All the party primaries are done and dusted and we know the 2023 presidential candidates. There is even talk of a top two and the rest. Amid this realisation is the support for these candidates, both offline and online.

The online support has already reached the point of fanaticism, where it is this person or “you don’t want Nigeria to move forward.”

It used to be “let the Igbos win”, now that has shifted, and what we have are people who have a preferred candidate and know that Nigeria, with that person in Aso Rock, can be great again.

Leaving you to make inferences, there is the side that argue that a certain candidate has the economic expertise Nigeria needs right now, without reference to his expertise on insecurity as if that is not a plague already.

There is another side who say their candidate is known to have created jobs for many Nigerians, without reference to his expertise on education, insecurity, or leadership abilities.

The third reference is the one who they say it’s his time, as per Aso Rock is a gift to experienced king makers. There are even whispers that he’s the only one who can go shoulder to shoulder with the ‘cabal’.

There are other presidential candidates indeed, who have expertise on various levels, but the voices of their fanbase are rather quiet.

For the previously mentioned, they have the capacity to recruit foot soldiers, both online and offline.

The ones who they will recruit will claim they believe in the dreams of their preferences, and the campaign will be led by people with influence.

Unless we want to be economical with the truth, we all have our preferences and can do so much to campaign for them. But, there are also those who had a revered position on roundtables and may switch sides “at any given time” – borrowing from the Nigerian parlance.

These influencers may argue that they love their candidate so much, and sometimes are not paid for their efforts. But, their preferences may be regarded as flawed in the bandwagon sense, and that’s where questions about integrity settle.

In this case, we forget the use of the words ‘preferences’ and ‘beliefs’, arguing that they must sold their souls to the religious evil figure, Lucifer, and it could be nothing else.

But, we don’t all see the same images in the skies, and sometimes colours change right in an instant. What you see cannot always be what others see.

We are talking about track records in this case, but, individuals believe a leader should have focused more on insecurity when the focus is education, and vice versa.

When it’s about the money and building networks in preferences, the conversation becomes longer, because every Nigerian is either an opportunist or a potential opportunist – in our homes, in our offices and business places, in our religious gatherings, etc.

In these conversations about preferences based on money or genuine desire for progress, we are lost in conflicts based on ethnicity, religion, etc. And, the whole campaign becomes more divided than imagined.

The bottomline is you cannot have the world on your side because your preference has been perceived by you as genuine. There are people who like chaos, as peace is a boring concept.

And guess what? Your favourites will definitely have other preferences too. Stop pretending like you didn’t know this before now.

What if you just sold your preferred presidential candidate without calling others the devil?