Over the years, our factories have folded up and given rise to worship centers and we have become a praying rather than a producing nation - it didn't mean anything to us, life has continued normally as it will never breed consequences.
Our agricultural sector followed, with the then bustling cocoa business, groundnut pyramid, all cash and food crops suffering abandonment. It still never meant anything.
Electricity generation and distribution collapsed, we thought we could still get by.
Naira started a steady slide into worthlessness in the mid-80s rather than act, devaluation was gullibly justified and defended.
Then all of a sudden, a sea of unemployed graduates flooded our cities, we still felt no whiff of impending ' wahala '.
Today, the situation is getting worse with the nation's domestic and foreign debt profile rising, we are citing non-profit generating infrastructural development as gains and reasons for more loans.
All around us jobless young men and women seeking escape from the poisonous fangs of poverty hit their heads on narcotics. We refuse to sense trouble.
Fully doped and idle, our young men embrace crime, robbing in traffic and homes. More daring ones become willing recruits of armed robbers, bandits, and insurgents killing and kidnapping to stay alive, we are blaming everyone but ourselves and our visionless leaders
Our young girls find succor in the prestigious prostitution code-named " side chick" - Pleasant pastime, life moves on.
Privileged rich men who created the problems become clients( sugar daddies ) of ambitious but starving young girls - trade by barter, life goes on.
Pleasure for few, pain for many. No one seems to think it is a problem, life continues.
Drugged side chick stabs an ' unfortunate ' sugar daddy to death. - like a movie premiere, we watch excitedly claiming hypocritical righteousness and spewing judgemental condemnations.
Hunger and frustration rule over reason. But rulers refuse to read the red signals..
Rather, the situation gets compounded.
Money meant for military armament amassed and mismanaged what do we get ? Just a mere mention, and is swept under but the consequences won't stay under
Security agencies remain poorly equipped and operationally and logistically incapacitated.
The results are here : Heavy casualties in battles, regular kidnapping of innocent students and travellers in addition to other similar cases - relations bear the heartache. The government wouldn't pay the ransom. Life goes on.
In some cases, desperate bandits slaughter some of the students to prove they mean business, government would not bulge. Principle superior to purchase of peace -high-level muscle flexing
Some parents of abduction victims have to sell their houses to buy freedom for their children. Those who had nothing to sell protested, weep, pray and roll on the ground openly daily in front of world press cameras seeking divine intervention as last hope, hun hun ? Nothing embarrasses us again, life goes on.
Farmers cannot farm, it all doesn't matter, only politics of division does.
Prices of food items skyrocket - we are only bothered about cows and grazing routes.
Late Dele Giwa once wrote that Nigerians had become un- shock able. He was probably writing about now, not then. His death then was a shock to all but more gruesome murders happen daily now without even making headlines.
Nothing shocks an average Nigerian again on the news no matter the enormity... " Bandits kill 15 people in...." Thank God, last week's own was even more.
Gunmen kidnapped emir and 13 others... well, they have even killed an Oba before.
140 students kidnapped in Kaduna state..." They will release them "
We justify the unjustifiable, explain the inexplicable and attempt to make sense of nonsense.
We are trapped in a horror cage and we stay in it.
Horror upon horror, sorrow after sorrow, fear, hunger, anger, danger, lack, lust, despair, deprivation, agitation, frustration, commotion, detention even execution, all have become integral parts of our daily life.
Yet, in some quarters, life goes on, like all is normal. Like the only problems we have are Nnamdi Kanu, Sunday Igboho, and open grazing.
But of course, arrest, incarceration, or even execution of Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igboho cannot stop agitations for self-determination.
Kill Kanu if you can hang Igboho if you wish, the fact remains undeniably clear that only an end to injustice and corruption, and enthronement of fairness and justice, transparently detribalized governance, provision of jobs for the ever-growing population of unemployed youths, and security for lives and prosperity can bring genuine and lasting peace back to this plundered and misruled nation.
Injustice and peace are strange bedfellows just as hunger and crime-free life are enemies.
Kanu is not the criminal, Igboho is not the enemy. Injustice and hunger are the enemies and those who foisted them upon us are the real criminals.

Excellent piece.