The recent "coalition" of political merchants in Nigeria in anticipation of 2027 is far from a welcome development. Apart from the fact that it distracts from the social insecurities and revolutionary desiderata of the present, everyone and everything wrong with Nigeria is represented in the so-called coalition—everyone but the actual future of young Nigerians and the masses of Nigeria. At every turn in our country’s contemporary history when it has been evident that the Old Order, by virtue of its senescence and avarice, has outdone itself and outlived its relevance, this generational affliction in the form of the established political class seems to never tire of foxy machinations to reinvent its dystopia and impose it on a rather unsuspecting and politically gullible society. Predictably, to sanitize this orgiastic exultation of rot, the Nigerian political class has once again commandeered consent and mobilized the unsuspecting to rebrand their putrid old schemes. On the losing side, as always, are the young dreamers (or daydreamers) whose collective future is unwittingly placed at the mercy of the present dystopia and all its extensions, most typified by this foredoomed coalition. 

By design, trumpeters of this fetid coalition have begun their echoes of “anything but Tinubu”—again setting off in the same tone and on the same track which history has repeatedly proven to be treacherous, sterile, and utterly injurious. Among the characters polluting public mentalities with the noise of this spurious coalition are cold-blooded political murderers, extraordinary human rights violators, tribal elephants, Islamic fundamentalists, gradualist Islamists, neocolonial collaborationists, compradores of conspicuous gluttony, etc., etc. We must be swift to denounce rhetorics of “anything but“—these are, at best, based on fallacious assumptions that imply lazy or zero thinking from their proponents. At worst, rhetorics of this kind are devoid of positive content and only seek to concretize the chances of falling into another oppressive political cycle. If history has taught us anything, it is that the worst has no limits. On the whole, however, one would be remiss not to acknowledge that Nigerians, and netizens in particular, appear to be zestfully obsessed with motionless movements; a self-defeating obsession with movements without change, even when history has condemned such movements and there is any conceivable number of reasons to pivot toward a radically new and promising direction. 

This stubborn obsession with stagnation and, by implication, backwardness, is a particularly dire African problem, certainly not exclusive to Nigeria. For all their condemnations of the Old Guard, young Africans in general are yet unwilling to break free of the negligent and oppressive chaperonage of the purulent established order. A symptom of the African social psyche, perhaps. Even so, it must be understood that this unbridled deference to older people is dangerous for the same reasons that excessive indulgence in the trappings of youth can lead to ruin. Those who wish to control their destinies must do so on their own terms and in a favorable environment. The sum of all existing social factors, redundant regimes, and geopolitical conditions under which this mercantilist collusion in Nigeria has emerged is certainly unfavorable to any genuine historical progress whose goal must be comprehensively corrective. In other words, this so-called coalition is a giant pile of excrement that will momentarily serve to dull the revolutionary spears of our people and nothing to decisively ameliorate their social insecurities, immiseration, exposure to the untempered violence of state and non-state actors, and their existential crisis which the revolving doors of bourgeois conspiracy continue to slam against their faces.

On the whole, history abhors stagnation, and when the reactionaries and talking heads of bourgeois democracy gather in the name of a sham coalition, they do so to perpetuate stagnation. Our society is therefore primed for movement—an actual historic movement that breaks down the walls of stagnation in all its internal and external dimensions—a historic movement which is beckoning the young people of this century to reject monotony and backwardness, to reject remaining in the thralldom of the reactionary and redundant forces and their endless schemes for orgiastic collusion. 

In essence, the real problem we must confront is our decadent neocolonial social structures and their protagonists everywhere around us. The political scene in Nigeria, and by extension Africa, is ripe for new actors with minds as fresh as the future the continent is yearning for. Their thoughts and actions must become the seed for mental freedom and social reconstruction. In this coming Africa, all forces of the redundant regimes in power now will inevitably be swept away as a matter of necessity. No other force, whether couched now in the robe of a spurious coalition or manifested in the familiar image of bourgeois collusion, would be able to stop the revolution that will displace the putrid roots and tentacles of these agents of backwardness whom history has already condemned.