Poetry and prose
“You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.” — Mario Cuomo.
There is something to be said about that gem which was dropped 32 years ago now by the then Governor of New York.
According to the dictionary, Poetry, is the art of rhythmical composition, written or spoken, for exciting pleasure by beautiful, imaginative, or elevated thoughts. In other words, poetry is the art of flowery speech. What we hear, made pretty.
The same dictionary defines Prose as matter-of-fact, commonplace, or dull expression, quality, discourse, etc. End of.
The last few days have shown this in lurid colour. Make no mistakes about it, the APC led government has thus far been a failure, and it showed in very clear terms yesterday on social media, platforms that the APC and its online denizens had hitherto dominated the narrative on. Every online poll I have seen, including the poll by the official APC twitter account, has them losing the narrative.
For us as a people, this should be a teachable moment.
The APC came to power on a groundswell of goodwill, which was largely manufactured by a media driven narrative. I was a part of that narrative. Were things bad before they swept into office? Yes. And for those who do data, we could see things getting worse. BUt that was were the sanity ended. In many cases, the pre-election narrative was driven by hysteria. This meant that people failed to do what was necessary and interrogate the alternative that was presented.
We simply allowed our emotions get the better of us, and well, here we are. Once again, this, is a teachable moment for us as a people. Making long term decisions is something that is meant to be done divorced from emotions. Will we learn?
P.S — before some binary thinkers say I’m supporting PDP, I’ve dealt with this in the past.