By Muyiwa Adetiba
Armed robbers visit your house, spending over three harrowing and traumatic hours with you and your family. Young men who are not older than your first child, or who, given their scruffiness, could easily be your mechanic or house boy slap you around and kick your butt if you are tardy in obeying their rapid fire instructions.

You willingly give your wrist watch, your wedding band and choice belongings. You watch helplessly, as your wife is led to where her valuables are and with trembling fingers, reluctantly give her life savings in jewelleries.

At the crack of dawn, neighbours who had cowed under the bed during your hours of ordeal now come out of the woodwork to sympathise—you wonder if it is really sympathy or curiosity.

They take a look at the physical wreck your home has become; the emotional wreck your family has become; the shame and disorientation you are trying stoically to mask; and someone in the crowd says, ‘lets thank God that nobody is harmed’. How about internal injuries?

The kind that takes longer to heal?’ you want to ask. Another one says ‘at least they didn’t touch your wife and daughter’. On hearing that they did touch your wife or daughter, there is stunned silence until another well wisher says ‘well, let us thank God for life’. What life? You want to ask again. But you know it is a futile question. Not once does any one talk about apprehending the robbers or ensuring that it does not happen again.

A man loses everything to an over night fire and escapes with only the shirt on his back. When a well wisher who prays to God to use the loss to replace life is told that the last two children died in the inferno, he quickly changes the prayer.

‘The Lord knows best’ he says and urges the victim to look at the brighter side when all this man can see is darkness; and it is not from the thick smoke fumes alone. Again, no mention of measures that will ensure there is no fire next time.

Yes, we are an incredibly optimistic lot who refuse to learn from the lessons of the past. Half of the things that have happened in our dear country would have caused upheavals else where. Yet we keep looking for the elusive bright side, we keep looking for alibi, for excuses. As Fela put it so  succinctly many years ago, ‘we keep suffering and smiling’

The class of Nigerians that takes the medal in optimism – or self denial—is the political class. I have been around politicians for long as a journalist yet I have never seized to be amazed at how optimistic they are. A friend once told me he was going to contest for the governorship of KwaraState. I asked him if he had consulted Oloye.

His answer was that Oloye had earlier promised his father who was his close friend, but of recent, he was beginning to double speak. So my friend was determined to snub Oloye and prove that he could win the election without his support. WinKwaraState without Dr Olusola Saraki’s support? I could only shake my head.

It is this same foolhardiness called optimism, that has made very rich, but very unwise men to come out to vie for the gubernatorial election of AnambraState when nothing in what happened in Kwara and Kogi States a few weeks earlier had changed.

I could have told them who was going to win for free. Yet they pumped money and energy into a futile exercise thereby giving credibility to a flawed process. Now they are shouting blue murder.

Someone once asked Fela what would happen in the country after the June 12 fiasco. ‘Nothing’ he replied. ‘Abiola go dey shout and Abacha go dey rule’.

This was almost 20 years ago. Has anything changed to make us believe we the electorate can influence elections? In other words, has the presidency done anything to make the electoral process more credible? Has the Civil Society done anything? Has INEC done anything? Finally, have the people themselves who stand to gain from government of the people for the people done anything?

So if we have been using the same methods that have been failing since 1959, why do we suddenly expect a different outcome when the stakes are even higher today?

Anambra is a small but intellectually endowed state. What happened last fortnight was a disgrace; to Anambrans, to the South East zone, to Nigerians.

Why should a credible bye election in a state that small be impossible to conduct if there was no hidden agenda? And why did the political class, the civil society and the populace not expect a hidden agenda and what did we do to confront it?

I can tell you, again for free, that it will be more of the same in 2015 if we don’t push for major structural changes in the way we conduct our elections. And the time to do it is now. Otherwise, as Fela would say ‘opposition go dey shout and Jonathan go dey rule’.

Sometimes I wonder why we bother with elections. It would be cheaper to dispense with the pretence and just allocate votes. In any case, isn’t that what we do at the end of the day after billions would have gone down the drain?

I must give kudos to the INEC chairman though. He knows how to take care of his Ivory Tower constituency.