The days of
punishment have come; The days of retribution are here (Hosea,9:7).
Yes;
we are now in the days of punishment; the days of tribulation. Following
my self-imposed mandate of manufacturing and Nigerianising words,
I have converted tribulation into TINUBUlation, which means the
days of punishment wrought about by Tinubu. Now whether we were thrown under
the bus by BAT himself or by BAT and Associates is subject to debate. Sure, weda
or wadant, BAT is on the throne. But all those who foisted him on us,
all those who played Oluomoic, and
Wikerian roles, which Yakubu latched on to announce ‘his
results’( the results were not ours) like a thief in the mid
night (1Thess,5:2)are involved. The judges, up to the Supreme
Cult who trod upon those monkeyshines
to murder democracy on 26/10/23, are all
involved, either as co-conspirators or accessories after the fact(
I hope I got it!). However, all these na long-grammar and pure
stories; the reality is that we are in an era of unapparelled punishment, for
which we would have been held responsible if we had actually voted. Sure, some
of us voted for this government and some of us are still acutely BATified
but we all know that the size of the BATist
battalion is decreasing at an increasing rate. Those who cooked
the results knew and still knows what the voters said and as such, I
will not be among those blaming ‘we the people’ for bringing this
upon ourselves.
The PMB Era!
Up to May 28,
2023, Nigerians believed that we would
never have it as bad as it was
then. In fact, borrowing from my treatise somewhere else, most of us were
celebrating that ‘our worst nightmares are over’. It was not
because most of us trusted the man who built Lagos, it was
because some of us believed that NOBODY could be as disastrous as the man from
Niger Republic who was raised in Daura. On
7th of February, 2023, feeling that we had descended to the
nadir, I had written thus:
‘When I read this
verse about 30 years ago, I wondered what the people did to the extent of being
served the heartless dish of bread of adversity and water of affliction
(Isaiah, 30:20). I also sympathised with the people in arrears as I wondered
what it would be like when neither food nor
water would give succour. Now, I
have seen it live; I am a living witness as the Government, which promised to
lift us from ‘top to bottom’ has concretely served us this bitter
dish in the form of excruciatingly long
queues for the troika of fuel, cash and PVCs . The oppressively hot sun is not
making it any easier. To further complicate matters, Nigeria, the largest
concentration of black people across the world has in the process become the global headquarter of ‘white-market’,
with the historical black-market in its own currency, Naira, which sells at a
margin of up to 50% depending on the desperation of the buyer and the
heartlessness and greed-quotient of the
seller. Before then, there were black-market injunctions, judgements,
security operations, certificates, pastors and bishops, subsidies et al.
Now, we have moved from ordinary distress, to advanced distress, to
multidimensional distress and finally to this current level of officially
sanctioned suffering of the people(Ik Muo, ‘Bread of
adversity and water of affliction’, BusinessDay)
However, it appears that we are now in deeper mess than we were at that period of which I had written
above. PMB had reportedly quipped that
one day, we would beg him to return to Aso Rock. I am not among
those who would earnestly yearn for PMB but
surely, my material conditions today are far worse than they were in the
days of PMB and these are due to policies and actions taken or mis-taken
by a government , which would act and then start wondering why it acted. The
rates of inflation, unemployment, poverty, are the highest in history or in
recent times, with the result that the
cost of living has risen to an
unimaginable level with a sudden plunge in the standard of living. The Naira would have been compared with ‘Mmege’(
Biafrann currency in the last days of that
‘I no go gree’ Republic) but at least. Mmege
was easy obtain. Howver, the case of Naira is different as it is very difficult to earn
but very easy to spend and it avails of
so little. People can neither buy food nor medicine; they cannot send their
children to school and they cannot afford to pay for darkness, which we receive
instead of light!. It would have been better if these had happened gradually
but they were all with immediate effect!
