You can’t plan anything these days. If you close your eyes for just a few minutes, by the time you open it, it’s a brand-new day. The only exception is when you’re offering a thankless job or suffering, those are the only times the clock of life takes on the character of a snail in a hurry.
It looks like yesterday, when we were saying happy New Year and counting down the remaining days of our grand tormentor, Muhammadu Buhari. By the time you’re reading this, the chronometer tallying our lives away would have accounted for the last 52 weeks in the cycle of life. That is when it dawns on you that while hardship has remained a common denominator of our lives, a new administration headed by Bola Ahmed Tinubu is in the saddle.
Yes, we have a new master servant in the Rock who, while increasing our suffering tells us that he is working in our favour a euphemism for increasing the burden of the poor. We used to think that the character of Rehoboam the son of Solomon was fictional. It was he in times of yore that campaigned on the promise to chastise his subjects with scorpions instead of whips.
General Buhari used to beat us with whips and lashes, yet we convinced ourselves that he was the best to ruin us for two solid terms before backing his party’s candidate. Tinubu did not promise us a pie in the sky. No; he promised to continue where Buhari left off and yet, according to INEC our electoral umpire, and the observers, majority of us gave him the required votes to become the best among us even when we barely knew his evolution. The courts affirmed that position in a manner that seems to affirm that even an alien is qualified for that position. Trust us, we have spent the last couple of days talking about how some of our citizens fake products. The irony is smiling back at us.
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Tinubu has not wasted time continuing where Buhari has left off. With the stroke of presidential indelible ink, he erased the phantom fuel subsidy they claimed we enjoy, sending the prices of commodities in a tailspin. As our new doctor, Tinubu affirms this is the bitter medication that we needed to swallow for a fever-free tomorrow.
If you ask those that have been around long enough, they swear that this is a worn-out sermon preached by every priest in the highest office since the days when Ibrahim Babangida corned us with his toothy smile. Babangida is still with us and lately swore off a cool record in history although its writers would mainly disagree.
With the price of everything including oxygen hitting the roofs, it is not surprising that only the toughest and the luckiest have waded through the storms of Nigerian life with Tinubu’s slogan of renewed hope. While the poor have been advised to keep tightening the noose on their necks, profligate spending by the ruining class has continued under our new Commander-in-Chief.
He recently ordered us to shut up after we complained that the innocent were being wantonly decimated by those employed to protect them. To show that it’s none of our business, he lately appended his presidential seal on the promotion of the highest number of Generals by any nation not officially at war.
The new brooms have been telling us to look up to the skies for the abundance of goodies. Unfortunately, all we can see is the floods of disaster running over the deserts of despair. Emefiele, the properly maligned CBN governor regained freedom as it becomes apparent that even in jail, his damned policies were still having ripple effects. His garlanded successor is not proving any better than his predecessor in managing the nation’s cash flow.
While regaling us with what we know about the sleave grease of his predecessor’s phantom poverty alleviation programmes, the new brooms are sweeping under the rug, their own phantom poverty sleaze train. The latest of this being the impromptu palliathief announced for those using transport on the few motorable federal roads during the Yuletide season, an off-budget spending. Workers malign the regime with claims that they only received one payment of a six-month promise of N35,000 promised to cushion the effect of fuel subsidy. This may be the last we hear of the issue except that the cash is probably earning interest in some top official’s account.
While this is going on, the legislature designed to check and balance have cruised home this season in their multi-billion Naira sports utility vehicles based on the argument that if and whenever they needed to travel the poor’s roads, they’d need a vehicle with good suspension to cushion against the gullies on those roads. Craters exhibiting their dereliction of duty.
As we count the misdemeanours of the presidency on our lives, those living outside the sphere of presidential influence are mostly groaning under the yoke of local emperors. The masters are constantly under the threats of superior Godfathers. One governor has resorted to arson to remain in office.
In the wars against the hoi-polloi, there are no cities of refuge to hide from the other scourges plaguing them. Those not constantly under the threat of ritualists are having to ward off kidnappers with phylacteries of hope and parchments of prayer with very little success. Organ harvesters are in the mix taking advantage of the prevailing situation to make quick money.
In spite of these, survivors count their luck daily, being alive. It’s a miracle the nation is still standing. Many have to choose which of their masters to obey – the governors threatening hell and brimstone or insurgents declaring on point of death that work days are work-free days without remuneration. The opportunists declaring every tribe and tongue an independent republic within a Republic or the governors elected or foisted on them by those who sit on the bench while voting takes place.
The cord of unity tying Nigeria rips daily sustained not by fixers but wishers. Seemingly marooned in its own internal turbulence, Nigeria hangs on a thread and breathes on prayers. We are a nation that prays to the gods whose injunctions we contravene to rule in our favour.
In spite of it all, we listen to our spiritual overlords, who make lofty declarations that imbue us with hope that the coming year 2024 would be the ultimate year of redemption. Everyone wants a better Nigeria, but very few are actually ready to work or do what is required to get us there. The clerk makes files disappear; the security man takes a bribe to close his eyes. Law officers are influenced by gifts to pervert the course of justice and courts take orders to upturn law, logic common sense and justice.
If we make it to next Tuesday, we’d be ushering in a new date on a fresh calendar that will soon unfurl for us, what we make of it. The fault is not with the gods, it’s in our characters and attitude. If we embrace change, it will happen. Seasons greetings.
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