₦airaland Forum

*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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DIARIES OF AN AFRICAN COLLEGIAN EPISODE 1

I was nine, ready for High School and I already had my whole life planned.

I’d won the Turkish Mathematics competition at 7 (Yeah, I was definitely very smart and I knew it), represented my school in various competitions and even preparing for the Olympiads by the time I was 8. I’d always wanted to go to the popular Loyola Jesuit College.

But my mum had other plans: she wanted me to attend a Unity College.

I’d heard tales about Loyola Jesuit College. How their students made straight A’s in their WAEC exams, represented Nigeria in Science Olympiads and so many academic feats I could only dream of. I longed to be there with the ‘top’ guys and the thought of leaving home for anywhere else broke my heart. Despite my mum’s best efforts to convince me that Suleja was one of the best schools in Nigeria
“ _It’s for the gifted_, she said”
But then, I just wouldn’t contemplate the idea of going anywhere other than Loyola.

Luckily, my dad was also hesitant about FedAcad, he’d never really liked government schools. I thought that’d be the end of it till my mum announced I was gonna be writing the Common Entrance Exams for the unity college. I started to protest but the look she gave me shut my mouth, any further protests would have earned me an immediate beating.

After series of cajoling and pleadings, my dad finally allowed me to write the entrance examinations for Loyola Jesuit with *‘permission’* from my mum who assured me that hell will be let loose if I failed the entrance exams into FedAcad. I desperately wanted Loyola Jesuit and I was willing to put in my best to get it. But, I had to prepare for both exams as I didn’t want to be evicted from the house.

On that fateful day, dressed in my sunday best, I strode into the hall brimming with confidence as I’d made all the necessary preparations. The entrance exams into Loyola Jesuit were quite difficult but I wasn’t fazed. In fact, I was quite pleased with myself for writing their seemingly *‘hard’* exam. Two days later, I wrote the entrance exams into Federal Government Academy, Suleja. The exams were relatively easy compared to other exams I’d written and only served to reinforce my opinion of Loyola being the best.

Days rolled into weeks, and weeks into months. I spent time planning and scheming on how to convince my parents that Jesuit Loyola was the _‘ultimate’_ while my mum fervently prayed and awaited the results.
When they were released, I got really high scores in both exams and therefore was qualified for their interviews.

On the 24th of September, Mum happily broke the news of my admission to Federal Govt. Academy Suleja (FedAcad). I’d already gotten my admission letter into Loyola the previous week but my Dad, ever the diplomat had asked me to await the results of FedAcad.

I was at a crossroads.

I couldn’t possibly defy my mum and she didn’t want to hear anything about Loyola Jesuit. The decision was left to my dad who was fast losing his ‘rep’ with my mum. She could see he was inclined to side me but we both knew she’d make the house unbearable for us if we went against her wishes.