Category: Olatunji Ololade

We belabour the ‘Nigerian dream.’ We abuse the idea that life will get better, that progress is assured if we keep faith, obey the rules and work hard, that prosperity is guaranteed if we continue to tread the slow, steady path to progress and a prosperous future. And in pursuit of these lofty ideals, we pervert the steady, measured, impartial course of the universe; hacking pliant paths to our dreams, from the crossroads where gluttony fosters depravity and vice.

Eventually, we awaken to a cold, bitter truth: We are being sacrificed. The Nigerian dream we are sold is not worth our sacrifice. And the individual dreams we pursue, aren’t worth a smidgen of what we make them out to be. By the time we all struggle to achieve our dreams; Nigeria will be finished. Given that each tribe may finally achieve its dreams of nationhood via secession, Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Ijaw to mention a few may establish their new nations.

When we do, the swollen belly of our idiocy and pride shall become clearly visible to us. When it does, it shall suddenly dawn on us that, all along, we had been blindly acting to a script prepared by career predators from Western nations of Europe, America and our ruling class.

The truth shall become clearer to us in intensity and impact and we shall hopelessly realize that we are being sacrificed. We will all be sacrificed; some of us much quicker than others. As it is now, so shall it be in our new nations, the Biafran youth, Ijaw youth, Oodua youth and Arewa youth to mention a few, shall become disposable indices in the scheme of things.

But until then, we will continue to have today and squander it on the altar of racism and greed. Today, it’s impossible to see any offspring of our ruling class engage or become embroiled in the familiar tragedies that mar our lives. It’s always the children from the breadlines, struggling middle class and backwaters that are involved. We are the youth divide traditionally expected and required to function and serve as unquestioning muscles and ordinary cannon fodder in the ruling class’ blueprint of pillage and destruction.

The decline of Nigeria is a story of gross injustices by the ruling class to the citizenry. But that is only an aspect of it, the greatest injustice is that meted out by individual citizen to self – the youth particularly. And this predominant malaise often plays out in our corruptibility and disinclination to foster a more humane leadership and society.

Today, we suffer devastation by Boko Haram, declining standards of living, stagnant and falling wages that are hardly paid at due time; we suffer curtailment and absolute denial of our basic wages, long-term unemployment, slave labour, escalating crime wave, among other ills.

Together, we perpetuate gruesome realities of the weakest being crushed decisively and maniacally by the affluent and strong. Together, we perpetuate a story of unbridled sectarian, ethnic and corporate power that has taken our government hostage, overseen the dismantling of our cultural heritage, societal and entrepreneurial values.

But if the ruling class, in connivance with predatory nations and institutions from the so-called ‘first world’ is responsible for plundering our natural resources and bankrupting the nation, we, the youth, are responsible for even worse atrocities.

We serve as the tools by which the ruling class and its cohorts overseas plunder and destroy our nation. The virus of political corruption, the perverted belief that only political and material profit matters, has spread to distort our thoughts and understanding of right and wrong. Today, it manifests in endemic proportions plaguing our communities with religious and political terrorism, economic and cyber-terrorism to mention a few.

Today, the Nigerian society dies a gruesome death basically because we lay to waste, our youths and we, the latter, by our suicidal actions and thoughts, submit ourselves as hopeless prey to the Nigerian ruling class and their cohorts overseas.

Everyday encounters with gluttonous gangs of struggling youth reveals among other things that many of us are the same social products as our peer from the aristocratic divide. Conditioned by life’s harshest vicissitudes to survive at all cost, we lay in wait, striving and bidding our time until we are ably positioned and strong enough to serve or rob the rich whose lives we earnestly covet and decry.

A visit to any night club, party, religious organization or office still attests to this fact. Ambitious and upwardly mobile youth from the breadlines or struggling working class families engage in a variety of excesses to the applause of mates yearning to be in their shoes. Either as advance fee fraudsters, bankers, journalists, accountants, secretaries, factory hands or ordinary clerks, youths from the breadlines daily engage in a bitter, desperate struggle to chance on the shortest possible cut to sudden and stupendous wealth.

We are beset by a greater and unexplainable fear beyond the fear of poverty amongst other harsh realities of life. Fear plays a greater part than hope: we are infinitely buoyed and obsessed with thoughts of the money that we could make or the possessions that might be taken from us or elude us, than of the joy and value that we might add to our own lives and to the future of our fatherland.

