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Prince Charles Dickson Ph.D
Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti’s Coffin for Head of State wasn’t simply a song. It was a funeral procession disguised as music, an indictment brought to the saxophone, anger, memory and ancestral stubbornness. Published in 1981, he emerged from the wound of the 1977 military attack on the Kalakuta Republic and the subsequent death of his mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. Fela’s response was political theater at its most ruthless: he and his people carried a coffin to the Dodan Barracks, the symbolic gateway to state power.
But before the coffin arrives in the song, Fela traverses the spiritual geography of Nigeria. He sees a country where religion is not simply faith, but access. In his criticism, where Muslim power reigns, the useful friend of Islamic authority becomes the interior; where Christian power reigns, proximity to ecclesiastical authority becomes political capital.
He wasn’t attacking ordinary believers seeking God. He was exposing religious intermediation, the conversion of sacred identity into state currency. In other words, the mosque and the church were not the problem. The problem was the politician who discovered that holiness could be used as a weapon and that voting blocs could be baptized or turbaned into obedience.
That’s why 2027 already seems familiar to us. Nigeria is once again heading towards elections with the same tired gods: ethnicity, religion, zoning, rights, regional suspicion, elite bargaining and careful burial of expertise. The country’s formal electoral calendar is now live, with INEC listing January 16, 2027 for the presidential and national assembly elections and February 6, 2027 for the governorship and state assembly elections. Yet beneath the calendar lies the most stubborn calendar: the ancient rotation of fear. Who is ours? Who will protect us? Who will punish them? Who will allow our people to eat?
This is Nigeria’s recurring democratic disease. The elections are presented as moral crusades, but conducted as ethnic auctions. Politicians talk about governance only after they have finished setting up the altar of identity. They know the trick.
A hungry citizen may ask for bread, but an anxious citizen may be forced to ask for the tribe first. An unemployed graduate may demand competence, but a frightened community may be persuaded that an incompetent relative is safer than a capable stranger. In this poisoned arithmetic, performance becomes secondary. Identity becomes guarantee. Governance becomes an afterthought.
The tragedy is not that religion and ethnicity exist. They are real, profound, emotional, historical and sociologically powerful. No serious scholar of Nigeria should pretend otherwise. Nigeria is not an abstract republic of floating individuals; it is a dense federation of memories, wounds, languages, regions, faiths and fears. But political genius should transform diversity into institutional strength. Nigerian politicians too often turn it into a market stall. They cut the republic into consumable anxieties, then sell protection to the very people they scared.
Here the finger metaphor becomes useful. In a democracy the people should be sovereign. Indicates, chooses, refuses, blesses, punishes.
The finger is the small instrument by which the powerful are summoned and dismissed. But in Nigeria the finger has been caught by those it created. The political class becomes the finger pointing the finger at Nigeria: pointing the country towards confusion, reviving old wounds, inciting ethnic suspicion, selecting an inadequate government, and then biting the very fingers of the people who brought them to power.
This is the wicked irony. The voter queues in the sun, dips his finger in the ink and believes he has made a choice. But long before Election Day, other fingers may already have been occupied: fingers that draw district lines of influence, fingers that sign elite pacts, fingers that manipulate primaries, fingers that hand out incentives, fingers that write propaganda, fingers that energize clerics and mainstream influencers, fingers that feed disinformation into phones at midnight. By the time the citizen’s finger touches the ballot paper, the republic may already be feeling tired.
The next elections will not only be fought in polling stations. It will be fought in pulpits, in WhatsApp groups, in palace courtyards, in ethnic associations, in market gossip, in student hostels, in radio studios, in courtrooms, in the party secretariat, in security briefings and in stomachs. Electoral integrity is no longer a secondary issue. Reuters reported that Nigeria’s Senate backtracked and supported the electronic transmission of real-time results after public pressure, against a backdrop of long-standing concerns about vote-buying, violence, opaque polling and post-election litigation. This tells us something important: Technology can help protect votes, but it can’t fix a political culture that still treats citizens like herds to be herded into frightened pens.
Regulation of speech is also becoming part of the battlefield. Nigeria’s broadcast regulator recently warned radio and television presenters against controversial political content ahead of 2027, while human rights groups criticized the move as a possible threat to freedom of expression. There is a dilemma: a country hurt by hate speech also fears censorship; a democracy threatened by dangerous rhetoric is also threatened by selective enforcement. In Nigeria, the referee is rarely trusted because the whistle often sounds as if it belongs to a party.
The deeper question, therefore, is not who will win 2027. This question is important, but insufficient. The deeper question is: what will reward Nigeria in 2027? Will it reward competence, discipline, political imagination, institutional respect, federal sensitivity, economic seriousness, security clarity and moral moderation? Or will it once again reward the loudest ethnic arithmetic, the most convenient religious custom, the most ruthless structure, and the most seductive distribution of fear?
A country is hurt not just by bad leaders, but by the values through which bad leaders become electable. If a politician knows that competence is optional but identity is mandatory, he will invest in identity. If he knows that the citizens will forgive the failure once the failure speaks their language, kneels before their cleric, funds their festival, insults their enemy, or espouses their grudge, he will master those rituals. Governance will remain the abandoned child of politics.
Fela’s coffin still lies outside the barracks of our consciousness. It is no longer just the coffin of a head of state. It is a coffin for every public office converted into private appetite; for every sermon transformed into electoral infrastructure; for every ethnic elder who sells collective pain for personal relevance; for every citizen who excuses incompetence because he wears familiar clothes; for every party that confuses the conquest of power with the government of a wounded nation.
As 2027 approaches, Nigeria must ask itself a brutal question: are we electing leaders or simply choosing which finger will press on our bruises?
Because the finger that touches Nigeria is not just in Aso Rock, in party headquarters, government headquarters or election convoys. Sometimes it is our own finger, which trembles over the vote, which still chooses fear over the future: may Nigeria win
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