. People aren’t going to the polls based on real issues.

Most people who want to vote for one of the two leading candidates in this contest want to do so for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the issues on ground nor the ability of the candidate to deliver.

So many people want to vote because one of the candidates is their man or they’re desperate for a change and they just want to see a new face in “that villa”, as Soludo’s driver puts it in that recent story.

Only a small number of people are talking about pressing issues regarding the economy or security or education, and how their favourite candidate is going to lead the way forward to help solve these problems. What we have mostly is a blind following with no real depth and consideration for what should really matter in this election. It’s no surprise really that people are getting carried away.

3. Both parties are basically the same.

Politics often creates the illusion of choice. It’s like when a cable TV markets their decoders under two different brands, giving buyers the impression that they’re choosing between two different products. The two leading parties in this election are essentially the same in their make-up.

Some politicians involved in this election’s campaigns say the opposite party has messed things up and that their own party is coming to clean things up. But that’s politics for you. Many of these people were in the opposite party or another party yesterday. Parties are just a convenient way for the politicians to project themselves and achieve their ambitions. So when politicians who were chanting “power!” yesterday are chanting “change!” today and a lot of people now think they’re a group of pure people, how is this election not overrated?

4. Does your vote count?

People think their vote will decide who will be the next president on May 29, and politicians promote this belief in their campaigns. They like to tell us our votes count, but this is a complete illusion.

Jonathan raked in 22.5 million votes the last time and beat his closest opponent, Buhari, by over 10 million votes. Statistically speaking, this means if any of the people who voted for Jonathan in that election had simply stayed at home to watch TV or dance shoki, Jonathan would still have won.

It’s the same thing for Buhari. If any of the Buhari voters had been on the sofa throughout that day, Buhari would still have lost that election. Their one vote wouldn’t have altered the outcome in any remotely significant way. It’s infinitely improbable that a single vote will change the outcome of a national election.

However, the point here isn’t that you shouldn’t vote or that people shouldn’t vote. The point here is that you should vote because it’s your right as a Nigerian and it’s good for our democracy. It’s also good to show your favourite candidate some love by voting. But to think that your one vote will decide whether your favourite candidate wins or not is simply delusional.

5. There’s nothing magical about your vote.

A lot of people are frustrated about the government, so they think that voting on February 14 would magically change the country and that after they cast their vote, Nigeria will be a changed country and all our problems will go away. Of course this is an unrealistic expectation, but the amusing thing is that people keep playing out this fantasy and expecting some magic to happen. That’s why a lot of voters turn vehemently against incumbent candidates running for second term whom they strongly rooted for at first. They’ve been disillusioned.

Voting is not magic. It’s simply a civic exercise that you’re allowed to take part in because you’re a citizen of this country. Realistic voters all over the world understand that their vote will not literally change the country or take away the country’s problems. Actually, things often pretty much remain the same after an election. So this voting thing is essentially about exercising your right to vote, being a responsible citizen and demonstrating support for some candidate or her party. But if you’re lucky, you might get some change after all.

A Nigerian philosophy lecturer once taught his students that there’s no God, and after the class he pretended to walk out. Then he walked back into the classroom and pleaded with the students to ignore all the nonsense he said and remember that there’s really God. It says something about how religion affects us as a people, even our politics.