Many people live in hardship here in nigeria..in actual fact, most people aren't living what can be described as a good life...or are they? According to my dictionary app, the phrase good life means - a life abounding in material comforts and luxuries or a life lived according to the moral and religious laws of one's culture. So, there is the clue we've all been looking for. The reason why in the face of THINGS(I will describe THINGS later) Nigerians still soldier on with a smile on their faces,even though the glow of that light at the end of the tunnel seems to be diminishing.

What bestows us with this unprecedented kind of resilience? Why are we so inappropriately docile and incongruously aggressive? Yes...we are both at the same time. We are docile when we shouldn't be, where we shouldn't be and to whom we shouldn't be. We are also aggressive in the same sequence...inappropriately. So, back to the question: why are we the happiest people on earth? Why are we so irrationally resilient? What makes us the sheep we have become...majority of us?
Well, some might say whatever they want about fela but a particular song of his captures how we react to oppression, despotism, cheating and many other countless crimes committed against us, to our faces by unscrupulous element. I'm sure you can guess which song of his this is. Legend.

The THINGS I mentioned stare us all in the face everyday: bad roads, poor infrastructure, dearth of appropriate medical health facilities, poor educational system, poverty, food insecurity, harsh business environment, lawlessness, oppression, hyper-epileptic electricity, a deceitful and inept government, flagrant corruption....I need to stop now so I can have space for the meat of the matter.

How can anyone living under these conditions be happy? Do most of us take drugs that catapults us to another realm, another dimension? What exactly are the things that insulate us from our reality? We have very high maternal deaths, very high infant mortality rate, rife cancer cases, prevalent HIV cases, ubiquitous jobless youths in every corner of our society...yet, we are the happiest people on earth. There must be something we are either doing very right or doing very wrong.

Lies are comforting but it never should replace the truth, no matter how bitter a pill that is. We have accepted to "ostrichize" our situation, denying our problems and feeding their gremlins at night. How many times have you heard a sick person reply when asked about his/her health with "I am strong". Or a broke person saying to you when asking for money that "I am rich". Does this in anyway change their situation?

Across the world, if we do a survey of the heritage of human mammals that subscribe to the phrase "it is well", we might find that they are 100% Nigerian. It is our own hakuna matata...our wonderful phrase. Or is it? Boko haram killings, people dying from diseases, children being killed, adults being massacred for rituals...how does this connote wellness? How do these regularly occuring events indicate wellness?

We are happy because we are rest assured that those stealing money in government,money that should be judiciously expended for the greater good will either be punished by karma or in the hereafter. We don't need them punished here, no, we will wait for judgement day when we will laugh at them after God's gavel slams the pearly table(must be a pearly table at the pearly gates). So, until then, we keep hoping that "e go better" and keep chanting the magical phrase "it is well"(even in the well..?). I've read about parents whose child was flogged to death by a teacher in a school owned by their church did nothing but accept their fate as show God wanted it and left the matter to be judged by God.

Our docility in this case is a self inflicted, unwarranted one. We don't have to be resilient in the face of THINGS but we have chosen to be. Our parents laid the path for us as laid by their parents and in loyalty and with conviction, we are passing it on to our children..a viscous cycle of ingrained cowardice and denial. We pray for our leaders instead of making demands of them. How much good has that done for us collectively? It has only made the thieves more determined and more brazen in their quest at our collective expense. That's why I always laugh at our bootless efforts at change. Change bit us in the arse and ran off with a huge chunk without us even noticing. We can't keep making soup with the same ingredients and under the same conditions and expect a differs taste. That will amount to being delusional.

We are like the patient who goes to a doctor with complaints of a peculiar pain but doesn't really want to hear the diagnosis. Doesn't want to know if it is cancer..just want to keep ingesting the mild analgesics, treating the pain with Panadol. We keep telling ourselves comforting lies...oh we are the giants of Africa, our educational system is fantastic...are we suffering from a delusion self imposed, self inflicted on ourselves? Won't it be better if we identify and name our problems instead of the salad of lies we concocted for ourselves?

Daily, like North Korea, we are fed these lies..radio, television, books...everything around us, our reality, contravene these castles of lies we have built around ourselves but we refuse to acknowledge them. No wonder our problems now seem insurmountable, a gigantic monster trampling all of us, reminding us everytime of it's presence in our lives.

You can act numb as much as you like, you can look at your wallet and say to yourself, I have some wads of naira and everything is fine but i tell you it isn't. It isn't about you, it is about the country, the people..about the greater good.

We have problems, people and solving them starts with accepting them. Let's do away with the lies and the denials, let's incinerate the feel good phrases, let's tell those who use these phrases as the source of their daily bread that we accept our problems and want to resolve them and the change we seek will begin to take shape.

Lies can be comforting but they have grave consequences.

Let us keep it real!