Nigeria Content Online

Are you
election-weary? Welcome to the club; you are in excellent company!
Surely, by now, you will have voted for your new (perhaps improved?)
members of the National Assembly? How did it go in your neighbourhood?
Did all the relevant agencies involved in the process keep faith with
all those clichéd promises we got? Of course, as the days roll by, we
will learn about the good, the bad, the absurd and the totally daft!
One can’t wait for the gist to start rolling in.

After all that has
been said and done by every candidate in these elections, one really
wonders if they ALL truly believed that they would win. And one is only
trying to be realistic here. The whole process is not as
straightforward as the election for prefect you participated in at
school; you each wrote the name of the person you wanted as prefect on
a piece of paper and placed it in a box or school beret (as the case
may be).

The names were then
compiled from the ‘ballot’ papers and the person whose name cropped up
the most was elected. Sounds so simple; you then wonder why, with a
process so straightforward, we insist on complicating matters.

If any school today
wants a particular person elected as prefect, who may not be the most
popular kid in school, they have enough styles to choose from. The
students may want a non-conformist prefect who will not succumb to the
whims of the school’s management. So the first thing is for the school
to make sure that the popular kid can never, will never and does not,
under any circumstances whatsoever, emerge as a prefect, so that there
will be no one voting for him. How? Simple!

What are the things
the popular kid is good at? Outlaw them; and make ONLY those things he
is bad at, the criteria for participating in the election. And make
these rules with a straight face, never minding how the perceived
unfairness and alleged injustice is viewed by anyone in the school.

There are many
reasons to proffer: “we are the owners of our school and we reserve the
right to decide who will fly the flag of the school. If anyone does not
like our criteria for deciding who is eligible to be a prefect, they
can go to another school and try their luck there. After all, where
were they when we were struggling to build the school to this level,
for them to just come from nowhere and want to be prefect, just like
that?”

Push it further:
“we are the owners of our school and we know the dream of our founding
fathers. We have decided that zoning exists in our school; as a result,
Master/Miss Popularity is hereby declared ineligible because he/she
comes from the wrong zone. It is important that ALL our students feel a
sense of belonging in this school to enhance the unity of our nation
from these formative years; they must feel that it is possible for
their own ethnic group to eventually become prefect one day. If anyone
does not like our zoning policy, they can move to another school that
does not zone students’ leadership positions, please!”

The idea is to work
from answer to question, and do it legally. Follow due process, then
you have no problem. You can add to and/or subtract from the criteria
at will; you own your school, so who is to stop you?

If Miss Popularity
has long hair, outlaw long hair as discriminating against female
students who are ‘blessed’ with short, thin, scanty or just bad hair;
if Master Popularity is athletic, outlaw ‘hunks’ as discriminating
against nerds. In fact, insist on ‘seriousness’, not sports, as the
MAIN consideration of the school’s electoral panel.

Is Miss Popularity
pretty? Outlaw beauty because it discriminates against those not
considered beautiful! Is the popular guy handsome? Outlaw good looks,
and justify it on the ground that not all world leaders are handsome
anyway; after all, handsomeness or beauty is no guarantee of a person’s
performance.

Remember you are
not saying anything new; you and everybody else have heard it all
before! Be prepared, however, for troublesome parents who know too
much. Call their bluff and tell them to meet you in court; or quickly
appoint their popular kid to a position with a great title: “Swagger
Prefect” in charge of all males getting the school swagger right or
“Beauty Prefect” in charge of all females aspiring to some level of
beauty. LOL!