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It is a long, long,
time since I visited London last so this may sound old hat to many, but
bless me if the first poster I saw as I exited the train wasn’t ‘Good
people Great nation’, courtesy of GTB. Just the kind of welcome message
you need when ‘escaping’ Nigeria! The wonders and signs did not end
there. I spent the next 13 hours waiting to board a plane to Brussels.
This was due to something called fog that goes with Britannia, only
when you have been away for a decade you tend to forget. So there was
I, practically reliving those old days at Ikeja airport when departure
time was a closely guarded secret, just as it was open knowledge that
if you left Lagos by road at the crack of dawn you could make it to
Enugu before the first flight landed.

After the departure
time for the 12.50 flight to Brussels had been changed for the fourth
time and the gate for the second, the sign was removed completely and
we found ourselves seated next to a growing queue of people bound for…
Munich! The native gentleman sitting next to me explained it all very
carefully. “This means they have no idea where the plane is, not to
talk of telling us when it will land so we will have some sense of when
it might take off for Brussels. This is England!” he declared laughing
and skipped away to seek his fortune elsewhere.

Driving down
Kingsway Road, Ikoyi a couple of days ago, I had another memorable
encounter with a political campaign poster, this one displaying the
arresting features of our former vice president Abubakar Atiku, clad
surprisingly, in a suit and promising Lagosians ‘better dey come’.

The thing with
these posters is that the message, in order to be memorable, has to be
short, so one has no space to seek clarification from Mr. Atiku as to
when that ‘bettah’ comes at whose door will it land? But since
Nigerians have experienced his leadership before, albeit as a number
two man, the question might be moot.

But there is also
another possible explanation for the happy choice of phrase. Mr. Atiku
has long years of service in the Customs and Excise Department. His
Wikipedia entry reads: “Atiku joined the Customs and Excise department
in 1969, serving in Seme, Kano, Maiduguri, Kaduna, Ibadan and Lagos. He
rose to the rank of Deputy Director (second in command nationwide),
with a notably impeccable service record…” so, the meaning of the
slogan might just be literal.

It was Yemisi Ogbe
who last week reminded one of that Nigerian gem, ‘idea is need’, so one
must, in light of this, laud the honesty and accuracy of Mr. Atiku’s
campaign crew. They are not trying to feed us some new line, some
brazenly false election gimmick.

In fact there is a
rich vein of realism that runs through Nigerian sloganeering. You Chop
I Chop or I Chop You Chop has to take the baba nla award for most
imaginative Nigerian political party name ever. The party founders
called it the way they saw it. Coming a close second, if not calling
for a category of its own is Charles Taylor’s, “He killed my Ma, He
killed my Pa, but I will vote for him”. Chilling, yes, I mean you
better vote for him. It is not evidence his lawyer is likely to use in
marshalling a defence for the former president of Liberia currently
standing trial at The Hague for war crimes.

You might think
that since Nigerians do have the franchise, a campaign for one man one
vote might be redundant, but that would mean you were MIA when the
verdict in the case of against erstwhile Delta State governor Emmanuel
Uduaghan was handed down stripping him of the post of chief executive
because as the judge ruled, no election actually took place.

In the city of
Chicago in the US where political corruption has legendary proportions,
there is an old joke about citizens being urged to wake up in good time
so they could vote early and often. In contemporary Nigeria, the
imperative of enforcing the one-man one vote system is even more
important than fooling around trying to implement a one-man one-wife
policy. Mind you, not that anyone is trying; the comparison is used
simply to make a point that some things do matter.

Sometimes a popular
song has the line that just fits the times. The Gamble and Huff chart
topper of the 80s, Ain’t no stopping us now, fitted the mood of the
gravy train days of the NPN, just before that locomotive came crashing
to a stop, militarily instituted by Mohammed Buhari’s New Year’s eve
intervention in December 1983.

History has an
awful repetitive habit. November 2009 was a chilling month for Nigeria
and set in motion the events that led to Mr. Goodluck Jonathan stepping
into the breach. There were no slogans then, just hopes and prayers
that Nigeria was on a different road at last.

We do not seem to have travelled very far.