A farmer was said to be clearing weeds on a stubborn patch of his land when a small plane full of politicians fell out of the sky and crashed into his farm. The impact tore open the earth and left a crater so wide and raw. Before the smoke had fully settled, the farmer reportedly turned to his assistant and ordered that the passengers be buried inside the same hole the aircraft had carved. By the time the police arrived, the work was done, and the farmer was in handcuffs, charged with burying people who might have still been alive. In court, he made a confession. Yes, he said, while they were pushing some of them into the crater, a few were shouting that they were still alive. But knowing who our politicians are, he added, he could not trust what they said. This joke may have sound not just cruel but revealing as well. Yet, it survives, because it captures an open knowledge too many people are aware of. In a land so bruised by deception, even a cry from the edge of death by a politician can sound suspiciously like campaign bombasts.
This parable, dark as it is, opens the gate to a deeper sorrow in our politics. When the powerful quarrels, and it is the ordinary who pays in blood. When the powerful reconciles it is still the ordinary who pays in grief. In Kano, during the governorship struggle of 2023, men were pushed into partisan fury as though they were defending eternal truths. Some died backing Abba because of Kwankwaso. Others died backing Gawuna because of Ganduje. They entered that storm believing they were standing for something solid, something fixed, something that would outlast the dust of election season. Yet politics in the hands of too many of our grandees is rarely a granite. It is clay warmed by convenience. It bends with interest. It shifts with opportunity. So today, those once presented as irreconcilable opposites may discover new reasons to smile across the same table, while those who died in the old hostility remain unavailable for realignment. The politician moves. The grave does not.
That is the first tragedy. The second is more humiliating. The follower is taught to treat politics like faith, while the politician treats it like transport. The crowd is trained for intensity. The leader reserves for himself flexibility. The poor man is told that loyalty must be total, permanent, fierce and fiery. The political master knows that loyalty, in practical politics, is often temporary, tactical and negotiable. So one man stores rage in his memory, while the other stores options in his pocket like spare currency. One is prepared to bleed for the quarrel. The other retains the right to revise it.
If Bentham were to stand before this scene, he would ask the question that strips politics of pretence. What good came of it, and to whom. Not the noise. Not the chants. Not the excitement that swells the head for a moment. The real good. Who benefited. Who suffered. The answer is painfully plain. The widow did not gain. The orphan did not gain. The mother burying her son did not gain. The young men now lying deep under did not gain. The gain traveled upward. The pain spread outward. Access, influence, leverage and bargaining power settled with the few. Mourning, confusion and broken futures settled among the many. This is not the greatest good for the greatest number. It is the greatest convenience for the smallest circle.
John Stuart Mill would sharpen the matter in another way. He would remind us that not every excitement deserves the dignity of being called a worth dying cause. There is a low and feverish pleasure in belonging to a clique, in chanting until thought collapses, in feeling important because one is attached to a powerful man. It can resemble purpose. It can masquerade as dignity. But it is often only borrowed importance. There is, by contrast, a higher good. It lives in justice, law, education, public reason, decent institutions and the security of human life. The tragedy of our political culture is that many are trained to pursue the lower thrill while neglecting the higher good. They are offered heat in place of light. Motion in place of movement. Noise in place of knowledge. They are taught how to belong, but not how to be productive.
The scale of our cluelessness, insensitivity and impunity can be seen not only in campaign violence, but in the yearly pageantry of the budget. Colossal sums are allocated for power, for security, and for the elementary obligations of the social contract. Yet electricity still behaves like gossip, always circulating, rarely arriving. Security remains a sermon recited over recurring fear. Figures are huge. Delivery is thin. Promises arrive in trailers. Results come in sachets. On paper, the state performs miracles. In lived experience, it delivers rationed scarcity. Excuse has become our most stable public infrastructure. And this is why being a rationalist first before being a devotionist is not a luxury. It is a civic duty. When a society keeps failing in the very sectors to which it keeps assigning humongous resources, devotion without scrutiny ceases to be patriotic and becomes complicity. The citizen who refuses to ask questions in the name of faithfulness is not defending the public realm. He is helping failure wear ceremonial robes.
At this point, one must pause and define terms carefully, because words like devotion and reason are too important to be left floating in the air. By a devotionist, I do mean a person of faith, sincerity or steadfast moral commitment in the honorable sense. Every noble cause requires conviction. Every serious struggle requires the capacity to endure. But devotion becomes dangerous when attachment overwhelms examination, when affection outruns judgment, when loyalty arrives before truth has even entered the room. The unhealthy devotionist begins not by asking whether a claim is true, whether a policy is just, whether a politician’s conduct serves the common good, or whether an institution actually works. He begins with attachment and then recruits arguments afterward. His heart settles the matter before his mind has been allowed to reflect. What follows is not conviction in the noble sense. It is often emotional captivity disguised as virtue.
By a rationalist, I do not mean a dry skeptic, a loveless cynic or a man emptied of warmth. I mean one who insists that belief, loyalty and action must pass through the tribunal of reason. A rationalist asks for coherence, evidence, consequences and moral consistency. He tests slogans against conduct, promises against performance, and personalities against principles. He does not reject devotion. He fine tunes it. He understands that emotion without thought is easily manipulated, and that conviction without reflection can become a carriage for injustice. Rationality in this sense is not the enemy of passion. It is passion educated by truth.
