I cast my ballot in the 2020 United States General Election last Friday, some four weeks ahead of the official Election Day, November 3.
It took me seven uneventful minutes. I lined up behind 12 other voters, all masked and socially distanced, as enjoined by a notice on the large glass door leading to the spacious hall of the Peoria County Election Commission Office in Peoria, Illinois.
As if on cue, all eyes turned to, and settled momentarily on the white woman standing directly behind me. She wore no face cover. It was as if she had come there to advertise, Trump-style, her indifference to, if not contempt for, the resurgent coronavirus disease, Covid-19. Something about her suggested powerfully that anyone who might be thinking of challenging her would find her not unwilling or unprepared to mix it.
Much to my relief, the line moved rapidly, almost like an automated operation, and soon it was my turn. A clerk asked for my date of birth. I tried rather clumsily to extract my driver’s licence from my cluttered wallet. Not necessary, she said. Then she asked for my home address. She cross- checked with the master register, and handed me a registration card to sign and date. Another clerk assigned me a computer-generated number and waved me to a vacant voting machine, one of the 12 in the hall.
By the time I was done, I looked at my watch. Only seven minutes had passed since I stepped into the hall. In that period, I had marked my choice for president and vice president, two U.S. senators for Illinois, one Congressman, several county offices, as well as some referendum issues, one of which proposes to make the wealthy bear a more equitable share of the tax burden.
Finally, I reviewed a printout of the entire transaction to be sue that my fingers had not raced ahead of my intentions. Best of all, I had put a safe distance between me and the woman who would not protect herself or those around her by the simple expedient of wearing a face cover.
I had been warned that I might spend the better part of a day on the line if I chose to vote in person, and that it would help to take a folding chair along in case the whole thing was too much for my superannuated legs. In the end, it was nothing like the obstacle race that voting in person has been turned into in the so-called “battleground states.”
Voting by mail has been a long-established practice, and Trump has done so time and again. But in this particular season, he has railed endlessly against it, claiming that it will promote fraud on a scale that only a few can even begin to imagine; that counting will take so long, that the results will not be known for weeks or months or forever.
But if he can foresee such discontinuities, why can’t he prevent them, especially since the election is taking place under his watch? Better to sow the seeds of confusion and do everything possible to undermine confidence in the outcome – unless he wins.
O man of little faith!
In case the Trump camp has never heard of the Faithful Messenger, Fani-Kayode, he was Minister of Aviation under President Olusegun Obasanjo, and later director-general of the failed re-election campaign of former President Goodluck Jonathan. As of now, he has had no fixed address or designation.
Not a few Nigerians were mightily relieved when, after three (four) unsolicited visitations, he abruptly terminated his self-assigned mission of inspecting public works projects in the PDP-controlled states, assessing their impact on the lives of the residents and evaluating the performance of the governors of the states he had honoured with his attention.
What the public remembers most about those visitations was his indignant refusal, laced with scorn and abuse, to answer the simple question: Who is bankrolling the junkets, with all the dining and the wining and the wenching?
Some five weeks later, he has embraced a divine mission: To commend Donald Trump to the world ahead of the November 3 poll as the Elect of God Almighty and his divine instrument for delivering humankind from the darkness that Bill Clinton and Barak Obama and their infernal collaborators and their undiscerning acolytes had clamped on it.
Better to hear FFK’s testimony in his own words concerning the Anointed Candidate: as reported on Facebook:
“The mainstream media can scandalise and demonise him all they like and they can even get some of his friends, associates, relatives and colleagues to blacklist, fabricate stories and lie about him just to destroy his credibility and stop him but it makes no difference.”
“All of them put together coupled with all the forces of hell and their master Satan cannot stop a man who has been anointed and chosen by the Living GOD to lead a nation and the free world. It is what God purposes that matters and nothing else.”
You hear that, CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, The Washington Post, Fake News, The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Black Lives Matter, Al Sharpton, Michael Moore, Mike Bloomberg, and fellow-travelers. You hear that?
“Do you think that it is by accident that Trump has overcome every obstacle that has been placed in his way by the Dems over the last four 4 years?
“Do you think it is by accident that he emerged, against all odds, as the Republican Party candidate in 2016 even though all former Republican presidents and most leading Republicans were against him?
“Do you think that it was by accident that he kept bouncing back in business over the years even though he was declared bankrupt several times and had numerous failures?
“Do you think that it was by accident that throughout his life when he had financial problems the banks kept bailing him out and giving him another chance and his friends kept supporting him?
Ponder those questions, all ye NeverTrumpers. Search your wicked souls. And ye gullible Nigerians, probably the most gullible creatures on God’s earth, consider this:
“Do you think that it was by accident that (Trump) spoke out more than any other American President in history, living or dead, about the killing and persecution of Christians all over the world and particularly in nations like Nigeria?”
“God uses whom He deems fit to restore and to effect His purpose and it ends there. If you have a problem with His choices then blame Him and not the object of His love or the person He chooses.”
Ask them Faithful Messenger, ask the NeverTrumpers slowly and deliberately: Have they forgotten, that Obama paved the way for Satan’s New World Order, introduced the most ungodly and anti-Christian practices in the history of America and sought to legitimise them in the name of ‘yes we can’, made same-sex marriage commendable and even admirable, and approved abortions in the millions.
Didn’t the self-same Obama not also declare America a non-Christian nation, denigrate the Church, mock the scriptures, desecrate Christian values, change the name of Christmas to “holy day” and ban Christmas from the White House and impose those demonic values and anti-Christ philosophies to much of the rest of the world?
Hear it loud and clear, then, from the Faithful Messenger: Trump will win the presidential election in November, after which he will usher in a great era of restoration of prosperity, decency, virtue and good old-fashioned Christian values in America.
And in the fullness of time, the Lord will raise a Trump-like figure for Nigeria, too, and all things will be made beautiful.
So, despair not, fellow Nigerians. Help is on the way.
•Written By Femi Fani-Kayode
