Never Again!
By
Welcome to a nation without memory. Come and perceive a nation without truth. Here, appraise a nation without rationality. Here, see a nation without enlightenment. Pray, do you not see the nation without thought, without a guide, without a dream! Again, you are welcome to an isle in orphaned totality.
Indeed, it is true, there is a disturbing characterisation about the Nigerian content. For the nation is ill-loved, deserted, unaccommodated in patriotic instinctiveness. Nigeria is bestirred in virtual mercenary universality. Here, everyone hurries in unhidden selfish embrace. It is as if right from the cradle, the nation — if that is what you must call it — is stricken by unconscionable self-centredness. Again, for here, everyone hustles in sweeping prowling decisiveness. It is as if there is a patent adumbration of a blind self-pursuit at the detriment of the nationl character. Again, it is as if everyone is resolved in stripping the abandoned nation of whatever is derivable from the fruitional earth. So, basically, take what you can get, slash and cut your way through the Nigerian cornucopia in prodigal glee.
Here, there is hardly a restraining moral. Here, there is hardly a conscionable reference. Here, there is hardly a believing pulchritude that traditionally defines the essence of nationhood. Presently, this charcterisation of an alienated state is now being heightened more than ever before, even now at this hour in this infant democracy.
There is this mercenary stirring now in the benighted and the primitive unthoughtfulness presently cultivating the murderous tyrant. How can they forget so soon? How can the blind campaigners pretend oblivion, distort the truth of yesterday, defiant of the horror perpetrated by an evil mind? Again, how can they forget the murderous dribbling of a decidedly vicious man who rioted upon the Nigerian landscape in insidious mischievousness? How can the mercantile campaigners pretend that the evil of yesterday never happened, that the miseries foisted upon this nation by the pseudo, unproven general never happened?
Frankly, the treacherous campaigners know better. The fact is, they don’t really care. What concerns them about the murdered journalist cruelly dispatched through the awesome novelty of a packaged killer? Nothing. Just another life unpitied in the violent fury of the Nigerian drama!
Again, what concerns the mercenary campaigners about the massive, riotous gutting of the national treasury? Nothing. Just a game of chance. The treasury, they insist, belongs to no one. It is just another abandoned fruitional orphan in the mercenary wasteland of the Nigerian content.
Thus, in their indifference to the murderousness of the evil one, in their brazen solicitousness for the return of the despiteous, equivocating tyrant, in their audacious stampede to hurry the orphaned nation to the darkness of yesterday, the mercantile campaigners are furiously affirming the stark depravity of the Nigerian content. They are telling the few, the thoughtful, that this isle does not deserve an enlightened content. The hideous campaigners who even at this democratic hour, are feverishly hurling the perverted treasury upon the tarnished landscape in a deliberate compromising crusade are declaring to everyone else that the nation is but a chimera, that those who cradle the Nigerian Union are but dreamers latched to delusionary blindness.
The contemptible campaigners may be right after all. For how do you explain the murderous treachery of the expressional rain that spelt death, chaos and doom upon the Lagosian landscape? How do you explain the well-scripted anarchical agenda to dismantle the infant liberty?
But in truth, the evil campaigners can only triumph merely in the restricted orbit of the primitive desert. Let them have the dunes and the wastes of their manufactured Araby. Let their beloved murderous tyrant preside over their ancestral wilderness. But not here. Never again will he stifle this verdant glow of enlightened vastness.
Never again must the treasured liberty be allowed to be stolen by the representatives of the bestial horde who pretend piety and the sternness of religious ordering even while they riot in debauchery and hate. Never again will the righteous troop allow a saving of the democratic barricades by the inglorious infidels who in their blind greed and arrogance presume a proprietary control over the Nigerian Union. Never again will the progressive throng succumb to the cheap blackmail of befuddled savages who left power just in the last hour but are yet storming and trampling, hollering and swaying in the dark desert, manufacturing the bogey of marginalisation even when they still stir in undeserved privileges.
Feb 2002