@AristotleJames : The newsstand analyst in the scheme of 2015 (Y! FrontPage)

by Immanuel James

Once in a while just stop and join them – those analysts at the newsstand. Not the noisy Premier League pundits, no. I mean those chaps who dissect politics and celebrity gossip. Don’t speak. Listen. Feign ignorance. Apart from gossip blogs and entertainment sites, this is just the place to be, in your quest to gauge the capacity for political thought in the average
Nigerian youth.

The Nigerian youth with coveted electoral value is not the social-media-savvy chatterbox with some education and stuff. See, that one doesn’t vote. On election day, he’ll be watching it all from his flat-screen TV, distributing his conjectures online with his smartphone.

His opinion articles and political statements are read by his kind who will also share with their kind. Round a very small circle of self-important folks.

The youth with the magic wand is the entity by that newsstand at your bus-stop:

“Buhari wan’ turn Nigeria to Islamic State. Na him de sponsor Boko Haram naa. Have he ever condemn it? God no go let him rule Nigeria again…Jonathan wan divide this country. Watch and see. All this National Conference na to divide Nigeria so that Niger Delta go carry their oil go after him tenure…Babangida and Obasanjo dey the same cult. No mind all this their yeye quarrel. If them reach for their cult na their them de settle. Who are they deceiving?”

Try raise eyebrows and he draws your attention to one silly, fake news magazine with photoshopped pictures, headlines blaring bad grammar. “Buhari send me to kill Christians – Ex-Boko Haram man confess.” Another headline: “Man caught with 20 human heads.” The analysts yells, “Hian! Election never reach these politicians don de do their yeye sacrifices.” His colleague supports: “Na them naa. Very soon now you go de hear of more accidents, plane crash, kin-nappin. Them go finish theirsef for this election. God go catch all of them.”

When he watches TV, this analyst, he doesn’t understand the influence of ownership structure on news content: he doesn’t understand how Senator Bola Tinubu is related to Radio and TV Continental, and The Nation newspaper; how Orji Uzor Kalu peers through The Sun; or how AIT is now a new arm of the Federal Government. So he does not vet messages from the conventional media to form informed opinions, and consequently ends up fat on propaganda. Besides, the politician’s interests are guaranteed in the illiterate youth, in whom manipulation finds victim support.

But there’s something to note. This analyst is more powerful than his educated online counterpart in the political scheme of things in this country, for at least two reasons.

One, he’s the one to vote. He and his friends, colleagues, wife, children. He’ll influence them all with jaundiced political permutations. So ultimately, his misjudgment is transmitted into the system to everyone’s detriment. And his kind are so many. They count!

But there’s something to note. This analyst is more powerful than his educated online counterpart in the political scheme of things in this country, for at least two reasons.

Two, he’s the one to rescue a machete from under the bed and go hacking people to death on the eve of an election. He’s the one to gorge on the politician’s religious and ethnic propaganda, reproducing same in whoever cares to listen. He doesn’t read those articles about Ubuntu and change – they are too long, too difficult for his understanding.

And ‘God’ is on his side. That is why, during electoral violence, his loots are considered God’s way of remembering him, God’s way of “catching” the rich. He loots with entitlement, with anger made righteous by his own sanctimonious standards.

He is likely not on the social media. He thinks Facebook is for people looking for dating, and when he joins, the only function he uses is Facebook Chat. He doesn’t know Twitter. His interest is in 2go, Badoo, and all such lousy platforms. So, civic awareness on the social media is not as far-reaching as we may think. For instance, less than ten million Nigerians are on Facebook.

Meanwhile, it is true that the social media have catalysed a lot of policy changes in Nigeria, and have equally raised the bar in civic consciousness in the Nigerian youth. Governments at different levels have become so jittery of cyber outcries that many of them had to recruit online urchins to stave off populist attacks. So apart from galvanizing youth participation in governance, the social media have also performed creditably well as an informal learning system for civic enlightenment. But that is probably where it ends.

The ‘nuisance’ value of the social media is probably a political bogey driven up by exaggerations. In other words, the fear of Arab Spring capabilities is the reason Nigerian governments are listening to social media commentators. But that fear is misplaced: the truth is that social media inhabitants, made up mainly of students, poor and middle-class youth, seem to lack the Arabian spirit of doggedness and selfless defiance required to activate the threat of their presence. Nigerian politicians appear to know this, and do concede to online demands only when they like.

We need to recognise that a larger population of the youth of Nigeria are missing out on the enlightenment spread online by our intellectuals and activists. Only recently, a journalist recalled how a political aspirant in an election declined to grant interview, saying he does not give a hootabout online newspapers and commentaries. It is mainly the political elites
that own the radio and TV stations in the country. Through these media, they hypnotise the uninformed youth with propaganda. We need to find ways to take them in.

As the 2015 elections draw nearer, political activists, intellectuals, and every stakeholder of change should embrace the task of extending enlightenment to the streets of the nation. Free and fair elections are useless in a polity in which voters lack the capacity to make informed electoral decisions. It is bad enough that even on social media, there are hordes of Nigerian youth that are intellectually and politically barren. It is worse if this austerity of thought is allowed to monopolise the space that holds make-or-mar electoral capital.
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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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