On top of all these our people in
government are behaving like the bigmen
on the top deck of the Titanic, who did
not know that the Titanic was sinking; they were enjoying themselves with choce
champaigns, cuisine and classical music. Here, our bigmen are spending billions in
renovation and building of presidential palaces , acquiring yautch and jets, junketing all over
the place with overbloated entourage and drawing largest portraits on canvas(
when Ghana is launching largest floating
Solar Plant in Africa)! The FG has just spent N21bn
( against 15bn initially alotted)to retouch Shetima’s
residence that was 85% ompleted in 2015( and that was after PMB had
committed N250m to build its gate),spent N2.5 bn to renovate the Aguda House
where the VP stayed and which has now become abandoned and N3bn to renovate the
VP’s residence in Lagos, ALL in less than 1 year! The NASS has approved two
presidential jets because the current ones are not presidential enough. It is speculated
that like PMB did in the purchase of the fighterjets, these planes had been
bought even before the consent of the NASS was sought. Both cost almost N1trn.
But N14.77bn was spent on Presidential Jets in 11 months .They are just
spending money as if it would soon expire! This is just as the video of Indian
Finance Minister going to work on a metro flooded our media space while the President of Argentina, Javie Melei has
abandoned the presidential jet cut public spending by half and cut the cabinet
by half. Argentina has a Per Capita
Income of $13651 in2022 against Nigeria’s$ 2163 in the same period.
Largest Solar, Largest Portrait, Indian Minister, the magician of Argentina& the golden Tyres
They renovated NASS chambers with whopping sum of N60bn
and are cushioning the lives of Judicial
operativess. N37bn has just been approved for Court of Appeal building in Abuja.
You should know why this is so: to
ensure that the judiciary would be further captured to pass the right
judgements soon (don’t think that 2027 is far) and the legislooters
would be busy sharing the loot or fighting over the booty that they would readily ‘aye’ everything
presented to them(after sinful padding)
and will not remember their oversight( or undersight)
responsibilities. And Dialy Trust has just reported that on 21/5/14, Aso_Rock bought tyres worth N244m in a single
day, paid for in three tranches of N200583390,30,070,000 and 6000960. Just for
tyres and in just one day!!!
Gloden tomatoes, (6k+) yam sold in pieces, looting of shops and Tomato laughing at apple
When people are stampeded to death
while queing for ‘bags’ of rice( some of
which are just 5 kgs), and people loot government and private warehouses and loaded
trucks in transit and some die in the
process as it happened in Nasarawa State University; When people are convictd
for stealing pots of soup and plates of rice like Ojo Monday
was arraigned at an Ado-Ekiti Chief Magistrates’ Court in Ekiti State for
stealing some noodles, maggi seasonings, salt, onions, "fufu" and a
pot of soup on 14/3/24 and Adua Fatogun, was remanded in a correctional
centre by an Ondo State Magistrate Court,
for stealing a pot of soup on 12/10/23 at Ifeleye street, Ayeyemi, in
Ondo. When people lock their
plates of food, when few miserable pieces of tomatoes and a handfull of palmnuts go for thousands
of Naira and when the take home pay
cannot get people to the bus-stops; when
sellers and buyers are not happy with the high cost of fooditems,and when
many more people are resorting to the dustbins for sustainance and
when couples use loaves of bread for cake.
Locking a plate of food, breadcake new Bible verse and the salary humiliated by market prices
When people resort to ox-driven carts because transportation has become unaffordable, when yam is now butchered and sold in pieces rather than in tubers and local chickens are slain and hawked in parts, when we leave the fate of our currency to prayers_warriors, when we revert to locally packed iced water because the poor can no longer afford the ‘poor-water’ meant for them, when a man goes home to await blindness because he could not afford his basic eye-drugs, when professors die because of hardship or struggle to become PAs to some ‘horribles’, when we are left with only witch-doctors and ‘nurse-elizas’ because our best have all ‘japa-ed’, when garri has also ‘joined them’them, it is obvious that we have already gone past the groundfloor and are sinking deeper. But some of us are behaving like those of whom Bob Marley sang:’Oh Time will tell;You think you are in heaven while you are living in hell’(1978) or of whom Fela had sung shuffering and shmilling( 1978).
