These days where the mundane is hyped, and the mediocre is celebrated, it is just so easy to lose focus, to show off stupidity, and to profit from ignorance. Since these days, service has been mutated to counter-servitude, and privilege has jumped borders: it used to be a privilege to serve, now it is a privilege to be served, even by one’s own representative. Service was a job, contested for, sworn for, and slaved for; now service is tyranny, an avenue to detain and harass familial enemies, a means to circumvolve diffidents, subdue dissidents, and propagate familiar, unconstitutional, policies, and a means to an end no less.
So that these days, every elected human (human, not official; perhaps calling them ‘official’ is why they act like slave masters) want reelection, deservedly or not. So that these days when I go to the market square, its modern equivalent, rather, it is hard to not notice those two large billboards urging the reelection of a certain Rep and citing somnolent soliloquized accomplishments, accomplishments that, in my entitled opinion, belie a four-year tenure. So that as soon as I acknowledge the ventriloquial message, “•••• lafé léèkan si”, meaning, ‘we want •••• one more time’, I smile. And that is all one can do. Àbí? I smile because I’d rather not laugh, mock, or scorn. I smile because I’m privy to letdowns at the hand of our man, and at a pivotal time too. I smile so I may not cry…
Since I know that not everything is money, monetary or infrastructure– that is how those of us not savoring the fabulous National Cake, and not even enjoying the crumbs off the fabled table, yet live from day to day in our diabetic land, a land of hunger in the midst of plenty. No bursary, no scholarship; yet we paid extra school fees for which receipts are yet inaccessible after four months, and even the political, sorry, publicized, reduction in school fees is not to take effect until another six.
Nay; not everything is in terms of how much funds an elected has in hand to conceive and execute worthwhile projects, lest sycophants say he would have done much more had he had the funds. Not everything is in Naira and kobo; some things are just integrity, plain and simple, and the lack thereof. For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, the head thinketh, and the hand doeth. At least that is the sequence the political species operate: promise first, think later… acknowledge, assuage, assure, abnegate, then abrogate and abscond; àbí?