Most of us, like our more privileged peer crave the best of everything without actually sweating for it. And when we do sweat for it, our industry is tainted by vigorous dashes of impatience and duplicity. In our work, we are haunted by jealousy of competitors, and a fleeting interest in the actual work that has to be done. We spend greater time and passion defending unjust privileges that we are desperate to enjoy.

Such appalling youth constitute a greater segment of the human element expected to salvage Nigeria from eternal ruin and bloodbath. Consequently, our society becomes more rudderless and unstable and vulnerable on our watch. Now that Nigeria as our fathers, ‘the wasted generation’ made it, and we the youth, aggravate it, have begun to collapse, we withdraw from the possibility of rebirth, and instead choose to exploit the infinite possibilities in our fragility and predicted collapse.

It’s about time the Nigerian youth started postponing immediate gratification and endure hard sacrifices spurred by conviction that the future can be better than the past. Beyond the politics and inanities of our existing ruling class and political parties, we face far more difficult questions at our moment in history: How do we reconcile reality with promises that have been made to us? How do we make the best of our circumstances at the backdrop of indefensible leadership failure and disillusionment of the citizenry?  How do we evolve and nurture to fruition, a new vision to help us deal with our gruesome realities, even as we rewrite a promising story of the future? How do we divorce ourselves from the pains and disappointments of the past – particularly those that many amongst us had no stake in but yet internalize and perpetuate unexplainable miseries thereby?

How do we redefine “Peace, Unity and Progress” with our lust for “Life, Liberty and Happiness?”  How do we become more human and humane than we are now?

Today, the Nigerian youth becomes fleeting fracture of the towering immensity he ought to represent. More worrisomely, many of the nation’s youth seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis 40 years before they get the physical kind from chain smoking, binge drinking, gluttony and mental indolence. Who cares though? It’s every man for himself; the ruling class and Nigeria’s senior citizenry will not bat an eyelid even if our youth is wasted beyond redemption, as long as their children inherit their stash of the country’s looted wealth.

The ordinary youth however, continues to perpetuate that sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes as “wisdom” among the rich but arrant foolishness of the masses. Hence the successful doctor, banker, journalist, engineer, accountant to mention a few, amongst us, do not care about anything and anybody else.

Yet we pine for positive social change and environment in which we could thrive. The few that claim to be intellectually endowed and progressive in thought amongst us seek to acquire knowledge and skills necessary to actualize their dreams of bliss but even this few have no taste at all for the vagaries of honest industry.

We live and thrive on a perversion hence when we cry for a historic revolution and youth-friendly society, our thoughts pander to a more permissive and corrupt society that will aid our mad, desperate dash for unearned wealth or what we deem our share of the Nigerian dream.

This is our Nigerian dream: a lush, breathtaking future that de-emphasizes honest toil and accords our vanities a caressing glance. We dream of strings of bank accounts at home and abroad; we hope to drive the best cars, live in palatial mansions in highbrow areas and enjoy the most lucrative contracts and job offers even when we do too little to deserve these.

Our lust for the fleeting banishes reality. And this depravity is pervasive. Decades ago, it manifested as worrisome and inordinate self-love; today, we re-establish it as the language of the socially inspired and politically correct. Hence the frenzy with which we seek out and worship industry titans, political messiahs, entertainment superstars and other celebrity icons. It’s all part of our desperate ploy to substantiate our vanities by seeking ourselves in those we worship and establishing a false intimacy with them.

If modern gospel of prosperity and motivational literature won’t make us celebrities, then celebrity idols, reality television and sheer violence will. We impatiently wait for our cue to walk on stage inside our theatre of the absurd to be admired, feared or envied. Our vanities cramp the growth of our human spirit: they restrict the resuscitation and positive engagement of our productive faculties. Thus we find it hard to subscribe to such faith, simple decencies, honesty and values that demand that we enthusiastically dedicate ourselves to progressive personal growth and realistic rejuvenation of the Nigerian enterprise.

