LITTLE ENDS: The mosquito in our underwear

A Yoruba adage has it that when an impertinent mosquito finds no other spot on a man's body to perch for dinner other than his scrotum, getting rid of it requires considerable wisdom and savvy. You cannot possibly negotiate with an irritant intent on drawing blood from that strategic location, especially if its proboscises are already drilling.

Try crushing the mosquito and you risk crushing other productive inhabitants of the neighbourhood. It makes no sense to endanger a man's most valuable pair of possessions while attempting to crush a mosquito.

There could also be the lewd and unrefined spectacle of slapping or grabbing one's scrotum in public.This adage needs to serve as the fundamental point of departure for Nigeria's community of conscience as they return to the drawing board to rethink strategies of dealing with what has arguably become the greatest threat to the Nigeria of our dreams: the PDP.

This gangrenous assembly of nation-wreckers and looters is the mosquito on Nigeria's scrotum.

I never knew that it was possible for an African political party to surpass the Rassemblement du Peuple Togolais (RPT) under Etienne Gnassingbe Eyadema in shamelessness, avarice, primitive acquisitive instinct, murderousness, cluelessness, and a 100% deficit in the domains of ethics, character, integrity, and morality. Few would disagree today that the PDP constitutes a deadlier obstacle to project Nigeria than infrastructural collapse and the ubiquitous dance of armed robbers in our cities, towns, and villages.

It follows then that if the PDP has a seven-point agenda that the megaphones of the current administration love to recite like baa baa black sheep, members of Nigeria's community of conscience need to develop a single agenda: how to aid the unraveling and eventual implosion of this Frankenstein that seems so determined to maintain the Nigerian people in perpetual slavery.

What happened last week in Ekiti is at once a statement and a manifesto. It is a loud statement on how the PDP proposes to retain and expand its chokehold on the nation in 2011 and beyond.

Ekiti is also the party's manifesto of violence and corruption.

What is not clear is whether the disorganized opposition and the larger critical mass have learnt anything from the Ekiti disaster. Take the question of the sanctity of human life. This means nothing to the PDP.

They killed in Ekiti. They have been killing Nigerians since 1999. How does one explain that we, the people, have not developed strategies of containment to prevent the PDP killing machine from functioning at every election?

How is it that we know that they will kill and yet wait for it to happen every time before expressing outrage? After Ekiti, it does not take rocket science to surmise that the PDP will kill all the way to 2011. They are rich, armed, dangerous,and determined. What are we doing to save the next victim?

The Nigerian people - the real stakeholders - need to broaden the scope of the ongoing struggle to reclaim Nigeria from the PDP killing machine. At present, opposition to the PDP - where it exists - is too narrowly defined by the need to prevent electoral heist and to secure little oases of inclusion for other political parties.

In our circumstances, the struggle for rigging-free elections needs to go in tandem with a broader struggle to enthrone an ethos of life in our democratic space. Simply put, no Nigerian election is worth the life of any compatriot.

The struggle for life would have to commence with major shifts in our representation of our electoral woes. Since everybody somehow expects people to be killed during Nigerian elections, we tend to complain more about electoral heists than the loss of life.

It is even more intriguing that the international community seems to have accepted death as a ‘normal' fact of our democracy.

Hence their reports tend to focus more on corruption, ballot stuffing and snatching, and voter intimidation than the loss of life.

This explains why the entire registers of narration of the Ekiti disaster in the media follows a pattern of making the loss of human lives less equal than Kayode Fayemi's ‘loss' in the theatre of justifiable national lament.

Those who are slaughtered in our elections hardly ever make it to the level of officially remembered statistics. For as long as we fail to make the struggle for life central to the broader struggle to save Nigerian from the PDP, they will always bet on killing to sustain the status quo.