''Yampion People" By Adesina Ogunlana

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You've probably have heard this joke – a south westerner was at the newsstands and requested for “a copy of the “Champion” news paper. Said the amala-abula man to the vendor – “give me sampion”
It was almost instantaneous, the guffaw that came from a bystander who after recovering from a hearty stretch of laughter said “see this man o, na yampion you dey call “sampion"
According to a newspaper report an organization named “ANTI BABANGIDA COALITION" (ABC) declared that it would mount an insurgency should General Ibrahim Babangida become the next president of the country.
I was aghast at this news. The ABC people were said to be a group of “activists” earnestly contending for democracy. If the news item was correct, then the ABC would be a very strange type of apostles of democracy.
The most elementary of lessons in democracy is that it is a “game of numbers” – the Candidate with the greatest number of popular support have the office be he a killer, drunkard, treasury looter, drug dealer, bomb thrower or even bum pumper. The whole idea is to give effect to the ‘Ori-Ojori’ political myth of the EQUALITY of men, which is the kernel of DEMOCRACY and its famous character of “Majority carries the day”
Every political philosophy has decision makers – in theocracy, God, in gerontocracy, the elders, in autocracy, the junta, in aristocracy, the elite, in monarchism, royalty, in plutocracy, money bags, in democracy, the people.
And, that is why Democracy is so simply and beautifully described as “government of the people, by the people and for the people, but in reality it is the government of the people, by the will of the majority of the people, for the people.
It is therefore a compulsion for a democrat that the wishes of the people is considered and treated as sacrosanct.
Of course, the views of the people are not always sound and the choice of the majority is not always good but a democrat abides by it, for the majority, by its sheer superiority of numbers is deemed to appreciate the point in question better than the minority.
So when the ABC folks say that they would ‘take to the bush’ and fight to the end, should Babangida emerge President, they betray either an ignorance of the understanding of the essential Democracy or worse, they expose the fact that they themselves are tyrants and no democrats.
It could have been a different matter had they premised their threatened insurgency on the event of Babangida’s FRAUDULENT emergence as the next president of Nigeria. In the 1998 build-up to the 1999 General Elections, General Theophilus Danjuma scandalised many people when he vowed to go on self-exile should his choice for the nation’s presidency Olusegun “Umoru are you dead?” Obasanjo lose the elections.
Note that Danjuma’s position effectively is that “I will remove myself from the scene if my candidate fails and not that I will forcefully change the scene to suit my will and preference”. Yet many people, including elements of the ABC sharply criticized Danjuma. But the ABC people have done much worse now. Unlike Danjuma, their position is that if Babangida should be the popular choice they will fight that choice. That is not only wrong, it is abominable. ‘Yampion’ is a worse pronunciation of ‘Champion’ than ‘Sampion.’