HOW TO BE A SUCCESSFUL NIGERIAN POLITICIAN

Make the relevant noise, get into office and leave stupendously rich, writes JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA

Relegation is a common phenomenon in professional sports. In most countries, if you finish below a certain position on the table, the last three teams in the English Premier League, the Spanish La Liga and other such leagues, you are demoted to the next lower league.  Relegation is also a thing in Nigerian politics, but if you play your game right, whether in or out of office, you should never get relegated.

To start with, you cannot have any other means of livelihood outside politics. If you make the mistake of returning to a respectable job where you are running an enterprise or a chain of businesses, you could lose the motivation for politics and soon you are forgotten. That choice is where oblivion comes to be your portion. Although, if you were to have a life outside of politics, you could end up with a more expansive and rounded existence where you experience life across layers of the human experience that were not available to you as a politician, but wouldn’t that place a burden on you? Is that what you really want?

The life of the average politician often starts from outside office. Do not worry, there is always a path to office, either as an elected public servant or as an appointee. Be a fervent critic of the incumbent government. You do not have to be positioned as an activist to be successful at this; just retain an obsessive interest in the actions and policies of the government, live close to as many TV stations as possible and do not be too far from radio stations. Learn to organise people.

Except you are working with a famous political leader who is out of office but doing their best to return, you’ve got to do whatever you can to ensure you are heard and seen as many times as possible. If you do this well, the government could get tired of your noise and then co-opt you by appointing you into an office. It could be a token, never mind, take it without shame. There is no shame in receiving. But there is an even better way.

You align with a party that ends up defeating the incumbent party. Your party takes power and you get a juicy position. More if you got elected to a position in your own right.

Now that you have power what are you going to do with it? Attend parties every weekend, because to not attend is to be disconnected from your class. During the work week, host courtesy visits every day. Some will accuse you of not doing anything, never mind, you will see that you need not do much in office to be heralded as a hero, you just need the backing of your audience and your ability to tell stories about your humility. To be seen to be humble is a political currency. To make these stories believable for when you are out of office, it’d help to document some humble experiences of you by humans privileged to access your presence.

Please do not steal money whilst in office, or rather, do not be seen to have stolen money. Nobody steals money whilst in office, everyone serves without a good pay, some even use their own money to run their office. The corruption reports you hear of are just a manifestation of the public’s imagination.

When you leave office, irrespective of how many houses you and your cronies have, you cannot be seen to be moving to a new house. Return to your pre-office house. How else do you show the people that you took nothing that was not yours whilst in office? You could even be a little more dramatic; move to your parents’ house. Say that you had to sell your former house to meet some school expenses. There are always school expenses in your story, never forget this. What about your children?

There will be detractors who will look at your children and their cars that cost enough to build several school hostels. They can look and judge, trying to use that to claim that you were just a thief like everyone else, but do not be distracted. Na person wey dem catch be thief. Don’t your children have a right to be rich of their own will and ability? Your wife and her houses? Your siblings got stupendously rich whilst you were poor over the same period? Do not be stressed by these. You are out of power now, objectively richer, sincerely poorer, but you have a government to fight.

Those who thought that just because you are out of office you have been relegated should be taught that you play in the NBA or the MLS —American sports leagues— there is no relegation in your game. Bide your time, wait your moment if you are patient. If you are not, that’s fine, make up your own stories. Claim that the government is working on a plan to ban politics. I know this is not possible in a democracy, but it does not matter, the more outlandish your claims, the more attention you’d get; believable claims get lost in the news, incredible stories are the news. Make your claim, build your own reality, then attack your points with fervour. You will soon become the rallying point for those who want change.

When time comes for protests—there will always be protests—make sure to dry-clean your activism, because the cycle of your journey back to office is now in full effect. There will be those who will say you had your chance but did not achieve much whilst in office, pay no heed to them. They are not your audience. In this game, always remember, you are not playing for everyone, you are playing for your own audience. They often change, depending on what part of the political cycle you are in, but to be a successful Nigerian politician, you must never lose sight of who your audience is. This is just an introduction.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing