*WAR WITHIN*



Binged, tired and lost in an unfamiliar dream, I woke up to the vehement sounds of the rain.

The bus-stop roof had taken some beatings and it wasn’t going to keep quiet. Not when it rains this hard. Stony as the droplets may seem the rhythm had a musicality to my new environment.

I woke up to an array of silent humans, each loosely packed in a tiny space of their own. The atmosphere was different this time around and the sun seemed to have escaped with the noise that would have deafened me if my two ear sized attorneys haven’t afforded me a fair hearing of melodious recordings from my cell phone.

The man whose squeaky voice tortured us for more than an hour had carefully packed himself in one of the seats as he was now dead to the world. We didn’t entirely like the noise but he introduced himself as a man of God, by mutual respect we ended any protest before it even started. Although the atmosphere had quitened, I could hear some men argue out their footballing allegiance and beliefs in turns – each trying to outweigh the other’s point. In front of me were two women, whose rancorous argument had delayed the whole contingent by 30 minutes.

One of them, her luggage on her laps, hatred in her soul and anger in her eyes. She just won’t keep quiet, she was so nosy that you would believe she saw demons at intervals. Instead, the demon was right beside her. Another lady with a yellow top which read “THE REAL BITCH” had called her fat. I didn’t think she was fat, I thought she was big( big enough to occupy two seats). The fact that she sat at my front made me stop to think she could be the barrier the pastor said was blocking my blessings the previous day in his Sunday preaching.

She had started her self defence almost immediately and like an M16 reaching for an innocent soul, she has done the damage in the least time her opponent could think of. She targetted her looks, calling her Ugly. Truth be told, the other woman was ugly…. But who cares?? There are ugly bitches too…

Like dogs fighting over bones they both aimed jibes at one another and it almost degenerated into a free-for-all fight. Their new rivalry had cost the entire contingent a 30 minutes delay before the start and it wasn’t looking to end any sooner or change for better.
I was in a public transport for a long distance journey. An option that I took helplessly due to my prevailing circumstance(s). One of them that I didn’t have enough money to travel by air.

I was en route to Ekiti– my ancestral land which I have ironically been to twice. One during my birth and the other to visit my aged mother.

Except those two occasions, anytime I am not in Abuja, I am in Lagos or running my second degree at a school in the United Kingdom in my dreams. On my last visit two years back, mum had convinced me to complete my voter registration after I had bitterly complained how bad the roads on any part that wasn’t a major city in Ekiti was, and by INEC crooked guidelines I have to make the travel down south to vote in tomorrow, Saturday February 16 general elections.

It was 6am in the morning and we were four hours from completing what was a long and grueling 10 hours trip. Like a store owner yelling at a breakaway thief, an elderly passenger repeatedly howled at the driver, pleading that he empties his bowel before he dies of inflammatory kidney cancer. In seconds, the bus stopped. Sometimes freedom wears the garb of the law of chance, each passenger wasn’t going to allow this chance pass them by, they quickly explored the old man’s misfortune to ease themselves too.

Old KSA music from loudspeakers, women jostling to display their wares, children in different stages of unclothedness scattered and running helter-skelter, some boys justling to sell their fried plantains and gala which they placed on their shoulder, others having jerrycans buried on their vertices. These scenes made me realize we had arrived at Oye Ekiti.

It was 10am on Friday morning, but it looked nothing short of a Monday morning in the market near the bus station – It was market day. Fifteen minutes later, I was in my mother’s house. Outside was lukewarm and the smell of Chelsea in the piss steaming off the veranda informed me of my uncle’s presence.

He wasn’t entirely bad, except that he was a ugly and an unrepentant drunkard. He was a security personnel in the Ibadan City polytechnic. For some strange reasons he was famous for his nickname, “ go-easy ” among the students . According to my mother, he was christened Babajide, a name he strongly detested.

This hate he owes to an old nightmare. In this dream he had tried to evoke the gods of fortune, dressed in red, laced with white hen feathers on his cap and an incantation only he himself understood. He had made way for the heaven gates until one woman appeared in white. Her face like that of a Lion who had just lost out on a prey – frustrated. She had immediately lashed out at him, warning him to never trouble the gods again else they forcibly transit him to the land of the dead the place where unfortunate soul like him languish.

She said, that he was still alive only due to their kindness, for to them, he’s been an even bigger embarrassment than his grandfather, Davidi, who was nicknamed, Oloriburuku, for his misfortune was almost a purposeful labouring to affirm the ugly stereotypes that anchored their intergenerational failings. That day, he woke up like a defeated warrior, the little strength that remained in him he had immediately used to denounce his name Babajide which meant “the return of his grandfather” giving that he died the same way my uncle was born.

Like in most part of Nigeria, stable electricity was a fantasy, hoped and prayed for but hardly ever seen or experienced. Oye Ekiti is as dark as Moscow is cold. One could even get lost within the confines of his compound during the evening . My phone’s battery percentage wasn’t entirely bad – 52%. It was the absence of network that worried me. As basic as it may seem 2G coverage was a luxury in this clime, as soon as I slide to unlock my device, notifications like “no network” stayed floating up its screen.

I had barely walked 50 metres when I saw a young boy hawking oranges, he made quick advances at me, wanting me to patronize the business I was sure wasn’t his own. I had three thousand Naira notes in my pocket. I gave him one and took two oranges. His face lit up like the Olympic light. He had hit a jackpot without playing his father’s favourite game – Baba Ijebu.

Minutes later, I would arrive the scenery of a crime incident. A girl has been mobbed by six boys, they claimed she disrespected one of them and they were taking her into a building yet to be completed. Perhaps they were taking her to a guidance counsellor. But I wasn’t for sure if one would live in such conditions. I quickly raised an alarm in a bid to stop them. But they won’t stop, instead they ran faster with her. They ran so fast they............


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