Muheez Olawale // Election Fever // Fiction

Muheez Olawale

 Election Fever 

Everyone knows that when my father’s pockets bulge with swooshing naira notes and his belly rounds with succulent meals, elections lurk in the corner. Apart from the fresh smile that pares the grime spread over his face, he rocks embroidered agbadas made out of imported Guinea materials. That is the only time his words hold enough weight to keep the townspeople from hurrying to their workplace and converge at the most popular beer parlour in the neighbourhood. Once grinning faces appear on walls along the streets imploring people with green ticks and fingerprints, my father is rich.

              As a child, I was confused as to what job my father really had. He left home very early each morning, and returned after bedtime. Even on Sundays. Some days, he never came home at all. My curiosity peaked and, like every child, I pleaded to accompany him to his workplace during the holidays, but he refused. My mother later disclosed that my father was a transport worker. I was confused at first, but as I grew above the clouds, I understood.

            My father was an agbero. He was the total embodiment of what every parent cites as the result of disobedience to their children. In my third year in primary school, a teacher once  gave us an assignment to write a composition on our parents. It required including their occupations. I couldn’t add agbero. Its closest translations in English were ‘tout’ and ‘thug’. It was synonymous to calling my father a criminal. So I left the space for the occupation blank. The teacher got curious and questioned me. While I struggled for words, a classmate that lived on the same street with me pouted, “his father is an agbero.”

The teacher rolled his eyes at me, expecting me to deny. Instead, I bowed my head and interred my face in my palms. The teacher tried to comfort me, but he could never prevent me from the catena of catastrophes that collided with me afterwards. Every fight I entered in retaliation of the taunts was an influence of my violent father. Once, I stayed up till midnight when my father returned home. I flumped on my knees and held his legs, pleading that he quit his job. He pulled me up and embraced me. He patted my head, and moaned my lack of understanding. My deluge of tears soaking his green and white uniform shirt never softened his heart. He promised to quit when it was time.

       The time eventually came eight years ago when my father got his break into politics. He had no official post, but it was better than agbero. His job was to campaign on behalf of the political party at the grassroots level. Father took his job religiously. In his first year which also coincided with the election year, he succeeded in securing about two thousands electorates, some of who had never voted in their lives. He made me vote although I was just seventeen, awaiting my JAMB results to apply for university. He went from door to door, stall to stall, preaching the importance of having a voice in the largest decision-making of the country. As a true son of the soil, the townspeople had more reasons to believe him. Plus, they believed he led a better life now that he had quit running after buses to sell illegal tickets on the expressway.

          Now that I’ve graduated out of the university, I perfectly understand my father. I saw why he had dropped his Second Class Lower B.A. in History and International Relations to become an agbero.

I   have just graduated with a Second Class Upper in Political Science, and the only prospects of employment I have are the secondary schools offering me chicken feed to teach recalcitrant teenagers round the clock. When father reminisces how he walked from firm to firm, his soles flapping against his callused feet, I spill the multitude of unreplied mails I’ve sent and the few ones that got responses with ‘unfortunately’ beginning the second paragraph. When the interviewer asks me ‘you’re from who?’, I shake my head and bemoan my loss. I am a nobody. My father is a nobody.

         Unlike the books, the streets pay. Daily. Connections thrive here too. Father sacrificed his life, and dived into the gritty politics to secure the future of his children. He had it all mapped out. If he could work diligently with the agbero union, he could attract the attention of the higher ups and easily rise through the ranks. Then he would present his credentials and plead for a political post. He would have proven enough loyalty, and the higher-ups would have no reason not to grant his request.

         Father’s plan has been falling into place all this while. Time only is his antagonist. Strongly aided by the politicians with unending promises of later. After wasting twelve years as an agbero, he finally earns his spot in the political party eight years ago. Ever since his triumph at the first election, he’s been fed with promises of promotion to state level politics where the governor himself will find him a spot in a ministry. But that governor is presently outgoing having completed two tenures, and the promise has segued into “just get our party candidate to win again, and we ourselves will put you there.”

Father has resigned to the possible fate of never rising above his post as a grassroots officer for the political party.

He wasn’t getting younger, so his chances of getting promoted diminish daily. Moreover, the party godfathers shall never toss a good apple out of the basket when there is no replacement. Father has scoured the neighbourhood, and he has found no one as heavily invested in politics as himself. The townspeople have grown to trust him even though he spells them the same promises every election year, just like the godfathers do to him. Stable electricity. Almost-free housing. Free education. Impregnable security.

      

     The only thing that changes every election year is the number of trucks that deliver relief packages at the town centre. They get larger each year. Father’s strategic planning ensures they are parked right at the mouth of the electoral commission’s registration centre, so persons without a voter’s card would quickly register for one and get a package. Sometimes, I wonder if the townspeople ever notice the PALLIATIVES inscribed boldly on the packages, if they know they earn the right to these packages and do not have to feel indebted to the potbellied politicians that send them.

        I am however in no place to educate the townspeople. My success hinges on my father’s. He has submitted my name repeatedly to the party godfathers. He has even taken me along to some of the party meetings. Some of them asked me to send my résumé to their official email, and they would have a look at it. Some of them promised to contact me once a vacancy opens up at their place. I am yet to get a reply, and I know for sure that nothing goes for nothing. If my father wants me to be successful, then the party has to be successful too. The party godfathers’ investment mustn’t go to waste.

    

When the Baale of the town begins to exercise his power as the village head to support the opposition party, my father begins to hatch stratagems. The Baale openly declares his endorsement for the opposition party, labelling with everyone who thinks otherwise as an agent of destruction. He forgoes the memories of himself limping to the voting booth years ago, setting an example for the townspeople by voting for my father’s party.

