This dying behemoth…

They wanted to be billionaires. However, unlike Frank Edoho’s popular television show, ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ they didn’t think like one.

Perhaps, because they wanted billions instead of millions, they needed to make a higher sacrifice. Sadly, theirs was an unusual sacrifice. Not the sacrifice of hard work or supplication unto God. Rather they sought to appease the god of Mammon.

A dead god made relevant by deceptive shamans steeped in primitive and inhuman dealings. So, the priest of Mammon sent them. Get me the private parts of a septuagenarian woman in Umunze, Orumba South Council Area of Anambra State. Get her nipples, ears, and fingers too. Bring them to my shrine and at the snap of my fingers you would become as rich as Aliko Dangote, Femi Otedola, and Tony Elumelu combined.

Lazy fools, they never reckoned with when Dangote took off with a small seed capital borrowed from his uncle. They didn’t reckon with when smart Elumelu was a penny-pinching staff of a bank and worked his ass threadbare till he used Standard Trust Bank, STB, a David, to swallow the United Bank of Africa, UBA, one of Nigeria’s goliath banks. They also ignored the days when Otedola just hustled, selling diesel and caring for garments at his laundromat. Now they see only the glory and glamour and drool enviously, ignoring the foundation.

Without thinking, they embraced the fiendish proposition and went after the hapless mama.

The chief suspect, one Onyebuchi Ezeh, a native of Abakaliki in Ebonyi State, was worse than Judas Iscariot, the betrayer of his master, Jesus. He was the old woman’s domestic staff. He took two other black-hearted friends to slice off and harvest the vital sexual organs and some other parts of her body from his madam and left her to die. What excruciating pain the woman must have gone through. Imagine seeing your death with your own eyes. However, Providence had not done with her yet, as she was able to raise the alarm that led to her rescue.

Brutish Eze was soon arrested. He confessed to the crime, saying an herbalist sent them to get the needed organs of the septuagenarian to make them billionaires.

The love of money has made our society mad. It is the twin love for money and power that has crippled this country. That is why in both high and low places, people clink glasses of blood, toasting ephemeral success. But Dame Patience Jonathan’s lamentation still rings a bell…’ this blood you are sharing, there is God o!’

Nigeria is overflowing with greedy and avaricious men, who rule the waves. That Umunze mama, is she not like Nigeria? We have scavengers everywhere, lurking in the wings at the corridors of power like vultures about to devour the carcass of a dying country.

Never is such savagery ever recorded in history that a country as blessed as Nigeria would be cursed with wantonly profligate rulers, who are imperial kleptomaniacs.  They are so schooled in the art of sleaze that they have no other identity. In fact, if I were a scientist, I would have so much wished to put the brain of our political leaders under a microscope and do a thorough study to ascertain if it is actually blood that flows in there and whether they have corruption in their genes and DNA.

As a history student in secondary school, I remember the scramble and partition of Africa. I remember how the thieving Europeans tore the soul of Africa to shreds among themselves and pillaged all that the continent had for their own good.

Today they tread on Africa like scum whereas they owe all their assumed glory to a deprived Africa. They even told us that Mungo Park discovered River Niger as if people living there then did not know about the river but we believed them. Indeed, Africa deserves apologies from Europe and should be paid reparations.

The Europeans fed us all manner of lies to make their looting easy. They caused Africans to sell Africans to them as slaves and taught us strange ways of governance.

Now our people learned fast from them and that is why every four years they mount the soapbox to sell us dummy promises and we fall for it. These politicians have since discovered our gullibility and foolishness like the oyibo did and convinced us about the balderdash, concerning the Niger River. They have successfully partitioned Nigerians across dubious party lines as the oyibo did in Africa. They have twisted the minds of our sons and daughters and sold them into slavery, making them thugs, killing each other while the sponsors of this violence sit cozily in their palatial homes, popping champagne.

Why must I kill you, my brother, for the joy of our common oppressor? Let us pause and ask for the whereabouts of their own sons and daughters. Their offspring are never at freedom square because they are already free courtesy of their fathers. Let us ask if we were born for street wars whereas their children are pampered in choice cities of the world? Let us ask why their children never trudge the scorched earth under sweltering sun in search of elusive jobs because milky jobs are already reserved for them even while in kindergarten.

Do not think you are foolish, believing that any of these politicians love you any more than the rest. But for very rare exceptions, their purpose is the same; they want to lord it over us and snitch our common patrimony for themselves.

Of course, we have prayed for a change but whether the change has come or is coming is dancing in the wind. Let this misdirected conflict end. This is not about Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Peter Obi or Atiku Abubakar. This is not about Yoruba, Igbo or Arewa. This is all about the soul of Nigeria.

Tinubu’s presidency is a national mandate; so is Obi’s or Atiku’s. Why then do we tribalise this and inflict wounds that may be long in healing on our psyche long after 2023 has come and gone?

Those attacking the Igbo in Lagos are making a grave mistake and, in fact, giving the people some air of omnipotence.

There is no way the Igbo alone could have caused the defeat of Tinubu and Buhari’s All Progressives Congress, APC, without the active and unmasked collaboration of the Yoruba youths. Setting their business premises on fire is most uncharitable because, for the victims, it is double jeopardy, bearing the brunt of misrule and now being hunted down by their own co-sufferers.

The north is trying to set off a tribal conflict between the Igbo and the Yoruba; this is sad. The Igbo have been in Lagos for several years to hustle for a living. It is preposterous to now say they want to become omonile; it is not possible and we all know it.

Everywhere is heated up. Now we know that the behemoth called Nigeria is made of wax and melting. Soon all shall come to naught if not remedied. The worst ‘ojoro’ is when one plays himself a game and is paid by an enemy to commit suicide or murder.

The gladiators have gone to court but I wish they did not. This is because even if the courts turn a new leaf and pass what many may perceive as a just judgment, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has already left a deep cut on the neck of Nigeria. One only hopes that it is not eventually chopped off, and may whoever triumphs at the end of the day still find a country to preside over. Nevertheless, let us await the outcome in peace; no politician is worth dying for.

NB: PLEASE, could someone kindly tell Nigerians what the government cashless or naira redesign policy is about? Where is our president; where are the Central Bank governor, Godwin Emefiele, and the garrulous presidential aides?

This is the only government in the world that gets high on inflicting pain on the people it supposedly serves, and would say nothing. That is why frustration is driving Nigerians onto the paths of moving locomotives.

May God hasten the healing of the injured and comfort the families that lost dear ones in the Lagos bus-train disaster; Aaaameeen!!!.