Nigeria's Democracy; The Devil on Our Cross by AKINDUNBI Ayodele Daniel

 

THE DEVIL ON OUR CROSS

Not so very long ago, a group of people numbered two hundred million, more than two hundred and fifty tribes, and approximately six hundred languages. The people had one thing in common, a country, or perhaps, a nation. Between the two hundred million men, there were two broad classes, the oppressor and the oppressed, or more subtle, the real eaters and those who strive for leftovers from the table of the oppressors and real eaters. Among the oppressed class are set of marauders who served as go between amidst the oppressor and the oppressed. These marauders are docile in the fight for revolution. The marauders are the officers of the oppressors wares and the dogs of their prisons; they are forever detained in the diary of the oppressors.

The culture of the two hundred million men had been taken away from them, whitewashed. This culture was the ancestral faces in which they look unto when they needed to see their creator. And for many times, the ancestors have savaged them from ruins. But, now, everything have fallen apart. The language, which is the collective bank of their experience, and in which they will communicate with their ancestors, had been broken. The ethos, values, norms, and beliefs, had been lost.  The brains of the people were washed with soap and seething sponge, to the point that they see their language as ‘’a vernacular’’. Nothing can be more tragic!

Only if the people would see the wrath that was to come when ‘’the worst some’’ out of these two hundred million men were granted the opportunity to rule themselves. The people had thought the violent white men had gone, until they were shocked with their replacement with ‘’a more subtle violent new white black man’’. After a brief stay in power, then, the people begin to see these malaise, for themselves, and these woes, by themselves. Poverty romanced the land; corruption cuddled their creativity; poverty became the hard labour on the land; ethnicity and bigotry became the pride of place; selfishness syphoned their thoughts, and politics of blame took to its peak!

Wole Soyinka in his book, The Man Died, said; ‘’ When power is deem culpable in any way, each family should in place of, or after its early morning regulation, make a ritual of throwing their breakfast slops at a pinned up photograph of a symbol of power, before going out to earn a living, under an insupportable system, every morning religiously!.’’ Power in its nature, is drunk. When power wields its force, one might be consigned to the margin. The cold reality of power is that, it has to be endured, but when it begins to puncture the thorns of violence in the heart of many, it becomes a bout. 

In Achebe’s No Longer At Ease, he said; ‘’poverty is not a tragedy, the real tragedy is suffering without relief’’. The mother country of two hundred million men is where the tragedy dwells. The citizen of the mother country have suffered with no relief; no succor. 

I therefore submit that the devil who brought us into this conundrum should be crucified. And care should be taken that his acolytes do not pull him down from the cross, to pursue the task of building a hell for the people on earth.

©AKINDUNBI Ayodele Daniel