I know. You know. We all know that nobody cares how brilliantly this article is articulated for or against the interest of the citizenry or the Nigerian ruling class. The jury will always be out over the perceived victimhood, tyranny, humaneness and monstrosity personified by the country’s citizenry and leadership. It depends what side of the divide you inhabit.
Just like everyone else, you are inclined to protect the source from which your bread is buttered. You will defend the source of your ‘hard-earned’ or ‘ill-gotten’ wealth. It’s a human thing – a foible most are vulnerable to.
Everybody pays lip service to ‘Change.’ Even President Muhammadu Buhari selectively effects ‘Change.’ He had good intentions no doubt, he is simply too flawed to prosecute a flawless anti-corruption fight. But this is hardly about the ‘true intent,’ ‘honesty,’ ‘noise’ and ‘posturing’ of Buhari’s anti-corruption campaign.
Now that it is glaring that soapbox rant, contrived marches and social media protests will never be enough to save us from corrupt leadership and the rigours of the Nigerian wilderness, we could initiate action by chanting heartfelt ‘Amen’ all through this piece, while we plot to reclaim our nation from the predatory ruling class.
I could advocate that we change our leadership at election time but our people have perfected the art of substituting tyrants with savages and vice versa. The youth dream of a revolution; they talk of ‘benching’ the incumbent ruling class with the spite of a serpent and the spunk of a fraidy-cat. As we have hordes of youth mooting a ‘take-over’ of government and advocating leadership by Nigeria’s youth, so do we have gangs of youth mounting the soapbox to rant and state candidly that, Nigeria is unripe for a youthful leader and youth-driven political platform.
Some interesting character recently advised that rather than start a youth movement, the Nigerian youth should stage a hostile take-over of existing political parties – I wonder how the youth are expected to review and overhaul the cancerous bulk of existing parties’ predatory ‘philosophies.’ Too many of such arguments are brilliantly put together and published across the mainstream and new media by beneficiaries of the nation’s corrupt structures.
Having acquired some wealth via patronage of the corrupt ruling class, they desperately model their existence after the vulgar lives and guilty pleasures of the same ruling class they once vented and spat at. Who cares how they made money or attained acclaim? Ki ‘won’ sa ti lowo as the folk artiste, 9ice, would say.
This leaves us in dilemma. How do we identify youth by whose exploits and honest exertions Nigeria may progress and attain freedom from the predatory ruling class? This is conundrum for other fora but this minute, I charge you to chant ‘Amen’ with the passion you put in the ‘Ice Bucket Challenge,’ “Wehdonesir Challenge’ and so on…
The citizens’ heartfelt prayer
Eledumare o! The One who is never deceived by the furor of our hastily conceived citizens’ protests on Facebook, Twitter and the streets of Lagos and Abuja; the One who is never perturbed by the duplicity of our revolutionary slogans and feeble mass actions, our backs are no longer against the wall, we are crawling into the wall like irritating geckos.
Our accidental revolutionaries, labour leaders and columnists of note are quietly eating up their words in the wake of ‘crucial’ meetings with the ruling class. They tell us to ditch the placards and save our chants till more auspicious hour. Whispers of currency smother our rant and revolutionary cry. At the end, everything remains the same. Our fates are bent and broken according to the whims of our predatory ruling class.
Thus we seek the comfort of your infinite mercies against the scourge of merciless leaders and duplicitous, self-serving rights activists. We pray that you repay our leaders and their ‘influencers’ 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, kindly rework our fates as you do to your most favoured faithful.
If our leaders are truly on the right path…if truly, they lead 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. 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 sleep and rise in everlasting darkness.
Make their wives hiss and fret for want of fresh air like our wives do. Make their kids and grandkids flail and choke in the grasp of unforgiving heatstroke, like peasant kids do. Bless them with noontime heat and bedtime heat even in the rains. And every time they seek from you the mercy they fail 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 patronising prophets till they become not much in sight.
They claim that money they save from anticorruption campaign and fuel subsidy removal would be used to improve infrastructure, 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 for lack of infrastructure, balanced diet and good primary health care.
Deny their trophy wives and newborns of oxygen and the best medical care as they deny kids of poor folk breathing their last, while their mothers are still ‘pushing,’ in hospital labour rooms and corridors of death, nationwide.
Bless their kids with gifts of patricide and mindless violence like they do to our jobless youth for political gains, every day. Turn their swimming pools to raging deeps to drown their progeny and trophy wives, like our clogged waterways do for lack of government intervention.
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 beloved’s 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 Ivy League educated wards eternal sources 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 condemning this piece, we pray: “Faja’alahum ka’asfin m ma” kulin.” Amin.
