Category: Niyi Osundare

By Niyi Osundare

Have you ever tried to count

The ticks in the ragged garment of politics

The litany of lies in the liturgy

Of a clergy so allergic to truth

 

Are you really black

Or ‘somewhat black-looking’;

How many negativities live

In the Negro of your skin?

 

Some are called neighbours

Because they neigh all the time

Like horses stung by malicious  wasp

They gallop from the frenzy of forbidden nerves

 

The shooter gets shot

The gun reels from vengeful madness

Let the antelope tell the hunter

The lethal taste of smoking bullets

 

 

Too many preyers

In our temples of Mammon

The altars reek and rock

From the plague of consecrated sins

 

 

Words s(t)ing

Words dance

Words swing

Like eloquent fruits on the mango tree

 

*Wordgame

May 2020 be our

Year of Perfect Vision

When we see through the clouds

That clear Sky beyond our gaze

 

May its moons master

Our miseries and woes

Our nights of wakeful dreams

Broken oaths and colourless blood

 

May its dragon

Slay our sleaze and sloth

Our bilious billionairing

And cannibal cupidities

 

May the river run

Without stubbing a toe

Even as the road rises

To meet our feet

 

So many scars from yester-

Years’ un-banded wounds

So many aches and doubts

We bleed from every pore

 

Gbe‘ku lo, gb’arun lo

Ki’le tura, ki’le tura*

Let Hunger die with the passing year

Make Hope its inseparable companion

 

*Drive death away; drive disease away;

Peace to the home, ease to the land

By Niyi Osundiran

IV

 

He spent so much of the Nation’s fortune

On the purchase of Darkness

 

And here, in these brief lines,

The stories of our recent Kings

Who left our luckless nation

A legacy of scars and wails . . . .

 

Shall we tell the tale

Of a recent King who squandered multiple billions

On the purchase of our perennial darkness

Digging NEPA* deeper into its leprous ditch

 

He came to power,

A lean, hungry fellow from another despot’s prison

And left a short eight years later (most reluctantly)

A King whose wealth bewildered the banks

 

Now proud possessor of empires

In every state, not counting

Those hilltop mansions whose roofs

Challenge the skies

 

Now fervent letter-writer and dispenser of homilies

Some self-appointed prefect for

Later occupiers of his former throne

This unmatchable exemplum of transactional patriotism

 

To which Kings do we owe our perennial darkness

Who are the royal drummers for our dance of shame

To whom do we really owe our fame

As Africa’s Big-for-Nothing Country?

Niyi Osundare

 

And here, in these brief lines,
The stories of our recent Kings
Who left our luckless nation
A legacy of scars and wails . . . .

III

The Goggled Fiend

And here comes the Goggled Fiend
Stone Age despot who knew so little
And talked much less.
Saw-dust brain and fist of iron.

Patient vulture on a long and murderous wait,
He wrested the carrion of power from a quisling
Installed in a hurry by a shamed, departing King,
That Slave of the King who strutted around as King of Slaves

No idle pretender, this new King
His Reign of Terror came in deadly storms
He banished commonsense from all state affairs
And placed a price on dissenting voices

His skull-hunters lurked in every corner
His Hit Squads justified every letter
In their dreadful name. Our streets still run red
With the June 4 horror and its martyred Warrior*

He hounded conscientious dissent into exile
And pummeled the Press and gagged the Truth
Then floated the scheme for a lifelong rule
A flock of timeservers embraced his plot

Dreadful days, nights of anguish
The land bled from every pore
But death came to the despot one lascivious afternoon
His legacy: his stolen billions and a broken nation

Kudirat Abiola, wife of Chief MKO Abiola, winner of the June 12, 1993 Nigerian presidential election. The election was annulled by General Babangida’s military junta and the winner was hauled into incarceration from which he never came out alive. On June 4, 1996, Kudirat was gunned down in broad daylight while on a campaign for the restoration of her husband’s mandate.

By Niyi Osundare

And here, in these brief lines,

The stories of our recent Kings

Who left our luckless nation

A legacy of scars and wails . . . .

 

II

 

Mimic Maradona

 

A King like no other

And giddy Emperor to the bargain

He had an insatiable appetite for power

And ravenous jaws for its countless preys

 

With a tooth-gapped smile, he shot his way to power

With another “Fellow Nigerians” in a sad August dawn

From the very first announcement he decreed himself

“President” over a dazed and swindled nation

 

The foxy power-grabber went to work

With his saga of subterfuge and deceit

“Call me ‘The Human Rights President’”, he declared

“For the nation’s Liberator is here at last” .

