We must keep marching on
WE are in a terrible state in Nigeria. This country is not the country that is our country or that should be our country – going by the current state and colour of everything. We are in a horrible state in Nigeria where, for instance, Titus sardine now costs one thousand four hundred naira in a modest shop.
Who brought us here? And what thing, what sense, is the subject that should not be our subject? Of course, it is the conscious and unconscious subject of the nothingness and meaninglessness of our Nigerian existence, our current Nigerian existence. And who amongst us is not feeling, is not experiencing the anxiety and depression which pervade each one’s Nigerian life and existence?
The questions I have been asking are consciously and unconsciously familiar and unfamiliar ones whose answers cannot but fill one with despair and further despair – a further sense of imagined and unimagined hopelessness and despairing despair.
Clearly, our regime’s “Renewed Hope Agenda” is nothing short of a “Renewed Hopelessness Agenda” that has accentuated – or that is accentuating – our despair, a renewed despair transported from the preceding regime of wickedly wicked and dangerously dangerous savanna bandits and desert pirates in league with their southern sycophants. What anxiety is each one - is each Nigerian - not seeing and has not seen, in the face of the existence of each one, of each Nigerian in Nigeria where the struggle of living is leading to the struggle of dying day by day?
Contrary to what the leaders and so- called leaders and worshippers and sycophants in and outside their cabinets and parties are saying and urging us to accept, nothing is working in the land. Your land my land our land which is your country my country our country is seemingly now been re- designed for unhappiness and displeasure. How hapless we have become! No matter the manipulations of all those in the saddles of our affairs, nothing is going to give us comfort and pleasure in the foreseeable or remote future as long as those in charge are in charge of our Being.
Our current Nigerian condition is telling me so. No matter how comfortable or pleasurable some persons may make or want to make or are making their lives in order to conceal the truth and fact from the truth and factual, they will continue to suffer from anxiety and depression.
Members of the masses in this country are barely surviving and minimally existing. Their condition is condition- less condition. As the prices of things, of everything, go up day by day each one’s condition- less condition worsens and worsens as he experiences further and further and very truly so the nothingness of human existence in your country my country our country. As a matter of fact, apart from the ruling chaps in the top or upper echelons of Nigerian politics and the civil service and the banks, no one is partaking in the acts of eating, tasting and experiencing the various aspects of enjoyment today.
But even then their various forms of enjoyment, sensual and aesthetic, at the end of the day make them strangers to themselves and to their country- folks. And they ever are afraid to be alone or to be in the streets to inhale natural air given to us by the Almighty. They also are too afraid to travel on our roads for reasons known to them and all of us. In other words, despite their most often ill- gotten wealth, they deny themselves, without really being aware of it, the freedom of a truly happy life that they have denied us all outside their community of the happily unhappy ones.
Before they realise it their own state of haplessness and despair becomes “more dreadful than ever” despite their every pretence to the contrary. Every one of them secretly struts everywhere and moves about with more than one security or protective personnel or bodyguard in or out of uniform. All of them have quietly and loudly killed themselves in their respective states of joyful foolishness. Our polifoolicians are polifoolicians indeed! Yet many persons there are who shockingly envy them.
Some among their circle are selling us a coup- bait. They have not smelled what they sighted and perceived all along as their marketplace of gold. So they are angling for a change of guard to lead and to control their envisaged new marketplace in their night and day of selfish self- preservation. No, no, no, fellow Nigerians. They ever never will be better.
Let us keep marching on in our present state of wretchedness until we embrace something new – or until something newly new embraces us. A new dawn of brightness and brightness and of more brightness and more brightness shall find us even if we cannot find it meanwhile. But can President Bola Tinubu and his genuine philosophers light this bright morning lantern for us? Can the President surprise us with a new cry of joy? Can he kill our present inglorious present and time - and re- born a new Nigerian life of giving birth designed for our patriotic pleasure?
Yes or no, we must march on – or steal a march on – to the destination. We have the steps and leaps of patriotic faith to take us there. Unpatriotic fear must abandon our faith, hope and courage of patriotic patriotism. We desire a new world. We desire a new existence. We desire a new sky. We must relive!
May Ramadan Mubarak help to usher in our yearnings and yearnings!
Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.