₦airaland Forum

MY RESENTMENT WITH NIGERIA
By Okenyi Sunday Chinweike

A wanderer will one day look at his home from a far distance with bridges torn down, and a little hope to look forward to where it all started and decide to die on the road. This is my story. I will tell it without subjecting any word to folly. I have come very far, but not far from suffering and death that awaits me on a strange land. If foolishness is blissful to keep quiet when the raging storms come at me and my people, I am done a fool.

One day I slept, waking up, I heard my name,
Obi!
Obi!
Obi!
it came to me three times, maybe more than that, for I have been into a deep slumber. It was 1st oct 2015, at 6 am. “Don’t you want to go to independence day celebration?, your friends are going. Get out of the bed now and get yourself prepared” my mother asked. I groined with heavy clutch in my heart, wearing a very gloomy face and staggered out of my room. I first heard that word “Independence” when I was in Primary one. Our then headmaster, Mr Okoro, a staunch man with a very funny accent, whenever he speaks, he attracts a kind of mocking laughter from the pupils, but no one dares laugh. According to him “fear of cane is the beginning of all wisdom”. That very day on the morning assembly, I heard our headmaster say many times “tomorrow is the day we gained our independence, the day our founding father liberated us from the clutching hands of colonial masters, we are free people” he repeated these words for more than I could remember before he added with ecstasy and shout “tomorrow is the day of celebration!” The pupils joined in the shout and I couldn't hold myself less.

That was the first time I heard the word “Independence”. As days and years go bye, I would one day ask myself what is “Independence” and the reason we celebrate every 1st October. As the answer came at me, so does it prove as fine linen in smokescreen, but getting closer a tattered cloak. That very morning, at the faint whisper of my parents' voices outside my room, I developed a cold heart. I paced around the shrewish history that birthed everything that was forced down my throat, glowing with outrageous hatred for everything, including my very existence in the country. Maybe, I thought, calling me a Nigerian is a crime; that name is a burden in itself. Call me 'onye' Igbo, call me 'Omo Igbo'—yes, call me 'iyanmiri'. Maybe to think that Nigeria exists is a folly, a mirage, hidden behind fake expressions. It may exist in papers, in all those treaties, but not in no man’s heart. Just years ago, a nation endowed with natural beauty and hope got drowned by ravenous bigotry and greed like a thatched house before the mouth of bulldozer. A dweeb before the dream of a common man and a nightmare to all who occupy it.

As I walked down the sitting room, I freed myself and sat hesitantly on the couch, rose a great cessation, holding up pillow for an hour I thought of the suffering of those innocent souls in the North, fathers, mothers, youths, and children. I thought of my own people, millions of whom were slaughtered by the government they were meant to serve. I thought of many incidental political uprising or game of politics as they call it, that has taken countless lives, unmentioned and undermined. Maybe they were right or so I thought, I was overthinking. Maybe all those millions of people were not sacrificed on the altar of the unwelcoming unity that we have, but for the principal lot that seems the only reason why endless hacking of breath stands encouraged. In the voice of the common man from the North, East, and West, I ask: Do you love me more than oil? More than the common wealth in your pocket or the presidential seat you so desperately covet? Is that why we have to consume ourselves, die in the hands of terrorist, rioters, bandits, and even those whom by law are mandated to protect us? Maybe, I did, in fact, think about the burning charcoal forced on my hands and forgot the greedy leaders that Nigeria is so blessed with, but it stands as a surety to my incurable foolishness.

Disgusted, I flipped, cursed myself for thinking just like others that freedom has been gained on platter of gold and was never demanded of by the people. Why would I step out there to join the dance, the march of well-dressed students, to burn for the joy of independence and the ecstasy of my doom? Who made me think of this Nigerian independence that consumes me? Why would I think that I should be happy on a day like this? I desperately wants to go home from this slave land, so do you. This land is the reason I hate you and you hate me. It is the reason I am Igbo from the East and a Christian and you are an Hausa or Yoruba from North or West and Muslim. Can we go home?

Hmmmm

Wow.
Sounded like a poem.
Has passion tho. A lot.

Dami12345:
Wow.
Sounded like a poem.
Has passion tho. A lot.

The writer is a poet.