BY the time you read these lines, I will be in Ilorin, ready to cast my vote in this year’s elections. I had deliberately registered in Ilorin, because it is the way that my state has been mal-administered since 2003, that has concerned me much more than practically everything else.

I voted in 2011 and came out disappointed, since the reigning hegemony was still able to steal the elections. Democracy can be pitiless, especially where a hegemonic control has been foisted on a society; and the control of the resources of the community is carefully manipulated to deepen the impoverishment of the mass of the people and the consequent exploitation of the dire circumstances of the people, to reinforce the hegemon.

Since 2003,Kwara state has been the honey pot of a single, pitiless hegemony. It is that insensitive, self-serving and poverty inducing, as well as humiliating hegemony, that I have always been opposed to. It is precisely the reason that I chose to register to vote in Ilorin. My single vote has a deeply symbolic position for me. I will use that single vote against the continuation of hegemony that perpetrates the underdevelopment of Kwara State. That rebellious cast of vote is to express myself as a liberated citizen who refuses to be enslaved by this arrogant hegemony and hegemon. Afterall, my forefathers provided the spiritual, intellectual and political leadership for the creation of the Ilorin Emirate.

I can NEVER forget these facts of history and that act of remembrance, is encompassed in the rejection of the political leadership and hegemony in Kwara today.

It is also significant, that as a Political Scientist and journalist, I can see through the deceptive inaccuracy of political sloganeering. The ruling party in Kwara mouths the slogan of change. But we have been under the same hegemonic control since 2003. So how can a tendency in power since 2003, and which desperately desires continuity of the same hegemony, now say it is committed to change?

This is a classic case of deceit. change in Kwara today, means continuity. I personally reject that form of change. Our eyes are locked so firmly on the presidential elections, and we seem to have forgotten that there are other positions up for grab in Kwara state, and in the Ilorin Emirate in particular (Kwara Central). So in tune with the statement that all politics is local,these positions are the Senate seat and the two House of Representatives seats, for Ilorin West/Asa and Ilorin East/Ilorin South.

Honestly, I think we do need change but not change that amounts to continuity of the same hegemony that holds Kwara, and especially our financial resources, in a suffocating bearhug. We cannot afford continuation of a leadership style constructed in the shape of permanent slave master, who determines the fate of millions of citizens of Kwara state.

The central kernel of this leadership is personal enrichment of the hegemon, his family and satraps on the one hand; and the immiseration of the mass of our people, their destitution and humiliating dependency on hands out from the hegemon, on the other. I am a descendant of the historic makers and liberators of this community, so my vote will be given to candidates who also reject a status quo which falsely describes itself as committed to change. MY single vote as a liberated citizen of this community will never be given out for the continuation of the enslavement, humiliation and pauperization of our people. Never!