You will swim in your own blood at this rate and pace. You will bathe in your own vomit, drench in your sweat, and breathe in your own fart. You will make life utterly dreading if you continue on this path. It is bad enough that it leads to perdition, but worse still, you will pull a whole lot of others into the ditch you are digging.
You will swim in your own blood at this rate and pace. You will bathe in your own vomit, drench in your sweat, and breathe in your own fart. You will make life utterly dreading if you continue on this path. It is bad enough that it leads to perdition, but worse still, you will pull a whole lot of others into the ditch you are digging.
You forget too quickly that happiness does not come from ‘things’, it comes from meaning. Someone once said that personal success devoid of meaningfulness and a steady commitment to social justice is a barren life, a trivial one. So you really think life is only about looking good and not doing good?
See the things that you are responsible for, yet you are not cognizant, perhaps of your deeds and misdeeds. You look the other way while countless mothers and babies die needless deaths, just because you think that your ‘own people’ are insulated from the traumas that are our own realities, shielded from the sorrows and hopelessness that we feel, the hopelessness that our churches capitalize on, and turn our desperation for hope into money spinners. I say it yet again, death is a common denominator, how long will you listen to the lies that are sitting pretty affixed in your faculties? How long will you fight your own shadows? Just how long will it take you to wake up from the nightmare you refuse to come to terms with? Just look all over our health institutions, does it not bother you that their condition hastens death rather than support life? Will you continue to be blindfolded to the truth and listen to the ones who will always tell you what you want to hear? Your stoic stance over the pains of your fellowmen who helplessly hope your sense of humanity and the empathy that comes into every mortal frame in the face of misfortune will be brought to bare but you keep disappointing them. Your own sense of empathy has vapourized, you have become very unfeeling. Yet! Our ‘mothers’ die, our babies perish even before they are born. In less than 3 weeks, I have personally lost would-be-nephew and niece, in the wake of the life sucking rather than the life aiding tools that you parade at our clinics and hospitals. You are lucky though, that you can ‘buy good health care’ but not good health, ask the Yarduas!
What should I appeal to? Surely not your humanness or the common bond you share with humanity. That will fail. Don’t be fooled, you know even with so much advancement in technology, no one can live forever, death and weather are common levelers, we will all die and the same sun shines on everyone, the rich and the poor alike. Does it not bother you that those who you rule, can sometimes use lantern to illuminate their path while in the operating theater in our tertiary health centers, and perhaps rely on the light that could come from their mobile phones, just to navigate. Do you think I am sounding overboard now? Ok!! You only need ask for proofs and I will reel them out like the movies.
You probably don’t know you have complicated our social order by your meanness, it might not have occurred to you that Ngozi that is 33yrs, Morenike that is almost 40yrs and not to forget Ekaete all of whom have been sleeping over at their pastors abode for a miracle to meet their dream husbands are actually seeking help in wrong places. I am not kidding here, this is beyond laughter, I am sure you will probably want to laugh this off, and say that we will soon accuse you of impregnating ‘our wives’. Indeed, you are partly responsible remotely and directly, overtly and covertly, I am not trying to be funny. Look at this with unbridled objectivity: Ade finishes school at age 25 and searches for job until he is in his 30s. He manages to save some money and he takes to ‘okada’ riding rather than joining other teeming miscreants parading our streets as area boys. He can barely support himself with the take home his ‘machine’ generates daily, and yet he is a grown ‘ass’ man who by every known standard of social indices shouldn’t find settling down a misnomer. Suggesting marriage to him even though he is 36yrs now, seems like a death sentence. In the long run, you have destroyed one of the many ‘hopefuls’ that could have married Ngozi, Morenike or Ekaete, and they end up as preys in the hands of ‘men of God’. Your activities make our already complex society even more perplexing, these days we the youth, (am I still one?) are coming to terms with the almost-out-of-fashion state of 419 and drug peddling. We have become more ingenious at making it quick, and gingering our ‘swagger’. We all now want to be on Big Brother, we all want to be on Star Quest, and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. We all want to be musicians that can’t play instruments, and artists that have no talents. We all want to ride on the tide of fame and surf on the crest of success. You are successfully making schooling quite old fashion, I have also just recently got my own FLV studio software, maybe I will make one or two beats as a producer and sell to David Gueta, Lady Gaga and Timberland, as I don’t personally like competing with locals- so that I will ‘hit’ it too, ‘sharp and fast’! Lest I forget, I wouldn’t sell my well crafted beats that are tied together with strings, drums and percussions to Kanye West, because I hate competition, I wouldn’t like to compete with Dbanj. Seriously? Are you still in doubt at how you have complicated our lives?