That is why we have youth threatening to destroy Nigeria and perpetuate ethnic genocide if President Goodluck Jonathan retains his seat or is booted from office come 2015. It is unforgivable idiocy and utter insanity for any youth to lend himself to such pitiful causes despite glaring political and socio-economic constraints that the incumbent administration foist upon us. This is not to absolve preceding governments of culpability but it is simply too repulsive in thought and action for the contemporary Nigerian youth to root for leadership that has done too little to improve standard of living in the country even as it gorges on resources meant for the sustenance of the collective.

A societal madness has begun to occur: bigoted, unemployed youth and bigoted, employed youth; lost souls wandering the streets of Nigeria’s major cities, day and night, like loose molecules in an unstable social fluid have begun to ignite. Thus our cities have become covens of immense cruelty where youth, fired by angst, a lingering sense of hurt and revolt, take alarming steps from threatening violence to perpetrating it. Traditional neglect of the youth as negligible integers of growth has evolved to dangerous generalizations and the demonization of peaceful majorities.

Today, economic forces create an overriding sense of disenchantment and futility among the youth. Additionally, the tyranny and insensitivity of the ruling class accentuates reactionary attitude and self-aggrandizing pursuits amongst the youth. The prominence of social justice and equality movements has dissipated as we become more concerned with identity politics than the greater good. Ironically, the ruling class, their close associates and scions are the only beneficiaries from this splintering of Nigeria into racist and more selfish associations.

A prevalent crisis of confidence has occurred in reaction to the social turmoil. More youths are feeling empty and without purpose yet we continue to moot revolution like the next best thing we could orchestrate after our last follies have fallen silent. We forget, still, that there is a time to speak and time to act; time to scream and silently orchestrate the inestimable violence of uprightness.

Our much vaunted “Occupy Nigeria” movement failed because the Nigerian youth is innately lacking in grit, honesty and ideal; that is why we remain perpetually exploitable – victims of what George Bernard Shaw, terms “the stupid system of violence and robbery which we call Law and Industry.”

Despite our romanticized wish to abolish the status quo as the protests dragged, the eventual result was as usual, an opportunistic contract between the exploiters (the government) and a part of the exploited (labour leadership), at the expense of the rest of the exploited (you, me and everyone) – something Noel Ignatin would call “the original sweetheart agreement.”

Eventually, the Nigerian youth is written off and our grievances dismissed as the crazed rant of a pathetic mass of revolutionary impostors. President Jonathan and company couldn’t be wrong for eventually dismissing us as essentially hopeless and misdirected, I reiterate.

Here, then, is the crucial temptation facing us; either we acquire at least a provisional and concrete ideology and the ability to commit ourselves to more progressive enterprise, or we expose ourselves to greater exploitation and disillusionment. More often than not, we are tempted to give up and retreat, in search of some comfortable, greener pasture where we can luxuriate and “survive” according to the idiosyncrasies and social conditioning our host nation deem worthy of us; this is always the resort of cowards and the feeble-minded.

The alternative is to drastically overhaul our values to become more progressively inclined and concerned with the political, the economic and social; to acquire the competencies and the skills necessary for the tasking work that must be done if the social structure of Nigeria is to be even slightly modified. Solutions can never be discovered without profound understanding of law, governance methods and the economics and social organization of humane statehood.

It’s about time we cultivated progressive interest in such realms and practicable goals and norms for their actualization; without these, we will continue to flounder in the sea of often ‘well-meaning’ but ineffective good intentions.

These are dark days for the Nigerian youth. We are going through a particularly unpleasant form of hell but it’s a hell that we have made for ourselves by our ghastly greed, laziness and inarticulateness. But we have still got youth on our side and thus the possibility of change.

Idiots as fragile as clay toys evolve into outsized heroes and gods, on our watch. But even gods grow out abandoned, held the late Christopher Okigbo; I would say, journalists too, but not your quintessential citizens, like the late Chinua Achebe. Achebe died and Africa mourned.

The novelist whose engaging literature taught the world to read and understand from an African perspective died at 82 and his demise was felt across literary tropes and political cultures.

In Nigeria, Achebe’s death reignites a seductive dirge; a ritual culture of requiem and colourful superlatives. Politicians froth with doctored and hardly-felt regret around their fattened lips and literary buffs compose tributes with obscene and overwhelming lyricism. Yet none is perhaps as impressive as the mainstream media’s glorification of Chinua Achebe.