A heartless and selfish government; taking
care of itself while ‘frying’ the people
Thinking about Bob-Maly and his soft yabis, some muscians of old and
even some current ones forsaw and tried
to prepare us for a time like this, even though they were singing about times
when things were GOOD. Sunny Okosun asked ‘which way Nigeria’(1985).
Eedris Abdulkareem sang Everything Jaga(2014) (and has just
upgraded to Emi-lo-kan!) for which he received verbal pugilism from Obasanjo; Soyinka told us
that ‘I love my country I no go lie’(2013) and Ras-Kimono,
in 2016 when everything w as calm,became the weeping prophet, wailing that Nigerians were under pressure
. On the foreign scene, the Pioneers were worried about Starvation(1970)
and then the same Pioneers( 1972) and Selecter( 1992) wept that
Everyday, things are getting worse. Jimmy Cliff( he traced his
roots to my village) went revolutionary and demanded that we should ‘remake
the world’(1976) while Bob Marley asked
‘are you satisfied with the
life you are living now’(1977). That was when musicians had vision and mission; when they agonised about the rot in
the society! They were all singing in
different times and different places but it was all about the Nigeria of today.
Till debt do us apart, modern Matthew at work, back to carts
And what pained me most is that the
person who massively and methodically
pauperised most of us was the same fire-spitting revolutionary who came back from
exile in 1998 and bemoaned what he saw
in Nigeria: ‘retrogression, and rolling back on reverse gear,
people spending more hours in petrol stations than in the productive sector; with poverty glaringly in the face of the people in
a nation that has so much resource to give’. What had happened between then and now? What
happened to the idealogue of those days? How can a government that promised us
a life better than heaven deal with us so ruthlessley without any iota of
compunction within a year? And we still have three years to go? Why
have we been brought down to these days of TINUBUlation? What did we do
to merit this?
Meanwhile, one Chuks Okoye, has undertaken the audacious, dangerous, difficult and thankless job of writing a new version of the bible for a time like this. His Ephesians 6:12 reads thus:
Eph,6.12, the overall score, the
debt swallowing the citizen and a prayerful Nation
And, as a deeply religious people that we are, we have handed the fate and health of the Naira over to God! “I stand in my office as a prophet, right now one dollar is 1,800 naira or whatever; now hear me dollar, my name is Chibueze Ozeokieze, I operate from heaven. Dollar hear my voice, you’ll die in the name of Jesus Christ. The suffering is too much; I cannot be here as a prophet and my people will be suffering. Dollar crash, dollar fail,” he prayed fervently while his congregation amenned,
I look at all these happenings and I am wondering, especially as the government appears unconcerned about our suffering and unsure of its policy direction. However, as I keep wondering(like a wanderer, Femi Kuti), I know certainly that just as night follows the day,It shall come to pass! The Biafran war came to pass. The essential commodities crises came to pass. The Covid experience came to pass. And the currency exchange crises, the most politicised economic policy in Nigeria, also came to pass.
Which way are we headed, hunger, malnourished salary and wondering like a wanderer
God knew what we would face and thus gave Nigerians an inelastic CARRYING CAPACITY for suffering while sinful opulence is on display all over the place. And the government says that poverty is not limited to Nigeria and Nigerians! I repeat, once more, allover, again, that it shall come to PASS !!!
MEANWHILE:
Kenya…. INEC Chair, Aarti Steel
Kenya is on FIRE over taxation but when Ruto saw pepper, he backstepped. Here, BAT has just set up a committee to raise our tax revenue from 11% to GDP, to 18% now-now! Nobody bothers about how the money is spent: different strokes for different folks.
·
Mahmood Yakubu has found his voice again, giving us worthless
assurances about Edo Polls
· Aarti Steel, a roofing sheet maker has joined the list of companies that japa from Nigeria… while we are all over the world searching for foreign investments!
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