- State-of-the-Nation Snaps {Part 1)
Do you know what it means
To sleep every night
With HUNGER in your stomach
And wake up the day after
Dizzy and utterly drained
Do you know what it means
To faint, then fall
In crowded paniative* queues
Staggering back home three days later
With empty bowls in your trembling hands
Do you know what it means
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To sicken, then die
From the mildest ailment
As the caring doctor weeps over your woes
And the needed drugs dance beyond your reach
Do you know what it means
To acquire your ignorance
In bookless schools and roofless classrooms
Where Mediocrity reigns as absolute monarch
And Platitude counts its coins in a gilded palace
Do you know what it means
When the university no longer has its universe
And Gown strikes a perfect rhyme with clown
When the compost bed of ideas
Has become the graveyard of dreams
Do you know what it means
To exist and not to live
To bear each day like a heavy yoke
To count on a plethora of prayers
And phantom miracles behind the clouds
* A Yoruba-derived pun on the word ‘palliative’. The two Yoruba syllables, ‘pani’, at the beginning of the word means, literally, ‘kill person’.