        While money heightens the Baale’s amnesia, it clears my father’s memory. He contacts the party leaders and lays the issue bare before them. They load his pockets with enough to exterminate the roadblocks. My father resorts to more traditional ways of winning an election. He returns to his agbero gang on the streets, and he pleads with them to help do what he’d done with them a decade. He pays them handsomely, and they pledge their loyalty. The gang breaks into the streets, rips off the posters of the opposition and replaces it with that of their aspirants. They find those campaigning for the opposition and scare them off the streets with beating.

         The opposition does not sit still like ducks. They flood the streets, the Baale leading them, and they accuse my father’s party of being a conglomerate of thugs who resort to violence to win elections. My father gives no response. He alternates his nights to visit the houses of his staunch supporters at night, dines with them, and grounds their mind. He urges them to spread the gospel. Have they not seen the progress the state has undergone during the past eight years under his party? Didn’t the change reach their doorsteps here in the town? Their eroded dirt road that cuts through the town and runs into the expressway has been paved into a smoother mud road. If they vote the opposition, this current party will have no way to tar the road, and the town will continue to battle with the dusty road for years to come.

Have they not received several packages of money and foodstuffs from this party in power? Didn’t this party draw the town into the political limelight? It would be betrayal if the townspeople turn their backs on the party at this moment of want.

       As silvery as his tongue is, my father knows the election does not rely on the power of persuasion. He extends the recruitment of the agberos against the election day. On the morning of the election, he gets counterfeit ballot boxes and papers from the party leaders. He gets a group of persons, some of them teenagers, locked up in a house on the outskirts of the town. They thumbprint ballot papers relentlessly in the stuffy room till all day. To avoid suspicion, they thumbprint for the opposition parties in quarters favourable to them as predicted by the analyses from the state-level.

        When the electoral officers arrive with more soldiers than expected, my father fears stealing the ballot boxes at the end of the day will be near-impossible. He contacts the party leaders immediately. They reassure him that the Officer Commanding has been settled.

              My father has kept me a stone’s throw from the election tussle. He fears the election might explode into a violent affair unlike the previous years. So he sends my mother and my younger siblings to our maternal village. I am the only relative here with him. Although I fear for him, I cognise the fact that he has to do what he must. At least one of us must get a stable, gainful employment. I am tired of eating good food only when the political scene is agog with election racketeering. My younger years are ridiculed with questions anytime I wear a new cloth or eat a good meal. I can’t wait to put that life behind me.

My father swings his gang into action around 7p.m. when the electoral officers are preparing to return to the headquarters. The gang lies doggo in a dark patch of the bush on the way out of the village. When the van of the electoral officers rumble into sight, heralded by a pickup truck full of soldiers, the gang burst out of hiding and shoot into the air. The Officer Commanding somehow forgets his pledge to my father’s party. He asks his men to return fire.

               Bullets cut sparks in the dark night. Groans and shouts rent the air. Fifteen minutes later, two members of my father’s gang are on their backs. Two more are captured by the soldiers who also lost three men. The surviving gang members both return to my father with accusations of lying to them. My father tries to explain, but they won’t listen. They beat him up instead. I try to fight them off, but I end up sustaining injuries. They are seconds away from slashing my father’s throat in retaliation of their lost comrades when the soldiers zoom their pickup trucks into our hideout on the outskirts of the city. They round up all of us.

                              We spend two harrowing nights at the army barracks before the soldiers release, and hand us our belongings early the following morning. The first call my father makes is to one of his godfathers. The party won the election. The godfather congratulates my father, and asks him to be present at the next party meeting where they celebrate the win. My father and I bounce home in ecstasy. The wounds from the boots and whips of the soldiers are worth it. Our life would change for the best. We meet mild celebrations as we walk through the town, but nobody curses us for attempting to steal ballot boxes.

                      In the evening, my father and I hit the serene streets of the capital at the house of the foremost party leader. My father, draped in his flowing agbada, recounts his contribution to the landslide victory as well as the nights he spent in the guardroom. He makes sure to introduce me to everyone he accosts, and the men in similarly flowing agbada strokes their beard and nods approvingly in my direction. Perhaps, I will get a chance.

               My father finally gets a chance to meet Baba Isale, the foremost party leader an hour after midnight. He introduces me, and the man eyes me with an unrevealing countenance glued to his face. Baba Isale thanks my father for his consistent and brave inputs to the party. When my father reminds Baba Isale of his decade-long request, Baba Isale rambles about my father’s unimpressive academic background. He coaxes my father to continue working in a spot where his value is recognised and appreciated. 

       He transfers some money to my father, and promises to contact him whenever his service is needed. Then my father pushes me forward, and makes a brief pitch of my academic background. Baba Isale nods, asks me to send my résumé again, and promises to find me an appropriate spot. Then he reminds my father again. Patience is a virtue.

       So my father waits.

                 He waits.

       Till election fever springs up in the next four years, and he is remembered.

•

Muheez Olawale is a Best of the Net nominee; winner, COAS Literary Competition 2024; winner, NASELS-LASU Essay Competition 2023; winner, LASUSU Essay Competition 2025; and winner, CEF Poetry Contest. He was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize 2025, and he was a runner-up at the A.S. Abugi National Prize for Short Story 2024. He has works published in Brittle Paper, PoetryColumnNND, The Kalahari, Afrocritik, and elsewhere. He currently studies English Language at the Lagos State University, Ojo. He tweets and grams @_muheezolawale.