 

And ‘Human Rights’ decrees tumbled down in droves

Which bound the nation hand and foot

And put ‘unfriendly Press’ in permanent gag

His letter-bomb dispatched a watchful media sentinel

 

His Structural Adjustment Pogrom* truly left the nation sapped

“Cure poverty with more poverty”, his IMF masters

Decreed. The nation went from daring to dead

The King longed to permanence his hold on power

 

“A little to the left, a little to the right”

Mimic Maradona took us all on a dangerous dribble

His perfidy went to labour, and June 12 was born,

A troublesome child that will bury him the day he dies.

 

Structural Adjustment Programme: a deceptive IMF-inspired euphemism that precipitated a socio-economic catastrophe from which Nigeria has not recovered.  

And here, in these brief lines,

The stories of our recent Kings

Who left our luckless nation

A legacy of scars and wails . . . .

   

I

Lamb of the Wolves

In civilian robes once there was

A figure who became King against his personal wish

All he dreamt was a humble seat in the Senate

But his handlers urged him to a loftier height

 

They said he was a simple man

Who started out life as a village teacher

A pious man who never missed a single prayer

He was often seen communing with angels

 

This was the lamb drafted for the helm

By a vulpine pack of party hacks

United by no higher purpose than ravenous greed

And fail-proof methods of nation-wrecking

 

They stole and stole and stole

Till the nation bled from their claws

Intoxicated by power so irresponsible

They boasted their rule would be for aye

 

Hunger wracked the nation

And Poverty undid her dreams

But a Party Chieftain declared with unimpeachable blindness:

“I have yet to see anyone feeding from the garbage dumps”

 

There goes the story

Of a vulpine pack led by a lamb

But the mask fell off their face one dreary dawn

When another “Fellow Nigerians”* assailed the air.

* The typical introductory greeting in the radio announcement of a military coup in Nigeria.

A fat-rumped squirrel

On its hind legs

Rubs both hands together

Like a monk in prayer

 

Its altar is somewhere

Up in the temple between the leaves

A chant or two from the store

Where the nuts and kernels lay

 

When someone promises you a silky robe

Take another look at his own wardrobe

One whose stomach is hunger’s battleground

Can hardly throw a peaceful banquet

 

Our whisper is louder

Than their shout

The words which amaze their wit

Are the common fare of our proverb

 

 

Don’t look too close

At the masquerade’s face

Guide your gaze

To his dancing feet

 

“The shroud has no pocket”,

My friend once observed

How I wish our Thieves-of-State

Had ears to grab a hint

 

* In short

(Sound & Silence)

 

When Language argues with Silence
And Syllables stumble
On the outcrop of broken codes, do we
Seek solace in the monastery of the Mute?

The Parliament opens today
To a crowd with absent tongues
But is this the silence that cost
So many millions of noisy money?

So many times you have to shout
So as not to be heard
When last I saw a noisy barrel
It was loud with tremendous nothing

The magic we seek
Lives in the belly of the drum
Those who master the membrane
Will provoke the magic of sounding

Once not too long ago
The Mouth and the Ear were husband and wife
‘Civilization’ planted a noisy distance
And now the couple live like sundered stars

Said the Sage:
Shout so you could be heard,
Whisper so the world might listen
Proverbs, once again, to Bones and Silence*

*Signifying on Wole Soyinka’s Dance of the Forests.

VENICE  UNDER  WATER

 

Omi ya’le

Agbara gba’gboro*

 

Rubber-boots, boatloads of anguish:

The streets sulk and sigh

Beneath the roar

Of billowing floods

 

Saturated symphonies wail

In the watery wind

The panting piano never knows

What to say to the violated violin

 

The City of Shops and Shapes

Sprawls haplessly on

In stark, amorphous misery

Bloated books wade in search

 

Of missing pages.

Famous antiquities shudder

In liquid silence, the museum a broken

Reed in the riot of incorrigible rains

 

Blighted bistros, capsized tables

Boated businesses, flotilla of franchise

Is Earth, that grossly abused Procurer,

Here, at last, for its pound of flesh?

 

Floating City, Adriatic Treasure,

Tell me this when, at last, your lips are dry:

Who precipitated the climate of fear that has

Turned your streets into this insatiable sea?

 

 

* Water has invaded the homestead

The street is besieged by floods