MISERY, THE ALIENATED CLASS AND THE NIGERIAN MONIED DEMOCRACY

Abstract

The masses can be controlled if they are made to cry, laugh, be angry or depressed”. The social instrumentation of the elite to guile the masses for power control has been interpreted by several hundred elitist theorists. Whilst most have looked at the masses as an independent variable that conditions the power elite strategies, the paper argues that the masses is essentially a dependent variable that falls prey of elite construction and constriction. This is made possible as the masses is constructed as an identity that is crushed and ripped, alienated from basic socio-political access, put in its place to be spoon-fed by the supposed democratic leaders who are demagogues. The paradigmatic shift in voters’ patronage in Nigeria politics after the introduction of the Smart Card Reader in 2015 that made ballot snatching almost totally non useful, heralded material inducement such as outright vote buying to secure popularity in elections. Using Marx alienation theory as a theoretical tool, the paper then argues that power elite would rather prefer to keep the masses in abject poverty, storing up their common wealth for a fragment of it to be sprinkled during elections, since that is the only way popular legitimacy can be secured. So the paper concludes that the masses are not destined to be impoverished ab initio, the elite tactically raped their collective consciousness to free citizenship and as such became an identity. The misery class is constructed, not born.