At his death, Achebe not only made “cover page,” he commandeered the first five pages of many a flagship newspaper. And he didn’t have to spend a dime to achieve such impressive feat. What height politicians and conglomerates burn a fortune to attain, he used mere words and a fertile imagination to ascend.

Alive, Achebe lightened many a thunder by his words; in death, he commands seductive shrieks of wonder and appreciation. Such is the quality of life and manhood of Chinua Achebe. It doesn’t matter how skewed or alluring he was in politics and candour, everybody remembers Achebe as one good thing that happened to Nigerian literature. In his death, the world relives his quality as a man and African.

How do journalists die? How do journalists live to be precise? Do we merit such honour and appreciation like we confer on Chinua Achebe? Do we at least merit the passing tribute of a sigh at our demise? Is there such person amongst us that excites interminable tributes, poetry and superlatives like Chinua Achebe?

The time for pleasuring ourselves will soon be over and like failures eternally condemned to self-fellate on ego and all that vanity ever gives; many of us will pass in spasms of insignificance and self-love. The world has seen the swollen belly of our pride; it is nothing to write home about. Nothing excites, nothing moves, nothing encourages anyone to go to bat for our cancerous pride.

We have failed to become worthier than our bylines. And our bylines aren’t really worth much to be precise. Yet every time we see it, we feel like some gift. Gift to whom? Gift indeed. How narcissistic can we get? We, whose answers to national riddles have become trite. We, who bandy inappropriate cliché as solution to avoidable conflict, pretend to be worth more than disposable pawns in the scheme of things.

A simple lust is yet our woe; the lust for unearned riches and self-love. It drives many a practicing journalist beneath the bounds of ethics and above it. But no matter how significant we pretend to be, we are actually worth nothing in the eyes of our benefactors and “friends in high places.”

This is some truth we love to ignore simply because it’s therapeutic to do so. Every journalist on the beat is on a string to some puppeteer. Be it on Crime, Politics, Business, Aviation, Entertainment and Society beat, everybody kowtows to the wiles of some contemptible deep-pocket, to the detriment of society and journalism practice.

But many of us would never admit this much; rather we love to argue that we “operate on a higher level.” We have learnt to claim that by virtue of “quality journalism” that we practice, we get to hobnob daily with “the crème-de-la-crème of Nigeria’s high society.” And thus is the ultimate fulfillment to many of us.

It is however, fascinating to note that many of us are actually kept on a leash by our so-called “high society,” like dogs. Our so-called “clients,” benefactors or friends in high places do not think much of us.

That is why they agree to an interview and request for the interview questions in advance. They think many of us are incapable of normal conversation and informed questions and follow-up questions hence their robotic repetition of what their “personal assistants” or “media person” tell them to say. That is why they prefer an email interview but get their “media person” to write the answers. That is why they agree to a two-hour interview session and shorten it to 15 minutes on the spot.

Our so-called “big friends” in high society liken the Nigerian journalist to scum of the earth, that is why they invite journalists to their offices for an interview session only to keep them waiting for two or three hours in order to tell them that they can only do the interview if they can grant full copy approval before publication. That is why they invite journalists to their events only to tell security operatives on site to prevent them from getting into the venue. The embarrassment and shame will encourage humility and show the journalist who’s boss.

I do not know why an average journalist needs to blindly believe that he can attain relevance only by courting and serving as publicity pawn to his so-called “friends in high places.” It’s amazing to see journalists engage in heated altercation and fisticuff over accusations of “stealing” and “courting” of each other’s “friends in high places.”

Many of us are a pathetic fraud. We make a show of friendship and intimacy with our so-called privileged friends although the latter do not consider us worthier than vermin or intolerable hacks. Many of us have nothing to say, do we? We have no more stories to tell or hope to offer to folk who still wander to the newsstands hopes aglow, every day, seeking answers to timeless conundrums on the pages of our colourful prints.

What answers can we give? What remedy can we flaunt past the trite banalities we haughtily couch as columns, and most times, “Our Stand?” But the readers hardly know better. They never know better and those that think they do would buy into our finest delusion as long as they can identify with it and as long as it fetes their vanities while they do the spirited waltz in the intellectual trash can of public discourse.

