HELL, OR SOMETHING LIKE IT
This is the hell which was promised. You think? No, it isn’t, it never was. Let President Yar’ Adua perfect his disappearing acts; let Acting President Goodluck Jonathan contend with greater demons; our hearts shall beat with rage, our streets shall burn in rage.
Let the blood flow, we have become, hell-raisers; the demons that be that makes Lucifer tick.
Damn the cleric with the self-righteous tongue, this is hardly the end-time that he seeks. Thus we may slaughter our neighbours as much as we like, we may spatter our dawns, red, with gross and bloody sunsets, the end of our dreams is hardly nigh.
Damn the critic and his pretensions to insight and grace, we shan’t survive by his love for hindsight and disgrace.
Give me the man with foresight and grace and to you I would oblige the incense that fires infinite hearts to deviate; and so may you get to appreciate the passion that stokes, fire and pain, in the heart of the everlasting patriot.
Perhaps you will learn to understand and exterminate the lunacy that drives us to murder and put asunder.
And then you could understand the insanity of the rampaging hordes, of Jos, Plateau State. And then you will appreciate the vagaries that drive the moderate insane.
But for all the madness we celebrate, it’s you and I that depreciate. Everyday we contemplate, everyday we complain. And so have we mastered the art of rancour and inveterate clamour. And so do we pleasure in chaos and ill-advised plunder.
It’s time we explain why it is that today, even when times are good or promise to be good, we feel we must complain.
Johnson and Ghandi would call it an act of protest, Fawehinmi would call it panic. I think it is something of both.
Yet for all the dissent we formulate, there are truths we would rather not speak, actions we would rather not take, for the love of the good; whose good?
And yet it sickens us not to decapitate neighbours with whom we used to felicitate and cohabit in the interest of “strategic goods and reasons” that teaches the trodden to madden.
Were sophistry and double-speak antidote to the madness we perpetuate, I would gladly oblige our maddened hearts, cure.
I would gladly dither where humanity and hope choose to vacillate. But they aren’t, are they?
Bustling with vigour, and brain, we flaunt our grasp of politics of State. Brimming with reason and grace, we flagellate demons we love to accommodate in our houses and corridors of State because it is apparently therapeutic to do so.
For all our intellect and grace, for all the polish we love to brandish, you and I amount to nothing, still.
I guess you see that we have failed us but you would dispute even that, wouldn’t you brother, sister?
Let us not continue to suffer truth as we deem fit, you and I have become the aberrant we seek to eliminate.
It is not enough to go down memory lane to remember the good old days; it is never enough to flaunt our knowledge of politics and history that elevates and imbues with longing for the good old days and a better fate; shall memories of yesterday obliterate the harsh, harsh realities of today?
Shall damning lines we originate, and articulate as the “truth of the matter,” “heart of the matter,” “much-sought panacea” put to everlasting slumber, the demons with whom we cohabit and put asunder-while our words lack bite and direction by which our lives could appreciate?
You may not know it brothers, sisters…but everyday, we confirm and reaffirm our folly and shame.
Everyday we stir to strife and spirited plunder and the best we can ever do is to curse the times and the leaders on whose watch we become degenerate, and our lives disintegrate.
Could it be that we are shorn of wisdom, and honour? Could it be that we are truly incapable of steering our ship of state to safety, beyond our harbour of ruined stones?
Every second, every minute, every hour, everyday, we stir chaos-enabled, still, at mathematically accelerated pace to celebrate our usual morning news-screen and prints of tragedy we ennoble.
Dusk comes with even greater uncertainties; ask the natives and survivors of Dogo Nahawa, Ratsat and Zot. They should know better. Only they could better understand the climactic melodrama of hate, only they could better appreciate the native flares that fired the dark, dark silhouettes that came while the crickets chirped loudest.
Only they can wholly navigate the buried narratives of decapitated friends and relatives.
Nobody knows what trials or joys accompanied their hearts to sleep but everybody knows what monstrosity instructed their recurring nightmares: over 500 and more hacked to death, in the interests of nativity and state?
Phases of our end harden towards definition and our lives lose definition, as it did last year and the year before.
And all we can do is tout our worn and tattered measures; all we can do is postulate tiresome premises and irrationalities while we pound drumbeats of a war we would never fight.
At times, I wonder if we truly understand the magnitude of tragedies we facilitate or every thought, every measure we bandy actually portends husks of dark, dark desires we have learnt to indulge and initiate.
Shall we ever tire of castigating the usual scapegoats and ennobling them while our perverted galleries retire to slumber?
Shall we ever grow weary of the usual platitudes and brickbats that has become our lives’ staple to the detriment of all that freedom, all that nationhood ever gave us?
Shall we continue to remember our defects only to regurgitate them with contempt and dishonour?
It’s time we seek virtue past confusion and plunder. It’s time we move past the age that grudges and grieve.
Let us begin to rewrite our official histories far from the strategies of the ones who got wasted and are desperate to get us wasted, on their watch.
Let us begin to hack our ways to the path of freedom, and hope. We need not shed their blood; that they gladly do on their watch, and as the world watches.
There is no shortcut to our epoch of rosy sunsets. Bloodshed shall only beget greater bloodshed.
Let us fight our battles at the polls. Come 2011, the world shall become ours for taking. It is time for another party, another politic, another age.

By Olatunji Ololade