Doors and windows locked give the illusion of absence. My feet turned heavy. I chose not to go back from where I was coming from even though I dragged with me a nagging element of blame. Nigeria, submerged in political discussions and malaise while our border states and girls are there entrenched in deathly throes.
I know the details of this murderous rage will come out in its Byzantine, complex details with time – that much I am very sure of.
I look at the impossibility of the continuity of peace after 2015 if either side of the great political divide wins the election; this fact stares us at the face with fear. The feudal cabals have, as they continue to proclaim, a monopoly of power, and some of the extreme southern elites and former militants are holding their grounds against this anomaly, even when politically, some of our men are ignorantly conspiring with the cabal: their real agenda will come out in due course.
Threats are being issued from here and there; exposing their ungodly ambitions openly. We all know our relationship with the feudal cabal will always come to nothing as from the ’66 pogroms but we don’t ever learn. From inception – the wrong amalgamation, our times together as a nation have provided moments of unmatched pain for us down south.
History has not forgotten the senseless overthrow of the duly elected democratic government by Buhari, the wastefulness of the IBB regime; institutionalizing corruption, horrors and dark days of terror during the Abacha monstrous, draconian regime…
Those days are still within our contemplative vistas. Like the Ugandan buffoon, the over-feed child, Idi Amin Dada, the realities of the shameful memories of the Abacha regime are strewn across wailing walls of our collective experience that cannot easily be forgotten.
Sometimes, I mentally abandon our present state of the nation to get some respite: too many issues to contend with within our nation space, all fall within unacceptable boundaries. I abandon myself from sad news of deaths; from either bomb blast or organized massacres.
I abandon myself from threats from either sides of the political divide, the tribal divide, religious divide and other intentional destructive divides. I sit listening to our inabilities to coexist as a nation, even though it is no go area at our National Conference. You can sense that unspoken issue in the essence of our furtive stares. I am always flushed into the main stream of thoughts as to why should the issue not be a matter to be discussed.
Are relationships and unions not dependant on adjustable agreements? I try to recollect that animated face and voice that would be strong enough, at the national stage to be able to proclaim and say the truth. Let’s go apart! And when it is said, let nothing be added. Until we address this issue, I am afraid, we shall continue to dwell in that indefinable sense of lose.
Let it be recalled that like a large portion of those who have good conscience, I carry the calvary of truth within me – truth being my most affected experience.
The patchwork called Nigeria, from the estuaries of the Niger-Delta to the sand dunes and Boko Haram enclaves attest her origin distinctly to fraudulence. Never has a relationship sound so fake, so wrong, so ritualistic in mandate and so unnecessary.
As a nation, we seem to dance with sedate but wrong steps; such unusual ceremonial steps that beat all useful imaginations. What for? What are we doing? Who do we think we are? Why are we preserving our voices to say the word which would varnish this our home? Why are we acting like life exiles? Is this our home? What defines a home? We look like people who had once died in a faraway land and had reincarnated to a new earth, doing everything possible to hold on to it with clandestine intentions.
We are aware whereas that the hundred years of miscalculation of a nation put together by the spouse of a colonial master is thinning down over the years into a fizzling disagreement.
Years of political, religious and social disagreements is making us drift apart, then why are we holding on to the breaking totem pole?
As I have said before, there are stubborn retentions from our history – such a northern reinforced supremacy over our collective landscape. A writer from the north wrote recently that their mandate in the country is to rule, being what they know best.
Such an attachment of descending sentiment! I am wondering which type of clan of creative artist such a hopeless treacherous writer could come from, and the mother who could have bequeathed her breast to him for his upbringing. His long write-up was however the voice of the northern cabal and elite; that rasping voice which is intended to entice and arrest the violence of the northern thugs.
As sparse and lithe that voice may be, it has an entrenching message to the almajiris, the Boko Haramites, the religious fanatics and zealots of their own making, waifs and strays, even the homeless. They are all ready to spill innocent bloods from Abuja through Kaduna to Abuja for what they know nothing about.
It was in a fleeting moment of revelation when I got to the house which was blinded by locked doors and windows I earlier mentioned. The occupant, an army veteran during the civil war, was trapped in a restfulness when his thoughtfulness appeared to prevail over all his other concerns.
His eyes deeply set in the future of the country which seem at the verge of disintegration. This dissatisfied being looked bodily worried from the ferment of what was eminent.
Except me, there was no other audience in the room with him. I thought the room was peopled by restless faces – faces he saw during the war; soldiers dying, children with kwashiorkor, women fleeing the theatre, guns removing lives, men with battle cries and battle deaths…
In that faraway look, you must know the feeling of discontentment in him, a replica of the woes of the nation. Yet, he was powerless in affecting the changes at the national level which could dispel the impending doom. Who would listen to this old soldier?
There is no time between now and 2015 when the elections would start and be won and lost. The mocking immensity of the task of ‘keeping the nation one’ would forever render us useless, tormented, impotent and feeble. I here deep inside me, loud drums, drums of disunited sounds even when they come from measured distances. I find a private sympathy for those who say, without being serious, that the divisibility of Nigeria should not be discussed. Why not? I find this empathy necessary, mostly the way this forlorn hope touch me in a remote space. One must consent to kindred spirit, kinship and unions, not forced against his will through whims and caprices.
I fear for the public display of weakness at the Confab where the issue of break-up is being evaded continuously even when we have it in our individual minds.
We are collectively being detached from the nation, from this progressively depleted ‘win and roast’ landscape of a country. We must now begin to be bereaved for its divisibility, if not through blood bath, then through a consenting agreement.
