ELECTION DAY DIARY OF A BAD BISH

BIO DATA OF PRISONER 5367

Name: Àlàkẹ́ Akọ̀wékọwúrà

Age: 22

Sex: F

Most memorable moment: Becoming Nigerian

Most embarrassing moment: Identifying as Nigerian

Offence: Being too hopeful

Sentence: Eight years with an option of parole after four years

THE PAST

Life is a collection of moments. Big moments, small moments, and inconsequential moments all lumping together to create this meaningful existence that is your life. Hence, becoming a prisoner of hope is never one big event. The crime is gradual, and the punishment, excruciatingly slow.

I like to think that I have not been an adult for long. And in some ways, this is true. But when you live in a country like Nigeria, it is hard to be cocooned. Life comes at you in many different ways, but the colour of your problem is almost always green. Very recently, I lived out one of my greatest fears –being caught in a violent riot. For those two hours, I stopped being my father’s daughter. I stopped being me. I felt strange to myself. What the hell was I doing here? I became the girl who hid out in a Micra cab seeking the protection of a street credible Micra driver who was parked right in the middle of the riot and smoking igbo, unperturbed. I knew in that moment that my education, my privilege, and faux bougieness could not save me if things escalated.

While the driver smoked marijuana and thugs laid barricades before us. I realised I was just another person zooming around Ibadan. No one here cares that sometime in the future, I might revolutionize healthcare for Nigerians, nor do they care that I’m a bad bish. They didn’t even seem to care that a man, whom I presumed was one of the protesters, just passed through them in a tricycle, with his head burst open with a cutlass. They simply let him pass and carried on with their drinking. The women who sold alcohol to them gawked for a minute, and we all just carried on like it was all normal.

But this is not normal. None of this is normal. It is not normal to pay toll fees to area boys in the name of protesting a problem we are all suffering from; it is not normal to have to buy the naira in Nigeria. It is not normal for teenage boys barely sixteen to attack armed security men. It is not normal to be in school for almost seven years for a five-year course. It is not normal for lecturers to be bullies without consequences. It is not normal that most of our art is about pain. I, too, want to write about flowers and blue skies, but the skies are thick with burning tyre smoke. The flowers have refused to germinate. Where the hell is the cactus spectabilis from civics class?

I am not an activist writer. I do not want to be. So please, Bubu, don’t arrest me. This is not an attack on your leadership. How could I attack something with an expiry date? In fact, this is quite the opposite. It is an adulation of your giant strides as a leader. Your political moves in silence. Your very loud unspoken statements. I recognize greatness when I see it. A man who is able to inflict pain as beautifully and as skillfully as you do deserves to be studied. Such seamless execution of dreams. But we will not even be talking about you today. Your time is up.

TO THE PRESENT - ELECTION DAY

Why is the idea of democracy so appealing? Breaking Free?

3:30am

I stir; I wake up and reach for my phone. It is only 3:30 am. Why is it so bright outside? I can see clearly. I move my laptop from my worktable near the window. I still harbour a fear that someone would cut my window netting and reach into my room to grab my things. It has happened before. Only that time, I didn’t have a mac to lose. The weight of wealth. Wealth?

146 messages from Ifelaw Gentries

Things are civil on my class Whatsapp group, unlike many other groups of its kind. My friend Femi has just very calmly schooled an overzealous Obidient. It’s hilarious. The sarcasm is thick with contempt. The subject is oblivious. This is my favourite kind of violence. Vawwulence

5:00 am

I trick myself into sleep by acting out one of my cinderella stories. In this version, I am a medical student. A house officer with a British accent who is also a charmingly handsome trust fund baby is in love with me. We live happily ever after. Fantasies

7:00 am

I wake up again. It’s morning. I have overslept. I hurry to observe my solat. Immediately after that, I’m online to catch up on all the election brouhaha. It’s funny. It’s annoying in an optimistic way, or is it optimistic in an annoying way? Everyone is cancelling someone. Everyone is calling someone unintelligent. I’m surprised some people know the use of that word. It just seems sharp to call someone unintelligent instead of just saying stupid. And it's even more surprising since the people who say it are often not acting very intelligent themselves. Intellectual snobbery. My least favourite kind of snobbery.

Note. I am one of them. But I really hate it; I loathe it; I despise it so much when people who consider themselves brilliant or are generally considered brilliant wear that ugly cloak of superiority and act like the rest of the population; the muggles are stupid dimwits. It’s ghetto. It’s ghetto to call people stupid just because they don’t agree with you. There’s nothing logical about logic that does not entertain context or nuances. It’s giving “I’m so insecure about every other thing in my life.” Intellectualism that does not engage is, pardon my language…..stupid. Oh God….I’m ghetto.

