So, as my country celebrates its 59th birthday, would it be appropriate for me to write a eulogy for its seemingly inevitable death? Perhaps some choice words as a send-off to the erstwhile giant of Africa.
Nigeria is dead!
Let those words sink in. Two hundred million people are without regular and steady power. No treated water. No roads. Hunger is prevalent. Food is expensive. Salaries are not being paid as at due or not paid at all.
Ritual killings for money, unemployment, poverty, delayed and denied justice, corruption, kidnapping, abduction, armed robbery, failed education system, failed healthcare system, insecurity, hopelessness, and fear of tomorrow, and many more are the hallmarks of Nigeria at 59. This is where I grew up. This is where my family lives. This is my home.
And my Nigeria is dead!. I have been struggling to come up with the right words to express my feelings and my thoughts on the 59th anniversary of Nigeria's independence. The social media has provided me with a space to write my remarks, observations, and more often than not, rant about the hopelessness of the Nigerian situation.
I shared my anxieties. I cried in silent sobs at the pictures and the news from Nigeria that compete for sympathy and sadness. Absolute silence from the plunderers, wreckers, and the defiant rogue ruling class has become more and more unbearable for our people. As expected, despair began to unite Nigerians as we comforted each other.
Thinking of Nigeria at 59, nothing came except tears. I'm crying as I write this. How can I put into words how it feels to be completely helpless as the country as I have always loved slowly turns into Hell? How can one fully express in words that could convey, in any way, the overwhelming sense of constant pain, of horrible uncertainty, the fear of tomorrow, and the fury of wasted lives through an epidemic of manufactured evils? How can I explain to people and to the world at large that my Nigeria, my heart and soul, is dead?
The fear of death is an eternal companion in these evil times in the unlivable nation. So, as my country celebrates its 59th birthday, would it be appropriate for me to write a eulogy for its seemingly inevitable death? Perhaps some choice words as a send-off to the erstwhile giant of Africa.
As the Emperor Buhari administration struggles to figure out the way forward out of the thicket of unfulfilled promises and dashed hopes, could I dare hope for a stay in its execution? Or is this just another delay in Nigeria's preordained death? Because of the morally bankrupt and kleptomaniac legislators who continue to strangle Nigeria and choke its citizens, the army of the poor are left to fend for themselves.
Nigeria is in a perpetual state of anomie that thrives on crises precisely because the beneficiaries – the ruling class – are the ones who maintain and profit from illusion and deception.
It's no secret that a nation can choose to either exalt itself to her people, thereby becoming an object of national pride or hide by dulling the citizen's senses and intelligence, thus negating the primary purpose of a nation. So far, the body of evidence shows Nigeria pursued the second path.
The ruling native tyrants have always taken advantage of our profoundly ignorant, naive, and unsuspecting people fueled by their systemic blinding allegiance to the same people that impoverished them.
It's sad to note that after 59 years, 200 million Nigerians have been conditioned by their schools, churches, and political parties to accept oppression as natural law. No wonder, Nigerians have become easy prey to punishment and suffering for engineered transgressions of the ruling elite.
At 59, Nigeria's infrastructure and basic amenities are taken for granted have been crippled, social structure dismantled, and family uprooted by decades of neglect and abandonment by the product of an idled and corrupt political class that blindly rapes our people. These quisling parasites coasted to power via election fraud – vote-buying, rigging, and other election malpractices.
Fifty-nine years of independence has laid bare the reality of a rotten and corrupt ruling class that never puts our people first. The paralysis and complete disregard for good governance pushed our civilization back to the stone age. This crass stupidity permeates all through the different levels of government. With ravaged infrastructure, plundered and stunted economy, decimated citizens, hope against hope, yet, cruelly some people still nurse hope for a lost nation.
At 59, Nigeria is a shining example of a government of feckless inaction, fetid bureaucracy, and unfettered bullshit pilot by Emperor Buhari who has wiped out all vestiges of any symbol of democracy and rule of law. Nigeria is dead. Yes! I mean dead! It's a victim of undeserved vindictiveness of agreed, corrupt, stupid, foolish, and callous political class. As Nigeria begins her 59th year, Nigerians should come together and fight the emperor to finish. This is supposed to be a democracy. Even the other brainless Fulani military despot Abacha was more generous than democratically elected Emperor Buhari.
Nigerians are dying. But if they survive this and rise once again, they may do so inoculated from the diseased inertia, subservience, cowardice, fear, to the enemy ruling class and sheepish loyalty to a wicked and lifeless emperor that have crushed their collective spirit for 59 years.
Emperor Buhari deserves our congratulations for making 59th independence anniversary the last one for Nigeria as one nation.
Happy Independence? Nah...