Doesn’t it really bother you? That Akporhonor now has a degree but doesn’t even know how to ‘write’ his name properly let alone spelling your own name right, and the fact that Bala, despite having completed his Secondary school education can’t even distinguish how to use the verbs, ‘does, do, don’t and did’. Will it ever trouble you that the ranking of African universities (not world rankings), makes most of our universities ‘entitities-non-grata’ on such a crucial list that accesses the quality of education on the continent? That is painful enough, but what about that 9 year old, Lasumbo, on Carter bridge in the midst of traffic, that toddler looking girl combing the highly populated streets of Idumota with a balanced tray full of oranges on a Monday morning? Why have you mortgaged their future and placed the onus on their parents? Why wouldn’t you just own up to the fact that you helped in sending her to the streets because of your greed. Shouldn’t she just be in school? Your conscience must be hardened, I wonder how you sleep at night, does blood flow in your veins? How could you steal us blind? Why would you pluck out our eyes and still try to convince us we were born blind? The fact that there is a speck in our eyes is bad enough, but beckoning on you to blow it out shouldn’t warrant putting chilli in your mouth while you attempt to ‘help’, ok? So you think it is ok that you steal, after all it is our ‘commonwealth’ and nobody’s wealth. Why do you think it is ok? How could you plunder the resources of so many so dastardly and without conscience? If you have to waste our own lives, but please not these little ones. Yes these little ones, those that are helpless and have no control over the opportunities of the future - did I just say opportunities? Whatever seemed like opportunities were killed, buried and incinerated long before they were born. Why be so callous to their future because of your willful heart of wickedness. The ones you haven’t killed receive half baked education from our educational system while your friends and cronies send their kids to schools whose fees are comparable to the cost of upgrading the public schools. Your friends actually pay that much to enroll their own kids in these schools most of which cost outrageous amounts. Amounts that would take more than all the money some of our parents would probably make throughout their working lives just to send ONE of your own kids to school through primary education. Haba! I think it is high time we passed a bill making it a criminal offence for public office holders to send their kids to private schools. Don’t you think so?
Why beg me to make more sacrifices for this our ‘murder land’, where dreams die and people perish. Seriously! Why do you keep lying to us, that you subsidize everything for us so that we could actually make ends meet economically with the peanuts that can’t even feed Lucky - my friend’s puppy. Please! What subsidies? Why do you and your friends keep using this as an excuse that you are expending trillions in subsidies? Who gets these subsidies? I am no economist, but how long would you hoodwink us? I challenge you to publish what subsidies that you give and who-gets-what and to what intent and purpose do they make life better for my aunty in the village or my siblings in the heart of Lagos. What manner of leader are you? Please stop these lies, I repeat I am no economist, but tell me, what economic theory supports a man who lives in the desert and crosses oceans just to buy sand? Tell me how can you keep lying that despite our having oil, that it is ok for us to keep importing gasoline, diesel and kerosene because we just can’t refine petroleum. How can we spend 630billion naira on food import in one year (2010), and we have the capability to feed ourselves and even to export to the horn of Africa currently being ravaged by drought, famine and diseases. Would you not wait, pause for a moment. Doesn’t it bother you that Boko Haram (your brainchild) that you so hate was created by your greed, that the kidnappers that you so detest with passion were borne out of your ingenuity to steal, that you perfected the machinations that celebrate treachery, nepotism, avarice, corruption rather than hardwork and the dignity associated with it.
Your brand of politics baffles me, you claim you represent me and yet just a handful of you, a few thousands live on what millions could live on, all in the name of legislating. Your politics stinks and you can’t even perceive it, and please don’t tell me you need a hundred years to perfect our democracy. You do not have that much luxury in time, because we might tow the route of the Sudanese, but even after that it will be disastrous in our own case, because we are not Sudan, and we have a complexity, in polity, that can be likened to nothing known in the world in terms of demography and history. How can you accuse me of being negative and pessimistic? You haven’t changed course from what is plaguing us, in the few steps you have taken you have shown how you will run us for the next 4 years. I tried psyching myself up to have high hopes when you were elected. Yet whatever hope I had died when I saw your first few moves in power. You don’t love this country more than I do, how could you call me a pessimist?
While writing this last paragraph, I took a break to watch a friend`s video, that is now almost viral on Facebook. It was a young man, who was mobbed for stealing a necklace. He was soaked in his own blood and sweat, weakened by the blows, clubs, kicks that had been meted on him by Lagosians because he ‘stole’. The clip was so graphic, I was tempted to write my friend who shared it to please remove such a video. As I watched, I was hoping that even as they kicked and hauled all manner of things at him that in the long run he would be let off, but alas, this video had no ‘hollywood-make-believe’ effects. I saw how a car tyre was forcibly downed his neck but failed. He made attempt to run after someone poured gasoline on him. Just a spark and he was in flames, he ran yet again, until he was caught up with. He was then roasted while more planks were hauled over him to incinerate him the more. He died in the most barbaric, gruesome and heart rendering manner. I watched him wriggled, struggled, until he became numb. All for stealing a necklace!! My eyes were laced with tears, and I felt so much pity not so much for the man but for our society, what manner of justice, yet a man is a minister and he steals us blind and the Sultan pleads his cause to be ‘forgiven’, and the consequence of his indiscretions, is to be moved away from a ‘juicier’ ministry to one that isn’t so juicy. Is that a punishment? Accept it or not, you have got blood on your hands!
Lives are wasting in Nigeria, it is not a metaphor. We need leaders with conscience who are passionate about where we are heading and bring real issues to the turf of our political field. Yet it is no longer news that salvation wouldn’t come oh my NIGERIA! Not in the manner of leaders we now parade. The Nigerian ‘political class’ are bad enough for having no vision, for being innately perverted and terribly myopic, but my pain is what would our children say of us in 2050, how would they look at our present time, when the world would have moved on to greater things and the so called rich nations would have abandoned this planet for us by moving to Mars. Posterity will not only be mad at these lots who are not just greedy but mean and shameless but they would be mad at how those of us without political power allowed such savagery to take place before our very eyes, while we left things in the Hands of God who seem to have forgotten if a country like Nigeria actually exists. On a poetic note I will end this with a quote from someone’s comment on one of the articles on Sahara Reporters (I enjoy reading comments more than articles sometimes): ‘Lie to me some more-. Truth is no salve. I delight in only lies, falsehoods and shadows, for I am Nigeria and in contemptuous deceit was I born’.
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