The barbarians are returning. The dead are rising from their graves. Hydra-headed monsters are in mutating births. Promises are becoming daggers weaving uncontrollably outside their safety scabbards. Chaff trashed out of the wheat last night are finding their ways back to the harvest basket, with different nomenclature. Those same old words we heard yesterday, right after martial music jingled us out of our sweaty slumbers are been repeated. Who says Nigeria does not recycle, we do but in a different way. We recycle our past tyrannical rulers. The despots and dream killers of yesterday are finding their ways out of retirement (recycling bin).

I have abstained from reading political news about Nigeria. Not that I do not care about my "beloved country". It is just that after each news I go into a state of comatose depression. But my brother, he is an avid political analyst, and for him to feed his passion, he reads every story or news that has to do with Nigeria politics. The more he reads these out-of-the-ordinary news the more he gets "pissed". We share almost everything, so naturally he shares these depressive political news by forwarding every one of them to me. I have no choice but to read and swallow hard, not unlike cloroquine during malaria bouts.

The one he sent me recently finally confirmed my belief that while the rest of the world is building a progressive bridge to the future, Nigeria is furiously patching a retrogressive bridge to the past. We are matching backward rapidly and successfully too. The Guardian Online reports a newly formed political party in Nigeria recently; UNDP (United Nigeria Democratic Party). The forces behind this wonderful futuristic and avant-garde move are former military Vice-President Augustus Aikhomu, some PDP rejects or drop-outs, ‘ex-militaricians’, and a host of other former ministers and ambassadors. The image of the evil genius himself, IBB is cunningly reflected in the new party. But nobody is boldly proclaiming his membership… yet.

The reason for this political party according to the report is:

" Two years on, it is regrettable that all the three political parties involved in governance of the country have been unable to fulfil significantly, the electoral promises they made to the people in 1999 in the various tiers of government".

A profound reason to set up a new political party, one would say. But wait, look who is talking!

These are "men with low mentality", to borrow from the immortal repertoire of Fela Anikulapo Kuti.

The last time I heard similar words were in August of 1985. That was the coup announcement that brought Ibrahim Babangida and later Aikhomu to power. These two individuals ruled or should I say, misruled Nigeria for almost a decade. I do not need to enumerate the debacle that befell Nigeria during the maradonic years of Ibrahim Babangida. Nigeria was plundered into blindness. Life became so miserable

to a level never before attained. People disappeared unaccounted for. Mass executions in broad daylight were carried out like in Mafia movies. While the president and these new self-acclaimed messiahs were fattening their foreign bank accounts, Nigeria disintegrated further into the valley of disillusionment.

When I look around me in my exiled, now adopted country, I see a million fragments of frustration and broken dreams, all victims of our atrocious government. Nigeria witnessed the greatest wave of brain drain during the nefarious and nebulous regime of IBB/Aikhomu.

They want to go home, but home is a figment of imagination in the mind of the dispossessed. There is no home for them anymore; their homes have been decimated by the military reign of IBB and his cohorts.

Abacha applied the final nail to the coffin.

The mother they left behind has been raped by hardship, and the young women have resorted to prostitution to escape the reality of perpetual poverty. This situation brings to mind, "Child’s Parliament", a poem by Chenjerai Hove:

"Mother sat

with hunger on her eyes

and soaked love in her eyes.

Then the flies came to sing nasty songs to her ears.

We listened to the interrupted tale of hunger and strife…"

For eight years Babangida with Aikhomu enabling, turned Nigeria upside down like a pyramid. Now they have the nerve to blame a government that has only been in power for two years? Is two years enough to judge a government? A government that has four years is being judged after twenty-four months. There is no question, the present government is rudderless. But the kettle has no business calling the pot black.

When a thief shouts accusations louder than the owner, there is something screwy somewhere.

Something is definitely wrong with that country called Nigeria.

Can someone please tell these people that the present government is trying to sew the tattered country they left behind in the whirlwind of their tyranny?

Can some one tell these barbarians to stop the distractions they are causing?

Another reason they gave for the new political party is "the nation has never experienced the kind of total collapse of safety and security of life and property as we are going through today…" I have one and only one question for the returning vultures. What happened to Dele Giwa during their regime? Which of the excellencies amongst them ordered and financed a letter bomb, in a country that has no factory for ordinary ‘knockout’? The country is a whole lot safer now than the IBB days, when orphans were made on daily basis and widows’ cries sang dirge in our daily lives. All of a sudden the country is no longer safe for living. Could some one remind them that the Nigerian armed robbers of today are PhD. holders, scientists, lawyers and doctors who have no other means of survival. Could someone tell these myopia personified that because of the IMF loan that went into their various personal bank accounts, our future as a country is completely mortgaged, with a skyhigh interest rate.

That despotic bug of greediness has beaten them again; to scratch the itch they have resorted to discrediting a ruling government in order to whip up sentiment among the struggling and dying masses. A military man will always be a military man. The same reason they gave for taking power from Buhari and Idiagbon goverment is what they are using now to cower the masses. The only pity about this is that the hungry people of Nigeria, the long forgotten masses, and the downtrodden paupers will be matched like cows to abattoir, to vote them into Aso rock. Oh, Aso rock, how they miss the good old days of that cozy bunker where "see no evil hear no evil massacre" of Nigeria was carried out with impunity.

I hope the citizens of Nigeria will wipe the dew of deception from their eyes and realize that this is a con game. This political party is fraudulent as long as it has the name of ex-dictators appended to it. Nigerians should not give a free ride to IBB and his highway robbers to Aso rock. They have nothing to offer but pain and pestilence. They know nothing else. The vultures of bedlam are running low on prey; it is about time they prowl the national coffer and wet their talons and beaks with innocent blood. Don’t be fooled.

I am totally and whole-heartedly for a multi-party state. New political parties are welcomed. But we should not put our new wine in old leaking bottles. We should not store our harvest in the wings of locust. Nigeria should not allow the lion to herd her flocks. We need to see a new generation of ideologically sane political leaders. IBB, Aikhomu and all the old ‘money bags’of the new political party are simply not it. They are masquerades whose spirits have lost their potency, their dance is old, therefore their efficacies are questionable. They are cancer on the skin of our nation, they are locusts in our farms and they are vultures hovering over our dying psyche. Their setting up of a political party just to intimidate the current government is tantamount to political insurrection and should be treated as felony. They should be given the taste of their own medicine, arraign them, try them in kangaroo courts and store them in Kikikiri like sardines.

Old despots like Ibrahim Babangida, his man Friday, Aikhomu and their cohorts should not be players anymore in the national politics of that broken nation. They should be spectators from maximum prisons.