Nigeria: Celebrating Shenanigans Called Elections

There is something almost comically farcical about Nigeria’s approaching election in the state of Osun.

Comical and farcical, that is, if it were not so tragically expensive.

This Saturday, August 15, 2026, is when the country will, once again, mobilize armies of officials, security personnel, journalists, lawyers, party agents, observers, politicians and their marabouts, and whatnot, spend billions of naira, shut down roads, make endless speeches, and produce mountains of ballot papers, all to perform another elaborate ritual whose outcome millions of Nigerians already know.

And after the votes have been counted (in Nigerian class, of course), somebody will declare victory, many will cry rigging, many will rush to court, and the ridiculously lazy Nigerian intellectual class will spend weeks discussing whether the electoral umpire remembered to cross the appropriate “t” and dot the appropriate “i”.

Equally lazy journalists, who have received their brown envelopes, will happily regurgitate the canned message of their paymasters.

What a magnificent waste of national energy and resources!

Nigeria, like most of Africa, has become addicted to this absurd theatre of democracy while remaining remarkably uninterested in the substance of democratic governance.

Unfortunately, in Africa, the script tragically remains unedited: politicians will pretend to compete; scholars will pretend to analyze; charlatans in priestly garb will pontificate; the media will pretend to scrutinize; and citizens will pretend (they call it hope) that, this time, the magic ballot box will suddenly manufacture a competent government.

Everyone is fooling themselves.
The question is: why do Nigerians continue to spend enormous intellectual and material resources perfecting an imported political contraption that has repeatedly failed to produce the society they claim to desire?

As we have asked ad nauseam on this blog: why do African intellectuals feel so terrified of thinking outside the colonial box? Why must our governance system mean reproducing institutions designed in Europe and transplanted into African societies with no consideration of our tradition and culture, especially when those institutions are themselves creaking under the weight of corruption, inequality, political alienation, racial animosity, and collapsing public trust in their countries of origin?

We do not offer an argument against elections; rather, we offer an argument against intellectual laziness.

The Chinese did not become the China we see today by endlessly asking how Britain, America, or France would solve Chinese problems.

The Iranians, whatever argument we have against them, did not survive decades of sanctions and geopolitical strangulation by surrendering their intellectual sovereignty.

They studied, adapted, improvised, and built institutions and technologies suited to their own circumstances.

Meanwhile, Africa continues to import political and economic models as if the continent possesses no ancestors, no history, no philosophy, and no intellectual resources of its own.

In Yoruba, we say, ọgbọ́n ju agbára lọ / wisdom is greater than strength.

Yet Nigeria keeps demonstrating the opposite: we have enormous resources and enormous populations, but microscopic intellectual courage.

Perhaps the real election Nigeria needs is not another contest between politicians. It is an election between intellectual laziness and intellectual sovereignty.

As we have advised several times in this blog, until Africans wake up and stop worshipping imported templates, begin to construct systems rooted in our indigenous civilizational experience while adapting them to suit modern imperatives, elections will remain what they have increasingly become: an expensive ceremony for choosing who gets to preside over national failure.

The election in Osun State will merely provide the next performance.

©️ Ọ̀dọ̀fin Fẹ́mi Akọ́mọláfẹ́ (1st Dan, Ọ̀dọ̀fin I of Kasoa)

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