 Welcome to The Advocate, the program that keeps you educated and informed on current events around you. Today I'm going to be talking about tribal division strategy. Tonya will be talking about creative curriculum and Steven will be talking about The Bogeyman Arrives, the 2023 Lagos gubernatorial election. We will be right back after the break. Please stay with us. First, I must really commend the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, for a fantastically executed election. Right now, I dare say that the U.S. needs to come to take election lessons from Nigeria. This is by far the best election in the history of elections. I'm sure you would agree with me. The past few weeks has left me really appalled at the level of impunity and more decadence that we have experienced as a nation. These events are truly a reflection of our value system. We've got a huge problem on our hands. To be very honest, I'm still waiting for the gubernatorial elections because I'm so sure that what we witnessed last Saturday was just a movie rehearsal and judging by the performances of various actors, we're going to make an incredible film worthy of the Oscars. And we are going to just sit here and pretend that we had an election. Really? I'm not even talking about free and fair. That is another conversation for another day. Did we really have an election to start with? Two powerful division strategies have always been religion and ethnicity. Education is always internal or is always the internal fuel powering these two division elements. Keep the people mentally malnourished and they would forever become slaves. They would never be able to make quality and progressive decisions since their education bank capital is zero. Many ways. Of course, we can see how the conversation degenerated to Igbo versus Yoruba. Young people, this is the time to arise and really get above this defeated thinking pattern if we must make meaningful progress in our nation. This is not the time for some tribal segregation. You know, the big guys are creating this division and they are also dining with themselves at the top. We've got a much bigger problem in our hands. And I strongly believe that this question would bring a much better perspective to the whole tribal division. And I'm going to ask if you had one hour to live. And the only available doctor that could cure you is of the opposition tribe. What are you going to do? Why leave it a ponder that let me now turn to my fellow advocates here in the studio. And I'm going to start with Stephen. What do you think about, you know, the presidential elections and most recently, I know we can say that we didn't witness as much violence as we did, you know, with the, just concluding, given interior elections. What do you have to say? What are your thoughts? Okay, a quick rundown on the elections now. We had the presidential elections and all that. Before it, we were told that, well, I was told by my friends and many people in the public that technology was the solution. Bivas was here and it was going to cure all the problems we were going to have. So then we went to these elections and then we found out that Bivas was no more than what you could really do on your phone. Only your phone would do it better. Your phone would take a picture of something and send it and send it to the next person. But that this Bivas couldn't really do that because there was a server problem somewhere and all that. We also found that, well, it could accredit someone, but you can do that with your register and all that. I had 300 billion also to spend on all these things and that's what it really did. Something my phone can really do. Then, of course, you had for over 24 hours or so, they really couldn't upload anything. There was opportunity for, we know what happens in Nigeria in elections. Then we moved from there. We now found out after our voting, we have 93 million registered voters. INEC had said 87 million people collected voters card. The person who putatively won the presidential election won with 9 million votes. So what happened to all the people in between? We have been having low voter figures before this, but then what happened really then is the figure of those who voted in presidential election, in the last election, ensured that we have one of the lowest voter turnout in the world and certainly the lowest in Africa. We are now the undisputed champions of low voting. You can see. Then we went to the gobernatorial elections and then we had all these, the campaign itself. We are still going to come back to it because of my own presentation, but the campaign itself was shameful. Something was wrong somewhere. No, it was shameful. The thing that one can say about it was primitive. We are really beyond what happened. I hope we are beyond what I hope. I can only hope that we are beyond that kind of primitivity. The campaign itself was the problem, the campaign, the bitterness of the campaign, the 60s to 50s feel of it. Now, if we are not careful, you know what the 60s ended with. That's what kept coming back to my mind. How could we descend that low? It was as if we were going around in a cycle going down. So I think that's a mistake we make. I think we believe we are far more ahead than we actually are. We compare ourselves like 60s US or even in everything like our animations and deals that have been done and we will compare ourselves to Disney. We really need to take stock of who we are. I don't think we have advanced as far as we think we have. When you consciously miseducate and uneducate your population, why would they be interested in getting involved in the political process? They are struggling to just feed. So when you extend that period between the presidential and the gubernatorial elections, and that gives you the extra time, gives them the extra time to spew this nonsense and then go to these communities and drop bags of rice, which is what they were doing, and sending these messages and putting these tribal things. That's enough time for it to really put those who had some spirit to come out to not come out. Why would they bother? I can tell you the number of people that told me, oh, I'm just an oludo for going out again tomorrow. For me, it was important to exercise my right to vote. So it's not a surprise. I don't think we are where we think we are. We are probably still where we were, to be honest with you, if not worse. And it impacts on the future