How Britain disappointed the world with Starmer’s election
Iknow that Mr Keir Starmer is waiting for my congratulatory message. Unfortunately, I don’t have garlands for him. Why should I congratulate a man for turning democracy on its head and/or for confusing the rest of the world with how to hold and win elections?
Britain insulted Nigeria by showing how bad a student of democracy, Africa’s giant in the limbo, is. It was really shameful to see the United Kingdom hold an election that the whole world did not want to talk about. Under British law, the media are prevented from discussing or analysing election issues from the opening of polls at 7.00 am till they close at 10pm on election day. This left even the almighty BBC skirting the globe for more important issues when all we wanted was a blowby-blow account of how the votes were going.
One British-Nigerian that participated in the election recalls how uneventful it was. He simply went in, spent a few minutes casting his vote and returned to work – on election day. Britain refused to impose a curfew on the day it went to war. Who were they trying to impress? Certainly not Nigeria that forbids general movement, closes all roads, air and seaports on election days.
For a country that leads the rest of the world in football hooliganism, Britain left its flanks open on election day. It went to war without arming its police officers or mobilising its battleinoculated military out in full force. In Nigeria voting is war and we are always fully mobilised for it. We shut down the entire nation.
In the United Kingdom’s elections, nobody snatched the ballot box. No armed thugs preventing non-labour voters from exercising their rights to vote. I blame the 300,000 Nigerians living in the United Kingdom for this shameful outcome. What is an electoral process where no ballot boxes were snatched or guns fired?
What kind of democracy is Mr Starmer going to practise without a pint of blood shed to appease the god of democracy? Nigeria buried over 100 disposable citizens through electoral violence during the last poll season in 2023. There can be no mandate here without the shedding of human blood. Nothing fertilises Nigerian democracy as effectively as the shedding of innocent blood.
Britons would have to mobilise the National Front to prevent their country being taken over by foreign elements. Imagine one Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch winning her North West Essex seat in spite of being born an Adegoke. If we had allowed that to happen, Lagos would have been overrun by the so-called Obidients and Sanwo-Olu would have been on retirement when a certain Gbadebo Rhodes-Vivour, a native foreigner born of an Ibo mother, attempted to upturn the political apple cart.
Even in the most cosmopolitan state in Nigeria, only certified shons-of-theshoil anointed by the reigning Jagaban of southwest politics could be allowed to run and win votes – ask one MC Oluomo. This is an advancement from the times when Britain superintended polls in which non-indigenes contested and won seats outside their ‘native land’. Ms. Badenoch should be told to return to Nigeria instead of strategically positioning herself to revamp the Conservative Party and someday turn Britain into a Nigerian colony. Rishi Sunak tried it but failed!
This warning became imperative because a group calling itself “The Yoruba Party of Great Britain” openly fielded candidates in British elections. Imagine the insolence. No nonindigene should be granted the right to be what their kinsfolks prevent others from becoming at home abroad.
It was beyond shocking to see successful Mr Starmer complimenting Sunak, the man he made to kiss the dust at the polls. Come on Mr Starmer, who will you blame for your own failure when it happens? Most importantly, what happens to rubbing the defeat in? Do you not know that revenge is a dish best served cold? If Sunak was such a cool guy, why did you stand in opposition against him? Even Tinubu’s friends blame his fellow party-man, Muhammadu Buhari, for everything that has gone wrong with the Nigerian shitstem.
The British system is often confusing. How come that an elect of the people had to go kiss the signet ring of a certain individual in an ancient palace that did not stand in the election before he is officially designated to govern?
Pretty shocking to any Nigerian watching the transition is how Mr Starmer denigrated the importance of the prime ministership by rushing to name cabinet members. Of course, we all know that the parliamentary system is different from the presidential system or the corruption of it, but why the haste? If Mr Starmer had booked a three-week vacation to Obudu Cattle Ranch or a one-month decompression holiday at the Yankari Games Reserve, Britons would have felt the importance of the exalted office. But the guy did not wait for the ink to dry on his oath of office papers before naming cabinet members. If he had taken advice from Muhammadu Buhari or Bola Ahmed Tinubu, things would have worked better for him and Britons. The haste is quite unnecessary.
By quickly filling up his cabinet positions, Mr Starmer selfishly broke the back of his godfathers. It is they that ought to have picked his cabinet members, judging by the tribes, tongues, region and religion that worked for his success at the polls. By quickly picking cabinet members, Mr Starmer missed a Godly moment to have prayer sessions organised for his success in mosques, synagogues, shrines and churches.
Finally, in winning this poll by a wide margin, Mr Starmer won by a landslide. Globally, landslides are jinxed mandates. While Nigeria does not do polls (we have prognostics), no popular mandate has ever delivered on its hype here or elsewhere.
Nigerians banked on Olusegun Obasanjo granting him two terms then realised he could have fared better writing fiction as biography and criticising incumbents. Muhammadu Buhari got the full support of all regions and religions, but friends of his successor say he drove the economy to the dumpster.
On the global scene, Barack Obama was the world’s first black president, but he left his people disappointed, plunged the world into unnecessary wars and presided over the death of Muamar Gaddafi. France felt on top of the world with Emmanuel Macron but by Sunday he was banking on a coalition with right-wing racists to stay in office. Justin Trudeau was every Canadian’s dream prime minister; he has survived in a coalition and his compatriots seem in a hurry to send out his Liberal Party.
Joe Biden picked America’s first female vice president of colour, but he is dangling on the precipice of history as a potential failed leader who sold his popularity to the Israelis to keep oppressing their own cousins, the Palestinians, and encouraging Volodymyr Zelensky to bite his thumb at his powerful neighbour, Vladimir Putin, thereby putting the rest of the world on the brinks of a nuclear catastrophe.
If there is anything I could offer the new leader of the UK, it would be what the late Nigerian social commentator, Tai Solarin, usually offered presumed winners; and that is – may your road be rough!