NOW THAT WE HAVE LOST

By the time you are reading this, the deed will have been done. I will have lost the elections to one of the main candidates. I will be grieving as I await the official confirmation of being denied what should rightfully be mine. I mean, my name and party logo did not even appear on the ballot papers! As you read, just know that it hurts really, really bad. Sometimes God allows good people to experience hardships visited on them by their enemies. What can I say?

I have many options before me. I have no doubt that there are countless people who love and believe in me. They know my abilities. They chose me. They too will be unhappy. I can cry about how hurt I am and how my followers have been hurt. We can have a big angry party where we will talk about how to deal with the people who stole our mandate from us. Because they love me, it will not be hard to convince them to begin civil disobedience in reaction to this loss. 

This option has its down sides. For one thing, it will mean making many more motivational speeches and screaming myself hoarse. I do not have the energy for that. This election has already made me lose weight. And even if I wanted to, what will civil disobedience do? It will only make my enemies get the excuse they have been looking for, to arrest me and permanently truncate my political hustle. God forbid that after losing elections, I end up getting arrested. 

Another thing is, they rape men in Nigerian prisons. I am a virgin. It would be a tragedy to get raped at my age. 

The other thing I can do is to create a parallel government. Declare myself president and appoint a cabinet. Create confusion. My followers are loyal. I know they will back me. But what will this achieve? For one thing I do not have the money to do this and no foreign government will give me backing, mostly because I have written bad things about most Western countries. The only countries I haven't written bad things about cannot help me. Like Togo. Or Djibouti. Again, as I do not have access to oil wells I am as good as useless to the world. I will only end up getting arrested by the army and then I might be tortured (God knows I cannot stand pain) and then end up in prison. And then that prison rape situation again. Not funny. 

I can also just keep quiet and let the more vocal and zealous supporters take matters into their own hands. I can claim that I had nothing to do with it and that it is not possible to be in charge of all my supporters nationwide. But then they will be doing it in my name and in 2019 when I want to run for office again, people will make documentaries about how I am a mass murderer because I allowed my zealous supporters get violent. So keeping quiet is not an option. 

I can prepare to go to court and challenge the elections. I am a lawyer and I know how expensive electoral litigation is. Where will I get 200-500 million naira to pay Senior Advocates? If I had that kind of money I would just buy a private jet and go and cry in a nice resort in Seychelles. There is crying and there is crying. Crying in luxury is not the same as crying in penury. Why would I want to make some lawyer fat? God forbid. 

All I can do is speak to my followers. Please find below a short speech, after which I would retire from politics to private life until the 2019 elections:

Dearest Supporters,

I hope this finds you well. If so, doxology. It is with a heavy heart I announce that which you have probably already heard: the temporary truncation of my presidential hustle. I am angry. You must be angry too. But pause. 

This anger can be used to destroy or to rebuild. We can go to the streets, spill blood, burn things. Or we can sit down, strategise and try to engage this government to demand good governance until we get the opportunity again in 2019. 

What can we do in the meantime? We can have a shadow government where we critique government policies and come up with more sensible alternatives. We can live above board and be leading lights in what ever we do daily. We can start to be the change we want to see. 

The road ahead will be tough. They will make fun of us because they truncated our hustle. They can flaunt their power. But we are the masters of our fate and we decide how we will react. I say we shock them. Because they think we will be violent. Let us shock them. Let us move on. But let us not give up on Nigeria. Let us keep demanding accountability and good governance until we save enough money to begin the 2019 campaigns.

Until then, stay well and God bless. 

Your one and only presidential aspirant,

Elnathan John.