The Nation Newspaper

Category: Niyi Osundare

  • SNAPSONG 135

    SNAPSONG 135

    By Niyi Osundare

    Hardly anyone similes
    In this land any more
    Laughter left our lips several seasons ago
    We are still looking for its forwarding address

    The streets are sour
    The roads are rough
    Playgrounds are wild with thorns
    For children who mind their tender feet

    Bandits empty bubbling schools
    Into borderless lairs
    In the new Republic of Snakes and Scorpions
    Grateful mosquitoes conduct the nightly choir

    School uniforms worn to captive threads
    Months-long dirt untouched by water
    A daily diet of whippings and wailings
    Brutal pedagogy of terror-touts

    Sores and scars
    From anguish to angst
    Tears from these terror lairs
    Enough to out-river the Niger and the Benue

    Brave Country
    Behold thy future
    In these terror-tracts
    These jungles from thy rulers’ minds

  • SNAPSONG 134

    SNAPSONG 134

    By Niyi Osundare

    Hunger walks the streets
    Bold and proudly Hungerian……..

    “Touch me not” Imperial Yam commands
    “Unless you have come
    With golden hands
    And a palanquin laden with weighty pounds”

    Beans rump around
    In the furrows of the market
    “Touch me not”, also, their golden rule,
    Costly antimony in each eye

    Corn dumps us all
    In the howling maze of empty stomachs
    Just a few grains on the selling tray
    And the seller asks for a pretty fortune

    Plantain towers above the stalls
    Its fingers decked with diamond rings
    Once common snack in lowly huts
    Its new name is ‘Touch Me Not”

    Ah rice, oh compatriots,
    Is the golden grain of the gong
    Home-grown or foreign-freighted
    Just one bag will deplete your purse

    Here we are
    In brave Hungeria
    Our stomachs so empty
    Because our heads are doubly so

    Hunger romps through our streets
    With a retinue of bristling bones
    Oh so fat our Eating Chiefs
    How so famished their luckless land!

  • LET’S DO THE SING-ALONG

    LET’S DO THE SING-ALONG

    By Niyi Osundare

    Tere pampa tere pampa

    Tere minnan minnan tere

     

    How does it feel

    To have all you need

    Have all you need

    Have all you need

    How does it feel

    To have ALL you need?

     

    Tere pampa tere pampa

     

    How does it feel really feel

    To need all you lack

    Need all you lack

    Need all you lack

    How does it really feel

    To need all you lack

     

    Tere pampa tere pampa

     

    ‘Blessed are the poor’

    Proclaims my favourite Pastor

    My favourite Pastor

    My favourite Pastor

    Blessed are the poor

    Proclaims my favourite Pastor

     

    Tere pampa tere pampa

     

    And he flew in this morning

    In a gleaming jet

    Gleaming jet

    Gleaming jet

    He flew in this morning

    In his gleaming jet

     

    Tere pampa tere pampa

    Tere minnan minnan tere

     

  • SNAPSONG 133

    SNAPSONG 133

    By Niyi Osundare

    What’s there to choose
    Between those who remember
    Too much, and those
    Who remember not at all?

    Can Memory be
    A millstone around our neck
    Or that much desired stepping stone
    To the House of Wisdom

    What happens to the Beauty Queen
    Who forgets her face at home
    Or the Lion with a missing mane
    In the gathering of champion Cats

    How do we console that Orator
    Who falls from the tree of words
    How do we sew the rags
    Of his broken syntax

    When Memory sleeps
    It is Remembrance
    That kicks it awake
    Like the stick which provokes the drum

    Do not mock my face
    With Oblivion’s fretful mask
    I am not the toad in the tale
    Which lost its tail and then its tribe.

  • SNAPSONG 132

    When courage falls into short supply

    Chivalrous stones will rise

    And shame timid seasons

    With a hard, intrepid query

     

     

    When elephants of the jungle

    Block their ears to the grumblings

    Of a trampled earth, fallen leaves

    Will spring a carpet of thorns

     

     

    The savannah has no hiding place

    For the fury of the harmattan blaze

    But a serpentine stream below the mountain

    Knows the answer for the raging bully

     

     

    Wisdom lives in the silence

    Between thunder’s pervasive clamour

    The thief who steals the King’s trumpet

    Must also steal a palace for its royal blast

     

     

    I speak, therefore, I am

    I breathe through my words

    My tongue the faithful priest

    In the temple of my mouth

     

    Head over shoulders

    Hands swinging on both sides

    Send courage on an errand

    And watch it return with daring gifts

  • SNAPSONG 131

    SNAPSONG 131

    By Niyi Osundare

    Hail Almighty NEPA
    Sole Distributor of darkness
    So generous in its infernal fare
    So dogged in its dreadful spread

    You turn our day into night
    Our night into frightening gloom
    The plague in the National Plan
    The woe of a wound that never heals

    From school to church
    From marketplace to mosque
    From stinking fridge to booming morgue
    To the nation’s fair of powerless factories

    Ruler after ruler has vowed to end your curse
    With countless billions of stolen funds
    The Uniformed Despot, the Muftied Rogue
    Routed by you, their Conquering Giant

    And so here we are, stumbling in the dark
    Getting bravely dizzy from deafening gens**
    With careless candles and luckless lanterns
    On our desperate journey to Medieval gloom