Talk is still cheap. It is yet the proverbial staple that keeps compatriots who know no better, glued to our sensational news prints. Still they seek answers but we have no answers to give, do we? Just more sensation and rhetoric.

Nobody actually learns from us anymore. Every journalist is seen as an attack dog or junkyard dog for a variety of interests and “high society.” Having pretended to have answers to everything, we have no more answers to give. And our usual alternatives are tainted by our vanities and grief; twin-miseries for which we have no tongue.

Every day we see that we are not ready for the travails of the inflamed distance. We know the darkness of our practice and the perversions in our hearts and yet pay lip-service to evolving a practice worthy of the humane and the heroic. This is not to deny the existence of the few good ones amongst us but their paltry band isn’t enough balm to soothe our practice’s festering sores.

• To be continued…

(A long introspection cut short)

No one could teach humanity to our callous clan. Nobody could teach reality to a land that dies of dreams of plunder. Who could teach direction to a land that thrives on monstrosities and misdirection? “This is another epoch…another order…another clime,” we enthuse – but if you look closely enough, you will find that we are still in that same epoch we swore to survive. You will find that we are still that great ship with no certain commitment to compass and outlast our course’s most hideous storms.

This ‘new epoch’ of ours, every moment uncoils as that in which like starved greyhounds, we return to sup on yesterday’s vomit, still. Every minute passes as that in which seedlings fear the late, as crop-shoots, the early rainstorm.

Our young expects too little, still; and our old still indulge in pleasurable reminiscences even as they discover no logic to justify that which they had forsaken and squandered. Come 2015, we have another chance at a ‘new dawn’ but in our ‘new dawn,’ will promises be broken? Will fear’s moonflower spread and attain full blossom till our proverbial dawn illumines as familiar dusk of compromise, as usual?

Every ‘new dawn,’ we continue to pretend that we have answers to everything. As Nigeria ruins and stagnates like cocoyam sodden in a mud field, you and I continue to rant and articulate highfaluting remedies to the problems that persist and smother. We continue to bandy common sense and text book panacea to preventable cankers we frantically preserve and foster.

Our pains are of substandard education, mass unemployment, sky-rocketing inflation, pervasive poverty, insecurity, crime, high infant and maternal mortality, sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) epidemic, cyber –fraud, institutional fraud, etc. To these, we have proffered countless solutions.

We have suggested population control. We have suggested greater government support and presence in the Niger Delta claiming that since it is Nigeria’s only reliable source of national income, the federal government ought to devote greater time, money and other resources to the region.

And more often than we could count, we have suggested that we paid greater attention to our ailing agricultural sector. We claim it would do us great good if we could revivify our dying cocoa industry, collapsed groundnut pyramids and struggling oil palm sector.

Not to forget our persistent rant about our neglect of our tourist attractions. It’s amusing to see us mount the soap-box in fickle fits of contempt – in our liquor and rant-activated pubs, living-rooms, courtyards and pages of our sensational newsprints. We have perfected the art of lamentation, bandying angst and pitiful punch lines as we mourn our rudderless politics.

What’s your poison? Nigeria’s leadership problem? Pervasive poverty? Endemic corruption? Religious upheavals cum perversion of faith? What is it that causes riotous incense to course through your brain? The abject rot of the Onyeama Coal Mine? The collapse of Ajaokuta Steel as well as other appendages to Nigeria’s steel sector? Our underperforming oil refineries and Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN)?

What excites your grief? Our conduit-built and corruption-enabled civil service? Perhaps like the lot of us disgruntled citizenry, you also harbor all manners of discontent for our public officers’ outrageous attitude to governance.

Bet you could recite by rote your ‘patriotic’ and ‘heartfelt’ panacea to every canker and vestige of inhumanity that has become the scourge of our portal of ruined stones. Perhaps like too many of our compatriots, you suggest a sovereign national conference or referendum which sole aim is to provide the forum by which we could redress the state of the union.

What manner of redress do you seek? Many have suggested that we break-up. They claim we shall do better if we go our separate ways. Bet you have mooted such fantastic enterprise in more instances than you could count. Now picture the dissolution of our 54-year-old union; what plenitude could it bring? What manner of peace, justice and stability could we derive from a relapse to humanity’s often wildest and best-forgotten enterprise?

