In the same way, lumping together our brightest and best with the clueless “forty thieves” that dominate our corridors of power in the interest of political expediency is simply a losing proposition.

It is becoming fairly apparent that the general elections in 2015 will likely be a two-way affair. On one side, the PDP, with over a decade of misrule and internal friction limiting their chances in any free and fair election, and on the other side, the poorly organized yet to be named opposition merger, dominated by a cacophony of egos whose only loosely binding cord seems to be political survival.

In both groups, there are the intellectuals; people like Ezekwesili, Fashola, Ribadu and Iweala, who have a clear idea of what needs to be done to turn the country around and can be trusted to make decisions that aren’t solely motivated by short term greed. Then there are amala politicians, the Adebibus, Sarakis and Anenihs whose “selling point” is their ability to “mobilize” the “grassroots” to do their will who can’t be trusted with the important business of nation building.

I do think it is necessary for us to fashion out a third way.

You see the two political formations that 2015 might force us to choose from are like one of my mother’s great stews unfortunately strewn with wicked fish bones. When I was a child I hated having to seek out the fish bone with my tongue so I could politely eject them from my mouth before they had the opportunity to choke me. Sometimes, I wasn’t so lucky and my confused tongue mistook fish bone for fish. My throat only recovered after a long coughing spell, several back slaps and many cups of water.

In the same way, lumping together our brightest and best with the clueless “forty thieves” that dominate our corridors of power in the interest of political expediency is simply a losing proposition. Just as my tongue wasn’t always savvy enough to navigate fish from fish bone, we cannot expect that the Nigerian masses will always be able to tell wolves from lamb amongst politicians especially when they come in the same wrapper. As we have learnt the hard way, power is a complex thing and there are really no guarantees when you are “voting Jonathan not PDP”.

A lot of reasonable people will probably counter this argument by making the important point that politics is all about “compromise” and intellectuals need to hold their nose and work with crooked politicians who own the political machinery (whatever that means) for the sake of the rest of us.

I disagree.

When reasonable people lump themselves together with crooked politicians, they lend them a legitimacy that makes it more difficult for the masses (even when they are politically educated) to differentiate fish from fish bone. If we should compromise on anything, let it be on ideology and not principles. Compromise becomes expensive when the average Nigerian can’t tell the difference between a goat and a lamb because we have, in the name of political expediency, forced them to flock together.

More importantly, this compromise introduces an inherent power imbalance to our politics.

You see one of the most fascinating things about politics is that given the stakes, one’s means and methods of obtaining and retaining power are only restricted by their own sense of decency. While conscientious intellectuals are often drawn by their sense of decency to abide by the rule of law, crooked politicians are less likely to do the same. They have no qualms with using destructive dog-eat-dog tactics (like kidnapping the prime minister’s mother) to get what they want. This makes it very unlikely that intellectuals will be able to impose their better-intentioned will in these types of arrangements without adopting similar tactics.

This ends up being a lose-lose proposition for the conscientious intellectual. Lose by playing fair and the crooks get to keep driving the country into greed-fuelled oblivion. Win by playing the crooked politician’s game and they are themselves no different from the vile characters they revile.

So what are our options given this reality?

Intellectuals need to, as the bible says, “set themselves apart for the work to which they have been called”. Compromise is too great a sacrifice for a country that so badly needs us.

No doubt there are costs to doing this. Our influence will be much smaller and the road to the great nation we want to build will be longer, narrower and harder to travel. However, the alternative is to lend credibility to the wicked whose greed will drive us over the cliff. Good people in government shouldn’t have to hold their nose to suicidal suffocation while the evil run riot on the world in their name.

We also need to be more strategic about our battles. We have to accept that it is better to focus our energies on small, easy wins that might not come with the titles and sirens but will help us solidify a grassroots base without compromising on our principles. There is no reason El-Rufai cannot run for House of Assembly and Fashola, a Senate seat on a platform of like-minded individuals. This way they don’t need to be part of a mega coalition of the good, bad and ugly to win.

When I was younger, before I learned to separate the fish from the fish bone on my own, my mother would painstakingly pick through by bowl of stew to take out the fish bones before they could choke me.

We need a political party composed of individuals defined not by ideology but by principle that will be sort through the fish stew that is our messy politics and set apart the fish from the fishbone, lest the nation choke to its death.

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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.