“Nigeria is sleek and thin, and such nations are dangerous.”
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I told you guys before…a dozen times, I think, that the day of Africa’s most populous Nation to die was imminent, that is, if she hadn’t died. I’d say, I told you this over dinner, over a game of who tells the best, salty jokes, and on that day we all heard the news declaring that men had been cleared to marry men. We had a conversation about the prospects of worldwide acceptance of such a law passing…seeing the light of day with every nation on planet Earth, that is. Yeah, that was the day I told ya’ll that Nigeria had died, and that “…rigor mortis had set in.” I said so to hold back some of the vitriolic innuendos, the crackerjack, crackpot brand of a drunken man’s take on a dead man suffering decomposition, he believed was asleep. “The smell is from him farting consistently from the refried beans and boiled eggs he had for dinner a week ago.”
That was the extent of the dilapidation in the structures, and the outright decay in the fabrics of a nation with an eclectic composition of traditionalists, religious hypocritical bigots, thieves, swindlers, practitioners of newer forms of debauchery, and zealots that evangelize untruthfully, fearlessly, with the name of God…all in their bid to blow smoke up the butts of the unthinking masses. The intoxication of the mind is a commendable goal among these imbeciles plying wildly in the corridors of power, Mosques, and Churches. The Koran is pulverized, and the Bible is screwed like a two-dollar whore. You see, God/Allah is the elixir, the preferred cocktail these Pastors and Imams serve to the fawning congregation. They take the words from acute, poker-faced pretenders and misogynists as the word of God.
What is the fascination about loving Nigeria?
The southern region is replete with these men and women. But it is in the entire swat of northern Nigeria, the Hausa/Fulani oligarchs, that have held power for the last thirty-five years, minus that spate between Obasanjo and Jonathan, that have written this mournful elegy, the lamentation hymn one hears daily. And this last February the Beast of a Nation showed its true colors. Why is anyone surprised the Beast ate her newborn right after birth? What is the fascination about loving Nigeria? Honestly? I do not love this no-electricity, no-water, no-order, gangster-filled, no-middle-class morass…big-mess-muddle bitch of a nation. “Oh, I can fall back in love with you, babe. But you must clean up…take a bath, for starters. Start smelling sweet again and see what happens.”
This man took Lagos to a bath party and schemed off an obscene amount
The funk is deep, revolting, and overwhelming. We are all drowning in your filth. Why would you allow a senile, sleepy-head octogenarian…a drug dealer, face like a puff adder, the man who stole Lagos blind, to take over the land of highly energetic youth, (in mind and body) to oversee modernity of a scorching twenty-first-century bastion? He’d steal with the same impunity of a tyrant. This man took Lagos to a bath party and schemed off an obscene amount; he is reported to be richer than some African Nations. What do you think he’d do to the Nation with no accountability? Go figure!
“Yeah, I hate you. I despise you, Nigeria.”
You looked at me with angry eyes, when I told you, you were dead. Some of you laughed at me. Some of you believed that I had lost my mind spewing such garbage…wondering where I acquired the chutzpah, the temerity, that is, to wrap the country in a burlap sac and toss her with vehemence inside a dump truck to be carted away to a public gravesite. That is where this punk-ass bitch belongs; in the depraved wells with ignominy and the minions of other evils. You are a shameless nation. Do you care? Are you worried that the rest of the world has written an epitaph to drop on your muddy-top grave? Now, you all know. I dare you to think you can right this halfway sunken ship. I double dare you to call me by that Baghdad, lady-of-the-night’s name. I am hurting, and hurting bad. I am crying for Nigeria…even with her unsolvable plethora of differences. And just yesterday, I heard some people blaming the white man for our ruin. The White Man? Oh, Hell.
♦ Don Okolo, Professor and filmmaker, is on the Editorial Board of the West African Pilot News. He is the author of many books.