What would be your role in the new order? Who will you be in your fantastic era? Funny, isn’t it that you seek to reinvent the millipede by calling it, ‘snake?’ Shall the lion cub become tomcat simply because we keep it as a house pet?

We could reinvent ourselves as much as we like; we could secede by our terms as many times as we like; we could quote Nietzsche, Plato, Disreali et al and re-echo the idiosyncrasies of our favourite columnists for as long as it gets us to justify our cynicism and grief, nothing will change.

Our lives shan’t get better. Nigeria won’t become the land of honey and milk we wish it would become nor it’s separated parts if we ever become foolish enough to go our separate ways; not in a trillion years. Until we change.

It’s a fundamental nature of our society that we accept abnormality and debauchery as incontestable parts of our nature. Yet if we did not indulge in such abject perversions and pitiable evasions as our principle of moral agnosticism which imbues us to be tolerant of anything and everything, we could have matured enough in intellect and psyche to know how and why not to compromise between truth and falsehood, reason and irrationality.

We could have attained such maturity that would enable us to understand that the values we project become the essence of our socio-politics and being – whether we like it or not.

Every utterance we make, as our most humane and inhumane actions and reactions, intensify the simplicity or degeneracy of our individual perceptions as well as the rationality and otherwise of every human politic we choose to scorn or celebrate.

It needn’t be so hard to be good. But it does – simply because for all our touted morality, wisdom and predilection to constitute a quintessential civilization of humans, we have lost direction.

Knowingly, we scorn both our glaring and latent abilities to discern that proverbial path, conspicuous as it is, to the realization of the essence and undeniable benefits of being good. Thus our culture and our lives disintegrate for our lack of character.

When we ennoble double speak and refrain from praising men’s virtues and condemning their vices, our fraudulence declares and we foster the corruption of our larger society. No practicable and highfaluting panacea could resolve our most hideous realities until we attain the essence of goodness without being self-righteous.

Simply put, there can be no compromise, however exquisitely couched, between us and the depravity we tolerate. Aiding and abetting corruption in the spirit of socio-economic and political expediency is hardly a compromise but a cowardly surrender to the elements that disintegrates and makes bleak.

Whether we like it or not, there can be no compromise or wanton sophistry acceptable on basic principles and fundamental issues. It’s time we desist from every conscious quest to improve the status quo from the deceitful springboard of compromise.

The change we seek subsists in such random and premeditated acts of goodness that we have learnt to forsake: like a citizen’s resoluteness to respect the traffic light and a local government chairman’s immutable passion to improve life at the grassroots – particularly when the world and the press aren’t looking.

Creator, we have come forth, when heaven lies at the tick of a bomb, when hell blazes in the spoken word. We come for hope and truth’s pure ray. We come to wish our strife away. Life is still not what we prayed for, under Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. It gets worse every hour.

The boy who had no shoes has grown to snatch our dog-eared shoes from our feet. That self-confessed son of a poor fisherman has come to snatch the few fingerlings we have in our nets; when we protest, he dishes us tadpoles to eat and claims it’s “fish.”The one who we hoped will accord us a breath of fresh air has emerged to blow as another clean breath of fresh stench.

Today, our grief is of fuel subsidy. Ebele baba has removed that mythical subsidy we barely enjoyed. Fuel we used to buy at N65 now sells at N97, N141, N150, and N160 nationwide. As a result, the price of everything has gone through the roof. A decent meal has become a luxury now: vegetables and tubers, palm oil and vegetable oil, kerosene and gas, now sell at abominable prices.

But our almighty President, Minister of Finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Minister of Petroleum, Diezani Alison-Madueke incumbent governors and company would have us accept such heinous fate as the next best palliative to endemic poverty, unemployment, moribund refineries, electricity shortages, insecurity, administrative ineptitude and corruption among other monstrosities they impose on us.

Ebele baba has forgotten his roots. He has declared war on us whose fates he swore to advance and protect. Like the proverbial alligator, he has chosen to wade deaf, against the storm and current of public opinion. Goaded by ballsy and mammoth Okonjo-Iweala, he decided to dole the most savage policies on to our battered souls. Prodded by his sleazy and disdainful cabinet, he has chosen to manifest as the corruption of every economic thought and the approximation of the shame that our ruling class has become.