of our nation. I don't think we've heard... I've never heard my parents, my godparents, talk the way about Nigeria that they are now, that they ever did. They lived through the war. They were in the war. And they are seeing things very similar and very scared for us. They're telling us to go, that we should leave. Some of us just... This is our place to be. And we don't want to be anywhere else. But I think people really need to understand that this should not be a surprise. It's just slightly below the surface. When you ask that question, one hour to live, and the doctor was opposite, try for me. That's not a problem, because I'm like every tribe in Nigeria plus foreign. So for me, I'm like anyone that can do the job. But for a lot of people, it's still an issue. So I just think that we need to dial it back to reality. The problem isn't the technology, the BVAS or the IRB or whatever. The problem is the people. And we can't just blame the politicians. The politicians are a reflection of ourselves. And so we have to kind of just have that reality check, I think. Let's talk a bit about... I mean, I saw lots of great videos somewhere in a Blair Do part of Lagos, that's Ojo, where literally the police officers were empowering Yoruba's to shoot at Igbo's. Let's look at this Igbo Yoruba thing. What do you think it's going to get to? Because Twitter is really agog right now. I don't think Twitter should be a reflection of what's actually happening in main society. That's just a microcosm that has a louder voice. I think, to be honest, I still have hope that sanity rules. And for most people, they just want a decent standard of living. That's what it is. And that's why people can use this kind of rhetoric. Because people are hungry and they want to blame the next man. So you dehumanize the next man so that you can blame somebody. But it isn't a Yoruba or Yoruba or Hausa or Shekiri or whatever it is. It isn't. It's a Nigerian problem. And I think that we have to always remember that the other person is another human being. I mean, what's happening here, you know, when we went to go and buy car batteries, the Igbo guy we buy from, they chase them from the market. You know, but as you say, some people say, that was a joke that everybody asked them, they'll say, oh, they're voting in a PC, but they'll press their hand label. So people are also voting secretly. You keep it to yourself, but everybody has that right to exercise their vote. And you don't have to agree with it. It's their right. The tragedy of it all was there was enough to campaign on rather than primitive things. For instance, I thought you only needed to look at the CVs of all the candidates and say, okay, is this person really qualified to be governor? You only need to then look at the incumbent and say, let him sell himself. What has he done in the health sector? He even had something to sell. I think they've done relatively well in the health sector. He could have sold that. Then he would have come to education and defined his record. Have I done well in education? Have I done well in this? Have I done well in that? There were issues on the ground. But you see, what we did, we just left all those issues. It now became, I don't even really want to repeat it on the air. It goes on to drive ourselves up, because when I hear otherwise educated people tell me that, I don't know how, tell me to drive you away to the sea. And also if you are a bad person and voted, I'll be your traitor. You know, also you're betraying your own. So we left the issues. But that should show the fact that, like you said, I agree. Maybe we're very ourselves. We've not gone past what we think we've gone past. Because you know why I mentioned Twitter? I assume, because they say that once you win an election on Twitter, you are a Twitter president. And there's a grassroots, right? So, but here's the thing. The so-called Twitter people are supposed to be more exposed. I saw people who were learned, who were arguing and who were blocking people, who were, you know, stupid, so low. Stupid, it's stupid leading the stupid. And stupid doesn't mean you're not educated. You can't be stupid. You can't be educated as stupid. You can't be learned and stupid. Education is probably stupid. So you know what I'm concerned? So if those on Twitter, because we're going to have a Twitter account, I mean, fundamentally you have sense you can be on Twitter. What would you say about the pepper seller or the market woman? If we're arguing about Ebo Yoruba on Twitter, then that means we really have a long way. The so-called learning people, what are you going to hand over to? I mean, how do you go back to tell your parents or your idiot uncle to say, oh, this is a strategy to divide us. Now, you that you're learned, you're on Twitter, dragging Yoruba or dragging Ebo. That sends a very, very, it's a signal that's very disturbing for me. It means that there's a huge, there's a huge education gap. There's lots of learning, but there's an education gap. Let's not forget that the generation of the civil war is still very much here. Our mentality is therefore still very much here. We're only one and two generations down from there. So we're still there. They are still speaking that same rhetoric, that generation. So if you think about the next generation from the civil war, which is my generation, we were hearing this. And that's what you grew up with. So it's been up to us. Yes, we kind of heard that rhetoric going on, but it's also up to us up to us to think about exposing ourselves to different people and understanding that people are just people, but it's not far removed. So I think that this thought of that, it was so far, it was old. It's not old at all. It's still very present. And those are still the people running this country. So it's still very much a part of our makeup. And that's just a fact. Wow. We'll come back to it. You know, I mean, it's just very important for us to know that like I pose the question to you watching right now. I mean, and I'm posing that question again, if you had one hour to live and then the only person that could cure you or save you is of the opposition tribe, right? What are you going to do? And as you step into this week, I'd like you to just think about it and look at it with the spectrum of what is happening in the political space in our dear nation, Nigeria. Tonya is going to come up next after the break. Please do stay with us.