By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Political Jumpology is the modern day art form of jumping from one political party to the other.
More acerbic writers would rather call the matter by a different name: political prostitution.
There is no need to call names here because the political jumpologists, or political prostitutes if you care, do not need much introduction.
To give him his due, there is this perennial political wheeler-dealer who is without question Nigeria’s greatest practitioner of political jumpology.
As a political jumpologist, he has thus far jumped from all the political parties whose acronyms are to be found in the English language alphabet and more.
In every stanza of the Nigerian presidential election, he stands tall to be counted by throwing his hat into the ring with any available political party named PPP or DDD or XYB or whatever.
Some mere mortals on the political terrain are endlessly talking of zoning, but the grandmasters insist as per the divine right of the north to the presidency.
This suits the perpetual political jumpologist down to the last dollar in his oversized agbada pockets as it enables him to participate in every presidential primary or dollar bazaar..
It bodes well for the jumpologist to somehow engineer his good self to be put forward as a northern ace anytime the south deigns to want to take power.
He even volunteered as the scapegoat in a primordial arrangement of getting a single northern candidate to lock horns with the then incumbent southern shoeless one who happened to be by chance in Aso Villa back then.
It was akin to digging his political grave when the feudal lords atavistically set on the course of choosing a so-called northern consensus candidate to oust the much-ballyhooed clueless one.
Given the charged situation in the country then, it became clear to many discerning political minds that a poisoned chalice was on offer for the opportunistic jumpologist of fortune.
The humiliation the jumpologist suffered at Eagle Square in that instance haunted him so much, thus leading to yet another jump from one party to the other.
It was then after that political crossing the jumpologist rose in raptures to square up with the quintessential president of the north for the ultimate diadem.
The word out there was that the jumpologist was crudely rigged out by the irredentist, but they had to settle on brotherly terms when the opponent became a stand-in father for the son of the incumbent when he wedded.
A master of the cash-and-carry democracy of Nigeria, the jumpologist past master of inebriating party delegates with a stash of American dollars is on the march again.
One roughneck out of the rich rivers of the south nearly overwhelmed the nation as a noisemaker in his guttural bid to challenge the irrepressible jumpologist dollar-for-dollar for the presidential slot but ended up being knocked into comatose like a drunken pugilist.
A shot of ogogoro for him!
Political supremacy is a matter of cash, and the ace political jumpologist has more cash in all currencies of the world than the bullion vans of yet another life ambition wannabe can carry.
Human beings are bought and sold like cattle in the political market to the delight of the ever giving jumpologist.
The legacy today in Nigeria is of course the truism that politics is the only business worth doing such that with the passage of time one must have looted enough public funds with which to buy delegates.
Like in the Nigerian Customs Service where bribery is the chief good, the political wannabe acutely believes that suborning the due process with cash is the only highway to democratic survival and political supremacy.
It is not unlike the followers of the leading political harlot to be shouting “Power to the people” with the goons of one party this moment only to change the very next moment into the rowdy milieu of mouthing “Change” before one can buy a broom or a fairly used umbrella.
Eating one’s vomit is a veritable source of nutritious political protein and patriotic carbohydrates.
Corruption is now the chief good in the country that elected a professed anti-corruption crusader.
Billions of dollars are being stashed away before our very eyes by public officials such that it is incumbent on the coming government to declare corruption an official public policy.
The good sense would then be to change the Augean stable by duly electing a proper professor of corruption in the shape and size of the highly acclaimed president of political jumpology.
*Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist and author (Culled from GlobalUpfront Newspapers)
