Nigerians look around! Can you see
common men and women amid the care
and struggle of daily life? Can you see
people in the jar of the noisy streets and amid
the squalor where want hides? Can you see the
wrong that produces inequality?
Can you see the wrong in the midst of
abundance that tortures men with want or
harries them with fear of want? Can you see the
wrong that stunts you physically, degrades you
intellectually, and distorts you morally?

How can you cope for so long with rulers who
have been rejected longest of time by God and
by the times? For long and especially the last
four years, you have succumbed to the variety of
forms of manipulative communication at the
disposal of your rulers. You have become more
indulgent of politicians who spin the truth and
tell you bare-faced lies.
Your government is working for the few rich.
Your country has been transformed into an
Orwellian dystopian society. Your rulers use fear
to nourish their insatiable appetite for power,
control, and money. Propaganda and corruption
are being used to dumb you down.
Your police have become militarized. Your
country has been turned into a police state in
which your government exercises rigid and
repressive control over your social, economic,
and political life. You no longer have true
representation in government. You lack safety
and security and your freedom is threatened not
by outside enemy but your own government.
You’re on your knees daily begging your elected
government for water to drink, electricity to use,
roads to travel on, jobs for the legion of your
unemployed sons and daughters, and hospitals
to treat the sick. Your pensioners are dying while
fighting for their pensions to be paid. You’re
satisfied with crumbs from the looters of your
treasury.
How in the world do you tolerate a government
well known for its crafted deception and free-
floating relationship with truth?
You seem to agree and enjoy distortion,
insinuation, misleads, and blatant lies of your
government even when your government lie
about the definition of lie. Do you know what
happened to the report of National Jamboree
nicknamed National Conference? You have been
indoctrinated to tailored disinformation of your
government. Why are you easily intimidated by
your government and at the same time defend
the very people who oppress you? You have
jettisoned your dignity and self-respect in
accommodating a culture of lie.
Why have you allowed those you employed –
your president, your governors, your legislators,
and your local government chairmen, turn you
into the most wretched beggars ever known in
the history of your nation? Why have you
granted – happily I might say – leisure and
affluence to your oppressors without a protest or
a fight? Though you are locked in a death
grapple, nothing your rulers offer or are willing to
offer mitigate your suffering.
Never challenged, the insidious linking together
of special privileges, the unjust outright private
ownership of your natural or public resources,
monopolies, that produce unfair domination and
autocracy. Can’t agree on the definition of
corruption and can’t discern lie at the heart of
your troubles. Rather, you’re content with the
clown civilization foisted on you.
A very powerful few are in possession of your
God given resources – the land, the oil, and
other riches in addition to other privileges. Yet,
without objection you accept the arrangement as
being sanctioned by God like Yorubas will say:
“Amuwa Olorun ni.”
You have willingly become the wretched of the
earth in the midst of plenty. You have relegated
yourselves into object of compulsory charity. You
are made to support the tyranny of your rulers
by just shutting up, accept, and acquiesce and
go with the status quo. You are made to pay for
their luxurious and reckless life and in exchange
you become paupers denied the opportunity and
dignity of earning your own decent living.
Despite your galling and destructive living
conditions, you continually yield your sovereignty
to the few elected tyrants you put in office. You
are scared to death to challenge the great and
unjust profiteering of your rulers. They owe you
three, six, nine months salaries while donating
billions to Jonathan’s campaign. Where is the
eruption of your raw rage?
You accept involuntary poverty, and other socio-
economic plagues that prevent you from
attaining your maximum potential. Degraded,
squeezed, and pummeled, you have become the
poster child for want and shame.
One wonders: why in a land so bountifully
blessed with enough and more than enough for
all, should there be such poverty and inequality?
Such heaped wealth interlocked with such deep
and debasing want? Why in the midst of such
superabundance should strong men vainly look
for work? Why should your women faint with
hunger? Why should your children spend the
morning of life wandering in the streets and
scavenging the refuse pit for food?
Your rulers counted on your mental indolence.
They exploited your apathy to the fullest. You
freely and obediently conform to their abuses and
political malpractices and other inhuman
treatment you’re subjected to. You’re tricked,
cajoled, ridiculed, battered, and smilingly
surrender to the injustices that toppled ancient
Rome.
By the way, where are your Chibok Girls?
For keeping up with the “darkness of error” and
for being enchanted with many fallacies and all
assorted abuses rained on you by your
government to widen your suffering and smiling,
and for accepting confusion and deception of a
tyrannical ruling class elected by you – 170
million dumb Nigerians – you’re my people of
the year 2014!
A lie can travel half way around the world while
the truth is putting on its shoes. – Mark Twain
The writer is Bayo Oluwasanmi. Email:
byolu@aol.com

hmmm

Thanks for this article. I share the same sentiment.

Our rulers are a reflection of us.