Fruit From the Forbidden Tree
To our adolescent kids, the election is perceived as some reality TV Show/game and most of them have been influenced by peer pressure. Some believe voting for any other political party means you are old and voting ‘Elluu Pee’ is youthful and hip.
When you are a parent, all you want is the fulfillment of your children. When everything they do gets them lectured, they won’t look forward to seeing you. So you have to ask questions tactfully without being intrusive as any form of overbearing or authoritative pressure threatens their autonomy and creates resentment. There is nothing as difficult as raising a teenager or an adolescent (Millenial and Gen Z mostly).
Do we then disown our children having been indoctrinated? Does indoctrination cure indoctrination? I know many prominent politicians whose kids were advocates for Labour Party and voted the same against their parents’ interests.
This is not because of any idealistic understanding beyond the bandwagon effect and excitement to participate in the election process for the first time.
While sitting at the Lagos Tribunal, most of the counsel before us told that their children participated in the protest. Same peer pressure not necessarily because they had the full picture of what was playing out. They genuinely believed they were fighting against injustice.
So you can imagine the disappointment in the minds of these free-spirited young ones when the narrative suddenly changed to “Lagos is a No Man’s Land and we will take Lagos — vote LP from top to bottom” by their favorite struggle of choice. It triggered the same shock they experienced on October 2020 at the protest ground when the narrative suddenly changed to “We have No Leader”, “Legislate Same-Sex Marriage” and “Buhari Resign!”
These are people who don’t even know the implication of our diversity or dig deeper into issues to examine the motive as they make friends freely with anyone in their age group. They are mostly mixed so they see no harm in it until they began seeing ugly videos and threats that their heritage is for the taking.
Of course, we counseled and tried to trivialize the whole issue and de-escalate the matter stating that people are just being carried away. But you know these kids have a close knitted media network than we do. Videos kept popping up and I guess the rest was history. No young adult wants to ever imagine being rigged against their heritage.
I know a few may argue that those in the contest were all indigenes, however much this may be true, recall also that this is not in contention but for the bigoted mechanism deployed to exploit the irrational decisions and support that will follow.
As a family, we talk about politics generally and allow everyone to make up their minds. I don’t care who my wife voted for most times, let alone the adolescents. I never asked and never told. But all these changed in the election of March 18th, 2023. Not just in my family but in the majority of families.
Let nobody say we have changed, for the divisive politics of the worst of souls changed us. The dangerous political narrative that suggests that the election is a war on the one hand and the identity politics of hate and ethnic bigotry was the nail to that coffin.
The misled can always be forgiven, the ignorant will surely learn their lessons, and the consequences of the choice of most will help them course correct, but the very well known actors responsible for the indoctrination and mutation will never have our ears for as long as they live, for the damage they have done to the fabric in the tapestry of our diverse society.
#ShunExtremism 🚔