    All hail NEPA,
    Nigeria’s Dean of Darkness
    Namesake with ‘leper’
    In deed and painful truth

    •National Electric Power Authority (now known as PHCN, Power Holding Company of Nigeria)
    ** Generators

  • LET’S DO THE SING-ALONG

    LET’S DO THE SING-ALONG

    By Niyi Osundare

    Tere pampa tere pampa

    Tere minnan minnan tere

     

    How many grains of rice

    Will make a mighty feast

    Mighty feat

    Mighty feast

    How many grains of rice

    Will make a mighty feast

     

    Tere pampa tere pampa

     

    How many fireflies of the King

    Will illuminate our night

    Illuminate our night

    Illuminate  our night

    How many fireflies of the King

    Will illuminate our night

     

    Tere pampa tere pampa

     

    How many whispers behind the walls

    Will rouse the streets to riot

    Streets to riot

    Streets to riot

    How many whispers behind the walls

    Will rouse the streets to riot

     

    Tere pampa tere pampa

     

    A very little prayer

    Is better than a mighty curse

    Mighty curse

    Mighty curse

    A little, little prayer

    Is better than a mighty curse

     

    Tere pampa tere pampa

     

    I sometimes close my eyes

    That I may see ahead

    Far ahead

    Far ahead

    I sometimes close my eyes

    That I my see far ahead

     

    Tere pampa tere pampa

    Tere minnan minnan tere

  • THIS HOUSE MUST NOT FALL (3)

    THIS HOUSE MUST NOT FALL (3)

    By Niyi Osundare

     

    Can a country of wise wo/men

    Be ruled by a Confederacy of Fools

    How foolish must those Ruled be

    And how wise the Fools?

     

     

    Africa’s Sick Giant

    Laughing stock of the world

    Nigeria thrashes around the jungle

    Like a snake with a trampled head

     

     

    This odd, accidental assortment of

    Fierce, dangerously unequal parts

    Riled by riot, threatened by rift,

    Legatees of a Dubious Imperial Mandate

     

    Too dim, too divided, to RE-make History

    And UN-make its errors

    Scared of that tough, regenerative Vision

    To RE-build this House and make it stand

     

     

    Every nation is nothing

    If not a-work-in-progress

    RE-thought, RE-shaped, RE-calibrated

    In answer to a noble necessity, a moral imperative,

     

    From Lord Lugard’s lemon

    A jar of regenerative lemonade

    For if we let this House fall

    We all may fall with it

     

    Victims of a map

    Which forgot its compass

    Unable to live with one another

    Because we cannot live with ourselves

     

    (Concluded)

  • THIS HOUSE MUST NOT FALL (2)

    THIS HOUSE MUST NOT FALL (2)

    By Niyi Osundare

     

    Drums of discord

    Shouts of war

    We heard these noised not long ago

    In the war which produced no Victor

     

     

    But countless Vanquished.

    The wounds are legion;

    The scars still live in our songs

    Memoryless, mad, and utterly blind

     

    Our nation is the toad which forgot its tale

    That mindless nanny goat whipped countless times

    For repeated transgressions: season after season,

    We drown in the same river of unknowing

     

     

    Always, wrong wo/men in the right places

    Hideous, hidebound, insufferably haughty

    Medieval in their methods, dark in their deeds

    Deaf to the throes to a nation dying in their hands

     

    And so, another season of songs of severance:

    Incapable of the wisdom to build the house

    We crave for the folly to tear it apart

    We act first, and think later

     

    But into how many parts this time?

    How many more wars over the spoils of office

    How can a land so brave and blessed

    Spawn a genealogy of rulers so blind, so blighted

     

    Victims of a map

    Which forgot its compass

    Unable to live with one another

    Because we cannot live with ourselves

     

    (Cont. next week)

  • TOBACCO SONG

    TOBACCO SONG

    By Niyi Osundare

    What a friend we have in tobacco

    Patron saint of lumbago

    It never fails our lives to roast

    In its lethal pleasure from coast to coast

     

    A silky fellow, slim as sin

    With a quenchless fire to light a scene

    Long and white with a deep-brown tip

    It sends you to heaven on a lengthy trip

     

    Neat nicotine, ward of the weed

    It has a mission: to blaze and bleed

    Between your fingers, hold your fate

    And pamper your habits that never sate

     

    The real, raw stuff, the fat Havanna

    Its macho magic, your quick Nirvana

    Smouldering like a torch, a fury of fumes

    In divine delirium it your life consumes

     

    A roasted heart and a pitch-black lung

    Will make your life strong and long

    In the “sweet menthol” lies your dazzling dope

    Your smoking passion and burning hope

     

    Build more factories for the cigarette

    Flood the market at any rate

    Find more jobs – for the funeral home

    Allow  quick Death to rave and roam

     

    Grand Incinerator, the Prince of Puff

    Red-cap Chief, the Flaming Stuff

    This ashen horror is the best of health

    The nation’s woe, the foreigner’s wealth

     

    What a friend we have in tobacco

    Its soft smooth charm won’t let us go

    Its curly smokes we always crave

    A ticking bomb that digs our grave

     

    For World No Tobacco Day  (May 31 every year)

    There is a raging inferno in the throat of the smoker.