To an average Nigerian, politics is a dirty game played by dirty people. This conception may not be far from the truth based on how the game of politics is played in the Nigerian political environment and consequently resulting to political apathy.
Political apathy means not participating in politics, electoral processes, or having total hatred for it. Research has shown that large percentage of Nigerians have apathy for politics; and the reason given by this Nigerians include: the issue of bad governance, election rigging, violent campaign, weak security measures, chaotic political atmosphere among many other reasons. With the aforementioned, it has been made clear that both the leadership and the followership of the Nigerian political system are faulty. The big question now is, for how long shall we continue to champion political apathy? What have we done to change the existing status quo? For how long shall we continue to engage in this political football?
I see political apathy in Nigerian as the act of shying away from the existing political problem and thereby endangering the survival of the political system. Most Nigerians fail to understand the dangers of political apathy and its negative effect on the Nigerian political development. Moreover, one can rightly say that, political apathy is the cause of bad governance, emergence of greedy politicians as leaders, denial of political information and education. Political apathy will cause the government to behave anyhow since people are not interested in their activities. The consequences of not understanding and not participating in politics either as individual or as group is servitude (i.e. the condition of being a slave) to another or to one’s circumstances because politics is about who get what, when and how.
During the French political revolution of 1789, the French were able to wage a revolution against the exploitative monarchical political system because they had no apathy for politics, that they had to take their future by their own hands to change the political order in France to that of a democratic republic and today, France is one of the most developed country in the world. Therefore, sometimes it is risky not to take a risk. Not that I am advocating for political revolution but rather mental revolution (i.e. change of mindset) because a stitch in time saves nine.
The solution to the Nigeria state of political apathy is for the Nigerians to have a collective unconsciousness (i.e. having one mind, thought and opinion) by drawing a margin between good and bad, then participating in all political processes, eliminating the bad political actors from the position of authority through their votes, then replacing them with good and God fearing nationalistic citizen with civic virtues.
