Column
Bitter Pills
By Des Wilson
Acquired Defection Infection Syndrome (ADIS-25)
When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law, we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long term interests.
– J. William Fulbright
In our recent experience, we have seen that a syndrome is a medical condition that has a particular set of effects on our body or mind. We have all seen what AIDS, Covid-19 and others have done to the citizens of our country. Medical and other sources have identified over 1844 syndromes around the world, most of which remain unknown to us.
ADIS-25 is an infectious moral deficiency syndrome afflicting desperate politicians desirous to align their uncertain political futures with debased and morally derelict rival political associations in order to survive the electoral manipulations of the state-controlled electoral body, either in a state or at the national level. Every citizen in Nigeria has the right of association with any political platform, religion, or group. This right is grounded in the defective Nigerian Constitution, and celebrated worldwide in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as well as the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights. So, morally and politically speaking, there is nothing wrong with any Nigerian seeking to secure his political future under another platform as it has become a plebeian pastime among traitorous and happy-go-lucky politicians in recent times.
The problem with this infectious political disease is that a sufferer suddenly begins to behave like a child who, for want of what to tell the mother, says they have water stuck between their teeth. So, it has become an open diagnostic challenge to political analysts to really determine the onset of this disease. And it is increasingly becoming easy to provide nonsensical explanations or justifications for the defection disease when indeed you need no explanations at all, since all Nigerian political platforms are the same in their presuppositions and their predilections.
These ADIS-25 sufferers are naturally prone to deception and can, therefore, belong to Party A in the morning and in the afternoon they move to Party B and in the evening they are in Party C! At each unscheduled political bus stop, they go to court to ensure the mandate they received from Party A is not taken from them. But because the disease exposes them to the wandering disease (Sokugo), by the next day, they can be back in Party A or B. There is no shame whatsoever in doing this, and that is why some call them political prostitutes. This is what the Yoruba call ‘political ashewo’, a not-too-decent label or stigma for people who claim they are doing the biddings of the people.
Some critics have not been too fair to defectors as they dismiss all claims to realignment as deception, political chicanery, deceitfulness, political fraud, double-dealing, duplicity or political hypocrisy. Whatever critics say does not bother these defectors as long as they collect the ‘come-on-board’ pay, which for some states, is as high as N200 billion for all the elected officials from the governors to the National Assembly, the state assembly and even unelected and retired former politicians who have to be placated for whatever reason.
The rapid spread of this pandemic has caused great discontent, and new malcontents have risen in the land.
ADIS-25 is said to be a product of a defilement by a retrogressively vile con traitor who arm-twisted a certain riverine mamalian into an illegal sexual relationship. And others, for fear of being victims, like secondhand smokers through association with ADIS-5 sufferers, and in the manner of all known pandemics, have panicked and welcomed the disease without seeking remedies from the contamination.
The contra-indications which arise from the political drugs administered through Aso Rock’s disruption of the status quo, anti-defection defection, hellish lies, fairy tales, and instability have been quite troubling adds verbal diarrhea as a side infection.
The prognosis of this disease begins on the day the political office holder emerges from the court room ‘victorious’ after a hard fought legal battle. The fear of another round of future battles, the feared regrouping of enemies, garrulity of politicians and promotion and magnification of small things as big things, invasion of slay queens of their portals, fear of the central government when its platform is not a sibling of the ogres in power, fear of discovery by opponents of hidden immoral skeletons in their political cupboards, and the eternal dread of the DSS and EFCC.
The strain of this disease, which is sometimes identified in some nations like the US and the UK, are almost easily contained and hardly become pandemic. This political tsunami which affects only the elite actors does not really change anything except that it encourages the sufferers to dip their hands deeper into the nation’s or the people’s till with a greater confidence that financial and anti-corruption gatekeepers may just smile as they pass by, cringing by the politician’s level of malodorous living. That’s all.