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 Nigerianizing words, I have converted tribulation into TINUBUlation, which means the days of punishment wrought about by Tinubu. Now, whether we were thrown into the bus by BAT himself or by BAT and Associates is subject to debate. Sure, BAT is on the throne, willy-nilly. But all those who brought him to that place, all those who played Oluomo-like and Wike-like roles, which Yakubu latched on to announce ‘his results’ (the results were his, not ours), like a thief in the middle of the night, are involved. The judges, up to the Supreme Cult trod upon those shenanigans to murder democracy on October 26, are all involved, either as co-conspirators or accessories after the fact (I hope I got it!). However, all these are long-grammar and pure stories; the reality is that we are in an era of unparalleled 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 know what the votes said, and as such, I will not be among those who blame ‘we the people’ for bringing this upon ourselves.
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Up until 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 no one could be as disastrous as the man from the Niger Republic who was raised in Daura. On February 7, 2023, feeling that we had descended to the nadir, I wrote 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, the naira, which sells at a margin of up to 50 percent depending on the desperation of the buyer and the heartlessness and greed of the seller. Before then, there were black-market injunctions, judgements, security operations, certificates, pastors and bishops, subsidies, et al., and 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).
“Those who cooked the results knew and still know what the votes said, and as such, I will not be among those who blame ‘we the people’ for bringing this upon ourselves.”
The author reflects on the current state of the country, highlighting the worsening material conditions compared to the days of PMB. The author cites high rates of inflation, unemployment, and poverty, as well as the rising cost of living. The Naira, compared to the Biafran ‘Mmege’, is difficult to earn but easy to spend, causing people to struggle to buy food, medicine, send their children to school, and pay for darkness.
The author also criticises the government’s actions, comparing it to the Titanic’s crew, who did not know the sinking ship was sinking. They spend billions on renovations and building presidential palaces, yachts, and jets, while lavishing on judicial operatives. This is done to capture the judiciary and pass the right judgments, with legislators being so busy sharing the loot or fighting over the booty that they forget their oversight and undersight responsibilities. The author suggests that the situation is worse than it was in the past, and it would have been better if the situation had been gradually resolved.
When people are stampeded to death while queing for ‘bags’ of rice (some of which are just 5 kgs), when people loot government and private warehouses and trucks conveying foodstugff for distributors, when people are convictd for stealing pots of soup and plates of rice, when people construct iron locks for 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 at the high cost of fooditems, when many more people are resorting to the dustbins for sustainance, 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 of currency to prayers, 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 cannot 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 ‘joined them’then, 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’ or of whom Fela had a song suffering and d smiling 1978).
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Thinking about Bob-Maly and his soft yabis, some musicians of old and even some current ones have 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’ (11985). Eedris Abdulkareem sang Everything Jaga (2014) (and has just produced Emi-lo-kan!) for which he received verbal pugilism from Obasanjo; Soyinka told us he ‘loves my country, I no go lie’ While on the foreign scene, the Pioneers wept about the Starvation (1970), while Jimmy Cliff demanded that we should remake the world’ and Bob Marley asked whether we were satisfied with the life you are living now.’ They were all singing about the Nigeria of today.
And what pained me most is that the person who massively and methodically pauperized most of us was the same fire-spitting revolutionist 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 idealism of those days? How can a government that promised us a life better than heaven deal with us ruthlessly without any iota of compunction within a year? And we still have four years to go? Why have we been brought down to the days of TINUBUlation? What did we do to merit this?
I am wondering, and as I keep wondering, I know certainly that just as night follows day, it shall come to pass!
Ik Muo, Dept of Business Admin, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye. 08033026625
