ColumnsDon OkoloOpinionEpic “Dear John” Philosophy And the Unresolved Nigeria’s Ugly Ethnic Cracks

“Dear John, You Have Left Me With No Choice”

Ten thousand men, and it could be more were determined to liberate France on D-Day. Those soldiers that survived the carnage could have said a couple of Our Fathers and maybe, just maybe, another couple of Hail Marys…that is, if they had any love for the Mother of God.

The Germans themselves were lying in decapitating waste in their vast beach dug-out, in the thousands, as were the allied forces floating dead about the sea and on the shoreline. The destruction was mutually assured. But one side came out on top. The haggard, beleaguered few that survived this onslaught sat in relative comfort to regain their wits…that is, if their minds hadn’t left them altogether.

They smoked and ran through rations in tin cans believing they had gone through the worst possible barrage…and that nothing would come close to the death of them from future encounters of what’s left of the war. Well, until the Staff Sergeant pulls up next to him and hands him a letter addressed to him. He is beaming from ear to ear. His manhood stirs because he recognizes the name of the sender. His heart begins to pound furioso. And it was with the same exact intensity as it pumped on the very moment he was about to lose his virginity in that makeshift burrow with his girlfriend, Jolene Joplin. He would never forget that haphazard, hurried encounter in a fifty-cent motel room in Constitution, Texas three years prior.

In the classical American yarn, Gerald Scott had gotten a ‘Dear John Letter’. It is always heart breaking to have walked through the gallows of certain death and then be felled by an arrow through the heart.

The letter in his hands was from; you guessed it, the redheaded bombshell, Jolene Joplin. Private Gerald Scott licked his lower lip and tore the letter open and began to read. By the third line, he is getting it…and his calming heart had begun to race again…and tears were beginning to run down his cheeks, and then finally, the letter falls off his hands. Jolene Joplin had not died; she had met a man and had fallen in love. In the classical American yarn, Gerald Scott had gotten a ‘Dear John Letter’. It is always heart breaking to have walked through the gallows of certain death and then be felled by an arrow through the heart.

And so, it is with Nigeria. You are probably wondering why that country hadn’t risen from her civil war years and moved on like the Americans did. The southern American States were crushed, and so were the southern Nigerian States. These two wars happened exactly one hundred years apart. It seems to me the Americans lived on the tenets of ‘no victors, and no vanquished’, because they successfully shoved what tribal echoes that were brewing to the side and truly moved on.

In Nigeria, it ain’t so. Seven years after the doggone Colonial Masters left, we went to war…clearly as proof we couldn’t govern ourselves. I am not apportioning blame here. It wouldn’t make sense to dwell on who was on the right side of things. It isn’t why I am writing this. I am simply bemoaning the catastrophic style of governance allocated only to the southeasterners…those that were crushed. Fifty years and counting, and there is no sign this will someday come to an end: You the people in power are tightening the noose. You are relentless, merciless, and it appears you have a hole in your collective soul, and couldn’t be feeling the slow death dance in her wicked tap-dance.

Do not be fooled: That rigor mortis is a fluke; it could be, and would be loosened to breed her a formidable polity you couldn’t handle. You see, the trajectory could be rewritten and redirected, and the simmering under the calm waters would be forced to abandon her five-star General’s warpath, and join the program. It is an option you must consider.

Do you blame the IPOB? If you want them arrested, do it peacefully, by opening up ports of entry…like the dredging of waterways in Portharcourt and Warri for starters…and we will leave Lagos to Lagosians…where they wouldn’t be clamoring for us to leave their stead.

This is why there are people calling for a break up…because you have refused to change. Do you blame the IPOB? If you want them arrested, do it peacefully, by opening up ports of entry…like the dredging of waterways in Portharcourt and Warri for starters…and we will leave Lagos to Lagosians…where they wouldn’t be clamoring for us to leave their stead.

You let the life-giving River Niger dry out, because you refused to dredge it, and inadvertently killed off all life in it, along those of the municipalities that depend on it for sustenance. You will be held accountable for the death of Nature in this one instance. Oh, you pathetic fools! YOU STONES, YOU BLOCKS, YOU WORSE THAN SENSELESS THINGS, OH YOU HARD HATS, YOU CRUEL MEN OF NIGERIA. (Shakespeare).

You let us crowd into hospital hallways where we are treated with placebos and prayers all over the Eastern Region. You let us visit dilapidated hole-in-the-wall dispensaries. Damn you, you long-horned lizards that travel to far-out places of the world to remove the scales in your soured, algid prone skins. You roll of pond scum that pilfers the food in your own plates. Where do these impudent natures of yours come from? You swim deep in callaloo soup and not even an empty, sucked out crab shell would you knowingly let touch the grounds on the southeastern front.

Would someone please stop this Jankara bus…this four-wheeled, smoke-filled Jagwuda death trap to nowhere. I want to get off. I am done!!!

♦ Film-Maker, Professor Don Okolo, is on the Editorial Board of the West African Pilot News. He is an author of many books.

 

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