8:00 am

I turn on my computer to edit something I wrote that I would never put my name on. No, it is not propaganda. Although, I would not mind writing one of those for the right price. Yes, my morality is sometimes for sale.

My mum has cooked something nice. The aroma wafts into my room. I’m hungry. I count thirty seconds to time my arrival in the kitchen. I miscalculated. She is still there. It would be unnecessary to leave now. I look at her….she looks at me…I grab a plate…I collect wotowoto. I wait for my mother to leave the kitchen. The time is right. I grab a plate, serve myself and disappear into my room. Alake Sodiqi

9:00 am

I’m excited. So excited. It’s weird. I make a quick video. And then the trekking begins. I kind of miss my sisters. This would have been a joint waka. I make a mental note to call Tomi, who is on call on election day. She can’t vote. Jhumai is up north in Kano, where all the rigging is supposed to happen. I arrive at my polling unit. It’s calm. The whole exercise is over in under an hour. Something wells up in me. Hope

1:20 pm

The first signs of violence.

2: 34 pm

I shed my first tear.

2:45 pm

I wail.

3:00 pm

I write.

4:59 pm

I smile.

I laugh.

Yet, I'm sad.

This is what Chimamanda means by cautious optimism.

No Structure 81……No Structure 82……No Structure 83……No Structure 84

I want to say it is over, but it is far from over. Message sent…..message received. See you in the future. However, that turns out. It's the hope that kills

THE FUTURE

Welcome to the future. Today, we have lived with the collective consequences of our actions, good and bad. It’s time to renew the subscription. All of a sudden, I can’t remember. It’s a blur. Oh my God!!! What happened to virgin?

Meanwhile…..I remember this…..

THE PRESENT PAST

Tinubu was just declared the winner of the elections. My first urge was to text an ex-boyfriend who had made a bet with me that Tinubu would never run for the presidency. His reason was that Tinubu was a kingmaker. Ten thousand naira worth of books is what he owes me, but I also know the chance of getting him to fulfil that wager is very slim, so I let it go. After all, I’m a bad bish. Tinubu being declared winner is not surprising. Yet, it is heartbreaking.

As heartbreaking as this feels. I’m even more fearful of forgetting. Because this is what life is all about —memories, or is it history? I will never experience these same emotions in the same manner and sequence that I have experienced them now. I will never be a twenty-two-year-old first-time voter again.

So this is me trying not to forget because after all that has been lost —our pride in our ethnic individual identities, our collective pride as a people called Nigerian, the loftiness of ideology --our greatest loss would be to forget.

I do not want to forget the joy of casting my votes for the first time. I do not want to forget trekking to my polling unit and seeing a very colourful poster of a cute man named Faozey. He was so cute, I almost voted for him. But I looked him up on Google, and all I could were his rants about losing the APC primaries. Nothing about his work so far, nothing to make us trust him. I decide he’s a clown and vote for my initial candidate.

I also do not want to forget running into my Daddy’s friend at my polling unit. He was a first-time voter. He’s also a retired, no, retrenched civil servant. Something about these elections made this sixty-five-year-old man, who has been through a civil war, military coups, and seemingly endless violent and bloody election cycles, decide to vote. A man who has watched the naira dance from #1:50 to a dollar to 750 to a dollar has decided to exercise his franchise. Something got my dad’s friend off the couch; something is keeping their generation resilient even in the face of incessant disappointment. How could I say I was tired after just one try?

And then there were the chronic voters. Men and women who have voted in every election. They recall each election by the people who died and the scandals that surrounded the candidates. They have no sense of time in the way that we do. They traded stories, many of which I suspect were grossly exaggerated. If only they had Twitter. Now, how are we going to know who is lying and who is fundamentally stupid or who is just a bigot in this group?

What is it that makes democracy so annoying?

I also do not want to forget that even in my clamour for a better Nigeria. I am still a deeply selfish individual. So who am I to say that a supporter of Tinubu is wicked and selfish? 50 dollars on Upwork cannot simply become 100 Naira. Haaa, God forbid! No, God abeg. I’m confused. Inconsistent in my desires for this nation.

What is it about us as a people that makes us so forgetful?

I have seen a lot of hot takes. I’ve read so many threads. Everything I’ve learned about Nigeria’s history, real or imagined, in the past months, I learned without having to make any conscious effort. Maybe this is the problem —the democratisation of information. Information is violence, and whether we admit it or not, the real violence was not the snatching of ballot boxes in isolated parts of the country. Electoral violence started way before election day. The packaging and refurbishing of questionable characters. The race to present every candidate as the least devil since there was no convincing Nigerians that one politician has their true interests at heart. We are a deeply untrusting people in spite of our disposition towards collective amnesia. Ironic but quite true. We learn to forget in very specific ways how our government and leaders have screwed us over in the past, but we never learn to trust them.

