After reading this article, I felt obliged to also speak on the controversial issue of choosing running mates tying Nigeria’s toddling democracy with a rope of cumbersome challenges hindering it from actualising its uncontaminated fundamental principles.
I sense that Nigeria’s two major political parties have been thrown into a state of quandary in their attempt to pick well-deserved, recognised and influential running mates owing to the formidable rise and emergence of ethnic, regional and religious politics in the country.
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The sudden emergence of ethnicity, religion and sectionalism in Nigeria’s politics, which is giving a serious headache to those choosing the president and his vice, is clearly sending a signal of despair and pessimism to the existence of the country’s tottering democracy.
I can now say that the days of the country’s ailing democracy are indeed numbered as long as Nigeria’s Christians and Muslims keep tying up the front legs of our stumbling democracy with a rope of ethnicity, religion and sectionalism. This is turning them into the biggest threat and formidable adversaries of the country’s juvenile democracy.
Earlier this week, after a seven-day fasting commanded and organised by his church in Lagos, which was conducted for seeking God’s intervention in the upcoming general elections, a Christian cleric, Isaiah Wealth, had galvanised Nigerians to vote based on candidates’ character and competence not their religion. He said Nigerians should be concerned about what the candidates have to offer.
Ahead of the 2023 general elections, Nigerians should return their motherland to those decent old days when they kept their ethnic and religious identities aside and looked upon themselves as one family and one nation. They should also not be fooled and allow those who gain huge profits from their division and conflicts to mislead them. They have to exhibit a spirit of patriotism by putting their nation first.
The electorate should also pray to their Creator, Who neither slumbers nor sleeps to help bless them with servant-leaders in the forthcoming general elections capable of nipping those root causes of Nigerians’ artificial multidimensional grinding poverty in the bud irrespective of their religious, ethnic and party affiliations.
Mustapha Baba Azare, Alkali Musa Street, Bauchi State, [email protected]
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