We are so stimulated with opioids of deception, our consciousness is always euphoric like the frog lolling lazily in water heated gently until boiling point when the ecstatic frog is boiled nicely to death.
Today, October 1, 2017, messages of happy independence, of joy, of hope and even strange words of pride are pouring forth across the media in celebration of 57 years of independence. But here’s the bitter truth and reason why I strenuously disagree agree with the Independence Day fest. The celebration is a huge farce, the produce of mass ecstasy, of ingesting too much magic mushrooms of propaganda and lies.
We ought declare this day, indeed all of October, a month of mourning, of sober reflections and atonement. We ought pour ashes on our heads and wear garments of shame.
For we have forsaken God Almighty to worship a god we made with our own hands: money. We have built massive factories which production lines churn out millions of dirt poor citizens every year. We bellow Allah and Jehovah and go on “holy” pilgrimages but we have no milk of human kindness so that the weak and defenseless are crushed.
Our greed and wickedness has ruined everything: morals, values, education, healthcare, electric power, roads, water supply etc. Our young gambol in crime: kidnapping, robberies, advanced fee fraud, cyber crimes, prostitution. When they protest against the tribalism, hate, joblessness driving them to despair, fear and terror, we send in the army to swipe their noisy, snotty noses of rage in mud and then we hail the new colonialists who still use military force to shut up civil disobedience.
Look at the country. See the stadiums, colleges, universities, roads, ports, factories, businesses, steel complexes, airlines and all that was managed to be built with oil money, everything. All in shameful dilapidation. Most are white dinosaurs leering scornfully at the celebration of 57 putrescent years. Today, bitterness froths at the corners of mouths and unity is frayed like a rag buffeted by Sirocco winds. Yet we celebrate. Indeed we are high on drugs.
Six years after independence in 1960, Nigeria social and economic indicators were climbing the charts of growth, besting comparatively, today’s great nations like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia among others. But our politicians squabbled instead of building shared core values to glue the nation as one. Tribal and regional devils tore up the sinews of nationhood.
Then the army came in with guns and coups. Nigeria stopped growing. It is today a stunted hippopotamus. Since 1967, when soldiers consolidated hold on political power until today, Nigeria has been ravaged, raped and reversed into deep throes of underdevelopment. Hordes of rogue elders and leaders, military and civilian, who pillaged the country and who still steal, taught Nigerians to steal.
Shameless men who dumped values and compassion and fed citizens with the bile of religious, tribal, regional hatred. They raid the treasuries and like foolish slaves expend their national wealth on luxury splurging: private luxury jets and yachts. They transfer billions of the nation’s money into their personal offshore bank accounts, into real estates in their former colonial master’s country. They live criminal lifestyles of the idle rich. Such idiocy.
This country is riotously managed mostly by the same group of ex-military generals. The men who continue to force their failed perception of governance down our throats, their jaundiced view of civil liberties, democratic freedoms and national unity as murderous burdens on us. They define their destruction of mores and values as basis for communal coexistence. They continue to rule directly or by proxy but their produce is corrosive and corrupting.
They have perfected the art of deception and vile propaganda, such as large numbers of Nigerians love to hear in their ignorance, lack of attention to details, unquestioning partisanship and mob thirst for blood. These vile propaganda, untruths, manipulation of the facts and fake promises, from since coup plotting days, to deal with institutionalized corruption over the decades are the cocktails of hallucinogenic drugs that keeps us on a psychedelic roller coaster through the past decades.
We are fed consistently these drugs of James Bond style stories of arrested corrupt elites to seized stolen loot to claims of huge jobs creation and poverty alleviation, and boy, do we sniff the drugs. We get so high that even in our poverty we hail our oppressors for giving us hope which never comes. Hope has not come in 50 years and is not likely to come.
Poverty will continue to mushroom, health, power, water, roads will remain jokes. Corruption will remain unabated. The socioeconomic structure mocking equity and allowing rogue leadership will be in place. But the common peoples, addicts of their drugs, will continue to die unsong and in penury.
All the same, if in spite of all of the above, you still wish to be high on the psychedelic drugs, then do take this one: HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY.