Prince Charles Dickson Ph.D
Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti’s Coffin for Head of State was not merely a song. It was a funeral procession disguised as music, an indictment carried on saxophone, anger, memory, and ancestral stubbornness. Released in 1981, it emerged from the wound of the 1977 military attack on Kalakuta Republic and the later death of his mother, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. Fela’s response was political theatre at its most unforgiving: he and his people carried a coffin to Dodan Barracks, the symbolic doorstep of state power.
But before the coffin arrives in the song, Fela walks through Nigeria’s spiritual geography. 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 insider; where Christian power reigns, proximity to church authority becomes political capital.
He was not attacking ordinary believers searching for God. He was exposing religious brokerage, 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 weaponised and voting blocs could be baptized or turbaned into obedience.
That is why 2027 already feels familiar. Nigeria is again walking toward elections with the same tired gods: ethnicity, religion, zoning, entitlement, regional suspicion, elite bargaining, and the careful burial of competence. The country’s formal electoral calendar is now active, with INEC listing January 16, 2027 for presidential and national assembly elections and February 6, 2027 for governorship and state assembly elections. Yet beneath the timetable lies the more stubborn calendar: the ancient rotation of fear. Who is our own? Who will protect us? Who will punish them? Who will allow our people to eat?
This is Nigeria’s recurring democratic illness. Elections are presented as moral crusades, but conducted as ethnic auctions. Politicians speak of governance only after they have finished arranging the altar of identity. They know the trick.
A hungry citizen may ask for bread, but an anxious citizen can be made to ask first for tribe. A jobless graduate may demand competence, but a frightened community can be persuaded that an incompetent kinsman is safer than a capable stranger. In that poisoned arithmetic, performance becomes secondary. Identity becomes collateral. Governance becomes afterthought.
The tragedy is not that religion and ethnicity exist. They are real, deep, 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 transform it into a market stall. They slice the republic into consumable anxieties, then sell protection to the very people they have made afraid.
Here, the metaphor of the finger becomes useful. In a democracy, the people’s finger should be sovereign. It points, chooses, rejects, blesses, punishes.
The finger is the small instrument by which the mighty are summoned and dismissed. But in Nigeria, the finger has been captured by those it created. The political class becomes the finger that fingers Nigeria: pointing the country toward confusion, poking old wounds, prodding ethnic suspicion, selecting poor governance, and then biting the same fingers of the populace that lifted them into office.
This is the wicked irony. The voter queues under the sun, dips a finger into ink, and believes he has made a choice. But long before election day, other fingers may already have been busy: fingers drawing district lines of influence, fingers signing elite pacts, fingers manipulating primaries, fingers distributing inducements, fingers writing propaganda, fingers stirring clerics and traditional influencers, fingers tapping misinformation into phones at midnight. By the time the citizen’s finger touches the ballot, the republic may already have been fingered into fatigue.
The coming election will not be fought only at polling units. It will be fought in pulpits, WhatsApp groups, palace courtyards, ethnic associations, market gossip, student hostels, radio studios, courtrooms, party Secretariat, security briefings, and stomachs. Already, electoral integrity is not a side issue. Reuters reported that Nigeria’s Senate reversed itself and supported real-time electronic transmission of results after public pressure, amid long-standing concerns around vote-buying, violence, opaque collation, and post-election litigation. That tells us something important: technology may help protect votes, but it cannot repair a political culture that still treats citizens as herds to be frightened into pens.
Even the regulation of speech is becoming part of the battlefield. Nigeria’s broadcast regulator recently warned radio and television presenters against divisive political content ahead of 2027, while rights groups criticised the move as a possible threat to free expression. There is the dilemma: a country wounded 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 like it has party membership.
The deeper question, therefore, is not who wins 2027. That question is important, but insufficient. The deeper question is: what will Nigeria reward in 2027? Will it reward competence, discipline, policy imagination, institutional respect, federal sensitivity, economic seriousness, security clarity, and moral restraint? Or will it again reward the loudest ethnic arithmetic, the most convenient religious costume, the most ruthless structure, and the most seductive distribution of fear?
A country gets injured not only by bad leaders, but by the values through which bad leaders become electable. If a politician knows that competence is optional but identity is compulsory, he will invest in identity. If he knows citizens will forgive failure once the failure speaks their language, kneels before their cleric, funds their festival, insults their enemy, or marries their grievance, he will master those rituals. Governance will remain the abandoned child of politics.
Fela’s coffin still sits outside the barracks of our conscience. It is no longer only a coffin for a head of state. It is a coffin for every public office converted into private appetite; for every sermon turned into campaign infrastructure; for every ethnic elder who sells collective pain for personal relevance; for every citizen who excuses incompetence because it wears familiar clothes; for every party that confuses capturing power with governing a wounded nation.
As 2027 approaches, Nigeria must ask a brutal question: are we electing leaders, or merely choosing which finger will press our bruises next?
Because the finger that fingers Nigeria is not only in Aso Rock, party headquarters, government houses, or campaign convoys. Sometimes it is our own finger, trembling over the ballot, still choosing fear over future—May Nigeria win
