Rinse and repeat

As I tend to do with my write-ups on this platform, I made a thread out of yesterday’s on Twitter last night. I typically don’t engage on my threads because for the most part, most people on social media aren’t good faith discussants. But yesterday, I engaged a few people, then I went to bed. This morning, I woke up, and as is normal practice, after mouthing a word of prayer, I reached for my phone, then saw these…

To be honest, I found both the tweet and its reply hilarious and sad at the same time, and my instinct was to hiss and move on. But I think there is a teachable moment in here, especially given as for me, this is about my Igbo people, so it is important to engage some of it.

Yesterday’s piece was short. The thread, very short. Just five tweets. It is the single tweet, the one which pointed out the flaw in the strategy of the victims that quite a number of people, not just these two, chose to see and engage with. It says a lot about our ability to assess multiple streams of information at the same time, and as important, it speaks to our emotional state. Basically, most of us are looking for affirmation of what we already believe, so anything that runs contrary to what we’d like to hear can only be from an “enemy”.

That kind of thinking is fair at an individual level, but when an entire group begins to act in this manner and expects the results to be favourable, one can only wonder…

So here’s the thing: my thread (and article) began by pointing out that this voter suppression tactic had been tried successfully before. I then pointed out that what happened yesterday was simply this: the people who did it before, have moved the tactic to a different point in the electoral process. Rather than doing it on election day, they did it at voter registration. That is strategy.

Good or ill, it is strategy, and one place a majority of us keep failing at is strategy. Now, at the risk of being (again) accused of “victim-blaming” for pointing out the obvious, let’s analyse yesterday and previous issues…

INEC has been struggling with voter registration. This is a documented fact. But at the same time, too many people from my part of the country have turned their backs on the electoral process. This is also a documented fact. Only recently I praised Uche Okoye for his work on voter registration in South-East Nigeria. But despite Uche’s hard work, the South-East is still posting the lowest voter registration numbers across the board. These are facts that we can’t wish away. So if all these things are true, how is it that people can’t see that setting a day aside for a lot of us to register, and making a public announcement of that action, creates an opening for our adversaries to use a strategy meant to shape the battlefield to their advantage?

Of course, it’s the person that points this out that becomes a “hater” because in our normal emotional reaction to stuff, we hardly pause to ask a fundamental question: “is there anything I’m doing wrong and if so, what?”

This inability to self-reflect is in many cases the bane of my people. Last year I took the time to pen a piece speaking to this issue. In summary, the character I’d like to be like in Things Fall Apart is Obierika, not Okonkwo. Too many of us want to be Okonkwo. Here’s the thing, Okonkwo didn’t end well. We need to learn to pause and reflect because throwing tantrums won’t change a damn thing.

My thread/piece last night was simply a call for a change of tact to a more sustainable strategy, but given the emotional reactions, I doubt it would happen.

So given that we’re unlikely to change our emotional approach to things, here’s what is likely to happen: many of the Alaba boys will go back to their shops and won’t engage the process further. Many of our people will cry foul from the sidelines. We won’t learn the patient plodding required to engage the democratic process. Then in four years, we’ll be back here again. Screaming about how Nigeria hates us and shortchanges us.

You can flip this to the strategy that’s been employed by pro-Biafra groups in their quest. A lot of shouting and emotional blackmail has gone into pro-Biafra agitation, but hardly any patient work to engage with any process anywhere.

But this is the brutal fact: the world doesn’t reward emotion. If it did, the Palestinians would have had their country a long time ago. The world rewards emotion only when that emotion is used as a tool to complement preparedness.

Are we prepared? No.

So anything we see, we should take.