Recently, he invited professional predators from abroad to help crush their predatory variant, Boko Haram terrorist sect, which he and his cohorts in power foisted upon us at the home front. Hence as you read, the nucleus of evil has arrived in our land to dish out discordant tunes to our bigoted clans. Very soon, their drumbeats of war, hatred and dismemberment shall reverberate devastatingly across our battered land. And while we expect the worst like it happened in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Egypt and Libya, Ebele baba and company are busy campaigning for second term.

To stem the tide of those of us who love to pick faults in the ruling class, he has made casualties of those whose strength we hoped would rid us of their gruesome breed. We miss Reuben Abati; the knight who pawned his armour to become Ebele baba’s court jester. Thanks to him and a great many more amongst us, nobody respects the columnist these days; they think we are leprechauns fencing in knights’ armour.

Do not be deceived by the furor of our hastily conceived citizens’ protests, “Bringbackourgirls’ hash-tags and strike actions, we shall tire of the novelty of revolutionary slogans and mass actions, very soon. Our backs shall remain against the wall and when Ebele baba and company push harder, we shall simply crawl into it like we’ve always done.

Our revolutionaries, labour leaders and columnists of note shall quietly eat up their own words following crucial meetings with Ebele baba on the way forward. They shall come back to tell us to ditch the placards and save our chants till more auspicious hour. Whispers of currency shall smother our rant and the revolutionary cry. At the end, everything shall remain the same; our fates shall bend and break according to the whims of the ruling class.

Thus we seek the comfort of your infinite mercies against the scourge of our merciless leaders. We pray that you repay our leaders back in their own kobo. Dear author and finisher of faith, please rewrite our pitiful fates as the Christians pray. And even though “the pen has been lifted” as the Muslims say, please rework our fates as you do to your most favoured faithful.

But if our leaders are truly on the right path; if truly, they lead us honestly and with unpretentious fear of you in their hearts, treat them the way you would treat your most favoured among humankind. However, if they lead us with disdain and deceit in their hearts, treat them the way you treated Abu Ashram and the Abyssinians when they rose against Mecca.

Afflict their mansions to tear down the comfort they build to our discomfort. Upset their bellies and purge them of the provisions they gorge like gluttons although it’s meant for the collective good. As we spend our finest moments in darkness, make their access to light a luxury of the past; reorder their fates that they too may go to bed and rise in darkness.

Make their wives hiss and fret for want of fresh air. Make their children and grandchildren flail and choke in the grasp of unforgiving heatstroke. Bless them with noontime heat and bedtime heat even in the rains. And every time they seek from you the mercy they have refused to accord us, treat their prayers the way you would, the wantonness of the gluttonous and accursed. Make their prayer points and praise-worship trail off in confusion. Smite their patronizing prophets till they become not much in sight.

They claim the N1.3 trillion they ‘saved’ by removing fuel subsidy shall be used to improve other sectors – like agriculture and health sectors; if they fail to live up to their words, make their kids expire to indecipherable sickness and malnutrition right before their eyes; like peasant kids dying in agrarian communities nationwide. Deny their trophy wives and newborns of oxygen and the best medical care overseas as they deny kids of poor folk breathing their last while their mothers are still pushing, in hospital labour rooms of death nationwide.

Bless their children with gifts of patricide and mindless violence as they enable our jobless youth for political gains, every day. Turn their swimming pools to raging deeps to drown their progeny and trophy wives, like the Oke Afa canal that claimed our poor, beloved folk fleeing from death, to their death; during the Ikeja bomb blast.

Subject their lives and those of their loved ones to the elements of bad roads as they do to us. Blind their pilots’ to the safest course every time they flee our land for overseas medical checkup; make their planes plummet to crash on humid rocks and plunge in the sea, as our beloveds’ in the throes of bird-strike, and our dreams in the face of stillbirth.

Let them not enjoy the fruits of their labour; make their Princeton and Harvard educated wards the causes of their everlasting sadness; make them the bad harvest of their inordinate lust for wealth, at our expense. Despite their wealth, afflict them with the poverty of good health, peace and contentment. And for every one of them seeking our downfall, we pray: “Faja’anlahum ka’asufyn mma” kulyn” Amen.