Celebrities and Politics

The general elections have just been concluded; it came with a lot of drama, talks, actions, and dragging.

Taking the front stage as one of the most dragged issues is the matter of celebrities and their candidate choices. A lot of celebrities came out to campaign for their choice candidate and some were dragged because of the candidates they supported.

Now the question is, do celebrities not also have the right to support their chosen candidate or campaign for the party of their choice?

Of course, they do have the right to vote for whoever they want and campaign for their choice of candidates. They are first Nigerians before becoming what we know them as today; they also have civic duties to perform.

A popular female actress was dragged seriously for her choice among the candidates. According to her post on the popular social media platform – Instagram, she said she was privileged to have met one of the presidential candidates. In the post was a picture of her with the candidate and she captioned it with the following words that say; “For the first time, I met the incoming president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and he shared some of his ideas, visions, and strategies to solve the challenges before us as a nation. Listening to him indeed renewed and affirmed why he is my choice. Jagaban is coming”

Of course, she is not wrong in picking the candidate of her choice, she had her reasons and she stated some in her public post but quite a number of Nigerians were not happy with her choice of words. How can you say incoming President when the presidential election is yet to take place?

Everyone has the right to select their preferred candidate but let us wait till the right time before making assertive statements. Based on the thoughts and sentiments of people, her fault was making an assertive statement of that sort when the elections had not even been held.

Another situation is where some celebrities were chosen as running mates for some candidates which came as a surprise to most Nigerians. Gone are the days when those involved in politics were fully politicians, now we have people in other career fields venturing into politics, which we have seen our entertainers/celebrities do. 

Warren Rudman said politics is too important to be left to politicians.

This is quite true; democracy is the government of the people, for the people, and by the people. What makes a government successful is the participation of every citizen in it, each and everyone playing their part and roles diligently.

We all must come out to play our part as Nigerians but we should never be angry because some other people do not want what we want.

UI elections are coming up and it is going to be interesting. We have a lot of candidates to pick from and this means varying opinions and choices. But despite these, value your relationship with people. 

Elections will always come and go, but if you destroy your relationships with people over candidate choices, what would you have after the elections?