Asides from being untrusting as a people, we are also quite the intolerant bunch. And this is not where you get to think, but not all Nigerians are intolerant. Errrrrm, don’t do it. Just like you shouldn’t say, “not all white people are racists,” when people are talking about how systemic racism affects them or how you can’t chip in “not all men” are sexual predators when women say 1 in 3 of them have been sexually assaulted. Time and place.

Just a little reminder, hate does not separate issues. Tribalism does not separate logical liberal Yorubas from the Yoruba nationalists. When they come for Yoruba people, they are coming for all of us. Whether or not you were part is inconsequential. This is not primary school; tearfully saying, “Aunty, I was not there”, will not save you this time.

So, I was saying. Nigerians, no, not Yoruba people, not Igbo people, are very intolerant. Whether it's overt bigotry or unconscious bias that makes you think a certain way or act a certain way around people of a tribe. You need to think deeply and fix it. It has to be personal. Every one of us has to reconsider. Today, it is Yoruba people harassing Igbo people and stopping them from exercising their rights as Nigerians. Yes, they fucked up. But if the tables were turned, I do not doubt that what happened in Lagos could very easily happen in Enugu or Delta or Kano. And it will happen again if we continue to act like this is not a problem that we all have, and guess who the biggest winners in all this rogbodiyan are? Yes, your guess is as good as mine. Politicians. How can we fight a common enemy when we are too busy fighting one another?

But even this journey of introspection that I have advised, even I recognise that it might be faulty. Am I Nigerian before I am Yoruba? Or am I Yoruba before I am Nigerian? Am I Muslim before I am Yoruba, or I’m a young person before I am Muslim? Why does identity have to be so layered? Oh! this hierarchy of identities.

We should not lie, and we should not steal; some of you people’s online behaviour in the past three months has been extremely hilarious. Ridiculous. There were the ones who fancied themselves some sort of street intellectuals who know the “game”. There were the ones who only echo what the loudest choir is singing at the moment, and then we had the unrepentant pessimists whose answer to everything is that we should all pack our bags and leave. Clown. You that they might not grant a visa. Just a reminder, whether you stay or you leave, the Nigerian stench is very strong. It will follow you. I promise you. Your Nigerianness is not a cloak you can wear or take off as you please, regardless of the colour of your passport, your Nigerianness is a one thousand-year-old curse, and we have just lived out 63 years of it. You either stay while we try to break the curse collectively, or it follows you everywhere you go. No choice is good; no option is right.

And then there was the most foolish bunch of them all; the ones who think we need the military to take over or that what is going to fix us is a war. Imbeciles. Nigeria must break, says a fool on Twitter with 4G internet. I wonder how you are going to tweet when all you would be able to eat are lizards and boiled grass.

The future is ……colorful as far as I can see. And now….

BACK TO THE PRESENT

And the award of the overall best in rebranding goes to…….Peter Gregory Obi

The videos are heartbreaking. Ballot papers in the gutters, on fire, allegedly done by the ruling party. But what is more heartbreaking is the selective anger. Can we stop pretending like there were no videos of our beloved candidate rigging elections in the east? There were videos of people being threatened to vote for APC, and there were videos of old women lined up while someone thumbprint the Labour party on the ballot papers.

How can you see one and turn a blind eye to the other? Is rigging okay if it is done in the name of our Messiah? Is it okay that our candidate, this statement we are making against political pillaging, is also blatantly rigging the elections in his stronghold?

I think not. Corruption is corruption. Stealing is theft. Ole is gbewiri and crying on national TV does not make you any less complicit. Many have cried before you, and many will still cry after you. Our mandate was stolen? Crying on national TV does not a winner make. But can we take a moment to respect Peter Obi’s campaign team? His speech writer, in particular. Now that’s a job I wish I had.

Now that the elections are over, can we all agree to stop being clowns and actually take the time to read, learn, and observe? And reading a thousand tweets a day is not what I mean by learning. Waking up every day to be dragging generator wire and carrying petrol keg up and down is so out of character for me as a bad bish. We cannot continue like this. On behalf of all bad bishes, please read, learn, and grow. And to other bad bishes across the country, please, I take God beg you, stop disgracing me. If you don’t know, keep quiet and do a Google search when you reach your house.

How do you think I have stayed a bad bish for this long?

FINAL NOTE

I know some of you will want to argue. Well, the comment section is open. However, I also know that there is a long process of registration that you would rather not go through, and that makes me incredibly glad. But please resist the urge to bring this to my Whatsapp DM. I will “fair enough’ my way out of it. I promise.

You want to argue? Fair enough. But not with me. We don’t have light abeg; my phone is not charged for meaningless battles. Told you I’m ghetto. And yes, I voted for Peter Gregory Obi.

Àkòwékọ̀wùrá 🍒