Get Involved; Political Apathy ruins hope By Taye Adegbola

The Nigeria political scene is a field of dirt and filthiness, Get Involved; Political Apathy ruins hope so many riffraff in positions of power, appointed on strict loyalty to political authority of the day. Politics at the grassroots is the guiltiest in this regard. A lot of Local Governments are manned by the most obtuse figure among us. They narrowed the purpose of governance to a clownish engagement and exist in power only to negotiate personal interests and polish loyalty. I have the benefits of direct observation. I have seen first-hand and severally too, scores of political appointments made in a city Local Council that has mainly men of the weakest intellect, purpose and capacity preparedness among us. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in the PDP or APC, the criteria are the same; servile flattery (loonies) and party sycophancy; teleguide a selection process made on the nominations of the de-factos within the party, in a turn-by-turn arrangement. Competence and capacity to deliver for the obvious, don’t count here.

Appointments into public offices are straight rewards for party service, loyalty and painfully, mediocrity. These ones are appointed to oversee policy design, implementation and progress assessment leading to local development in key government departments ranging from health, education, finance, social services etc. without the faintest touch of scholarship and/or professional training. Empirically, this arrangement has made possible for a public primary school dropout to supervise and instruct a trained public health expert in the Civil service on community health advocacy and prevention best practices. The expert yielded for fear of losing his job. The community health suffers in consequence. Our lethargy is the greatest offense done to our purpose. Political progress here is crippled by our poor sense of political participation and an attitude of indifference. We have left too much in the hands of political charlatans, waned gerontocrats, and phony elements at the expense of our peace, prosperity and progress.

Grassroots governments is key to development, unfortunately most of your current representatives at that level are Lackeys, yesman and brown noser who were pushed to prominence because of your indifference and lack of political enthusiasm. In the final analysis, it won’t really matter what the political system is (or is not), we don’t need a perfect political system anyway; we only need a perfect political participation. Everyone must get involved.

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Enough of rhetoric’s and criticisms, it is time to smash the order that relegate purpose over gratification and sectional loyalty. Our greatest weapon to fight this ethereal monster is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation. The untowering generation can rewrite this history. The political layer is too broad, it is the biggest stratum of the society. It controls other strata. Its distribute and share the wealth of the nation. The towering poverty in the land extends beyond money, incomes and education, it is primarily borne from scarcity of good men with a heart of service. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. The country will not get better by our words, we must rise to do the act.

There is no higher religion than human service; to work for the common good is the greatest creed #WoodrowWilson. The path will be rough, we must resist the temptation to quit. Are you ready?