Politics and You
By Babajide Micheal
It was on a very hot afternoon; after shifting from one lecture theatre to another, we had another opportunity of presenting in the class of our drama Professor who takes us Studies in Drama and while he was leading us on the path of European Drama abinito, we found ourselves talking about Plato’s REPUBLIC and therein, we learnt before that POLITICIANS, SOLDIERS and their variants form the Ideal World, while POETS, SINGERS, ARTISTS and their subclass are banned from and misfits in this ‘Ideal’ world, this is so because to Plato, the latter fabricates falsehoods and illusions from things that aren’t real and from this, we can easily infer that he thinks them as insincere, ambiguous, un-trustable, insensitive to humanity etc.
The question now is, are these valid? Between the Politicians and Poets hitherto, who are the reformers of the society, social constructors, clamourers of the idyllic? The answers are boldly written on the faces of the status quo: Social Realities. No matter how the skin becomes irritable, nauseous, prickly and detestable when the sun fries, it cannot be shed or peeled off from the body. The coming together of a group of people is a corollary of a system of leadership, laws and governance. Every individual has a domineering and self- conceiting tendency that to be manipulated, lorded-over, ruled etc only follow an instinctive protest.
Politics or its designates: Politicians when mentioned, leave a troublesome challenge on the memento of time. It is often a reminiscence of betrayal, distrust, evil, gory, violence, exploitation or whatever vice and nefarious adjectives one can fill the repertory of diatribes and polemics with. In fact, in the camp of religion and theology, anything political is pigeonholed ungodly and sacrilegious. To be more specific in fact, Nigerian politics is commonly conceived as diabolical. What surprises and arouses inquisition in me the most is, why this great injustice on the designation POLITICS?
The innocence of English Mini Dictionary defines politics as ‘the activities concerned with governing a country or area’. Encarta Dictionaries in one of its definitions of Politics says . . .the interrelationship between the people, groups, or organizations in a particular area of life especially insofar as they involve power, and influence or conflict… ‘From these definitions, an affective and inquisitive reader will want to ask: what activities are concerned with the governance of a country? Are the activities coterie oriented, cabal configured, occult included? The everyday realities and agents of politics are pointers and summations of what can be termed virus (es). When virus bedevils a computer system, what happens? Its malfunctions. Let’s look at English Mini’s opinion on Virus. It says ‘a minute organism which can cause disease- a destructive code introduced secretly into a computer system’. Who are those we have introduced into the political system? What organisms have we elected into the social structure?
Policies, News, Judgments that impregnate the pages of Newspapers which are byproducts of governmental actions and ‘tragic’ dramas always streaming stealthily from the lips of various media, spell the activities that depict the governance of our country- Nigeria and every country of the world.
But the point is, these assailants of virtues and ambassadors of crimes are from what BACKGROUND and social formation? What is there foundation? The bible says: when the foundation is faulty, what can the potter of bricks, builder of blocks do? These are fundamental questions that we seldom ask ourselves. The normative structure of the home determines the output of the offspring in posterity. In the home, the politics is demeaning, cruel and imperfect, all that fights the society would be ‘nuisances, rotten-breeds, failures, wolves, bastards etc’. When in the church, the politics is ‘scarleting’, filthy, sinful, unholy, sacrilegious’ all that would infest the society would be a ‘cryptic livelihood, ‘Sodomic’ and an Elian milieu’. And finally, when the human person and individual is arithmetic of social and ontological misfit; cosmological indecorum, the world is volatile to a precarious continuum.
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