This distinction matters profoundly in politics and beyond politics. Because the ruling class thrives where devotion outruns reason. Once followers are trained to follow before they evaluate, to defend before they investigate, and to obey before they understand, power becomes insulated from accountability. In politics and beyond politics a rational citizen may admire a personality, support an endevour and commit himself deeply to a cause. But he does so with open eyes. He knows that character must weigh more than charisma, and that public loyalty must remain answerable to public good. The devotionist asks, who is right. The rationalist asks, what is right. One begins with allegiance and may never arrive at the truth. The other begins with truth and only then grants allegiance.
In that sense, the healthiest society is not one without devotion. It is one in which devotion is subordinate to reason, ethics and justice. When reason leads, devotion becomes disciplined courage. It becomes principled commitment. It becomes the strength to persevere without surrendering one’s mind. But when reason sleeps, devotion decays into faction, fanaticism and manipulation. It becomes a ladder by which the powerful and the empowered fool alike climb over the backs of the sincere.
That is why reason must come before devotion. Not because devotion is unworthy, but because devotion without reason is easily kidnapped by forever wannabees. The rational mind asks what is working, what is broken, who benefits, who pays, and why the same failures keep returning with fresh slogans and new banners. The rational mind does not kneel merely because the speaker is charismatic or the crowd is large. It asks for evidence, not excitement. It examines attitude and behavior, not only intentions. It weighs fruit, not merely foliage. The devotionist who begins without reason may end up loving a banners more than justice, a slogan more than truth, a politician more than the people in whose name politics is supposed to exist. But when reason leads, devotion becomes majestic. Then loyalty belongs not to men, but to principles. Not to factions, but to the common good.
Kant would bring a sterner discipline still. He would remind us that a human being is an end in himself, never merely a means, a tool or an instrument. Yet this is exactly what violent partisanship does to the ordinary citizen. It turns him into an instrument. An instrument of intimidation. An instrument of spectacle. An instrument of negotiation. An instrument for proving that the don still has street muscle to deploy. His loyalty is praised while useful and forgotten once stale or spent. He is flattered into danger, then abandoned to grief. Pure reason rejects this arrangement because it asks whether the principle behind it could ever be made a universal moral law. Can we honestly will a world in which ambitious men may inflame their followers into mortal hostility, while preserving for themselves the freedom to embrace yesterday’s enemy once interest changes direction. No morally serious mind can affirm such a principle. It is not ethics. It is opportunism dressed in formal clothing.
Politics then wounds more than bodies. It wounds meaning itself. It teaches the poor to spend their deepest emotions in the wrong market. They carry anger that does not feed their children, loyalty that does not heal their sick, passion that does not educate their young. The deepest tragedy is not only that some died. It is that they died inside a borrowed conflict of interest. They were told they were defending something permanent, only for time to reveal that for some of the chief actors the quarrel was negotiable from the start. One man’s eternal loyalty becomes another man’s seasonal strategy.
This is where sober reflection must overtake whimsical intoxication. When the rally ends, what remains. When the convoy passes and the dust returns to the road, what remains. When the microphones fall silent and the thugs zoom off, what remains. The grave remains. The widow remains. The orphan remains. The fractured friendship remains. The neighborhood mistrust remains. But the politician moves on. He explains. He adjusts. He realigns. He decorates convenience with rhetoric and hopes the public will mistake political prostitution for statesmanship. This is one of the oldest conjuring tricks in politics. Opportunism borrows the language of pragmatism. Betrayal rents the vocabulary of reconciliation. And the public, already exhausted, is asked to clap for the performance.
Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al Sadr helps us see the deeper layer beneath this spectacle. In *Our Philosophy*, he makes clear that no social order can remain sound when built on greed, force and self interest alone. Beneath every political arrangement lies an idea of the human being, of truth, and of the purpose of collective life. Once that moral foundation cracks, politics degenerates into a market where loyalty is traded, emotions are rented and human beings are spent like expendable currency. At that point the crisis is no longer merely electoral. It becomes philosophical.
In *Our Economy*, al Sadr insists that justice must regulate collective life, that wealth and power cannot be allowed to roam among the weak without moral discipline. That principle belongs not only in economics, but in politics. A political order that consumes the sons of the poor so that the well placed may improve their bargaining position is not merely inefficient. It is unjust in its essence. It violates the very purpose for which society exists.
And in the horizon opened by *Our Society*, the remedy becomes clearer. Society must be formed, not merely managed. Citizens must be educated, not merely mobilized. They must be taught to ask not merely who their man is, but what truth is being served, what justice is being built, and what public good is actually being protected. Once that moral and intellectual shift takes place, the poor become harder to herd, harder to rent, harder to bury for other people’s convenience.
So let the lesson be spoken plainly, though sorrowfully. Never place your blood at the feet of politicians. Give your strength to justice. Give your labor to truth. Give your voice to what genuinely lifts society. Defend your rights, yes. Defend your dignity, yes. But do not surrender your mind to men whose alliances are lighter than their rhetoric. Do not lend your life to quarrels whose sponsors may tomorrow rename betrayal as wisdom. The politician may defect. The slogan may mutate. The alliance may rearrange itself and call the rearrangement maturity. But the grave keeps a stricter record. Earth does not switch sides. It keeps the poor man exactly where politics left him.
That is why the living must learn to think before they are invited to die for somebody else’s convenience.
