This Is Nigeria, Our Nigeria

By Dan Amor
Even as the River Niger surges still along its wonted path to its dalliance with the River Benue and the consequent emptying of the passionate union into the mazes of the Delta, and, thereafter, into the vast, swelling plenitude of the all-welcoming seas, it is Nigeria, our Nigeria. True, Lagos is still Lagos; Abuja is still Abuja. It is, indeed, injury time in a new country under a new democracy, our democracy! Yet, everywhere you look, things look pretty much as they always have been. Still, the sway of buffoonery and unintelligent greed; still the billowing gown arrogance of the supposedly powerful, the surface laughter of the crashing rivers celebrating the disquieting crisis of democracy, the riveting appearances of things. 

*President Buhari 

Splendid is the current! Yet, into the heart of the average Nigerian pop uninvited intimations that we live today in the cusp of a new age, a new country and a new democracy. Alas, it is a new era. But in the lull between the passions and exertions and excitations of our workaday world today, at these times when the body yields to repose and the mind nestles in shades of quietude, it hits you: it is the dawn of change! But, what manner of change is this? From better to worse?

Something, you realize, is going on in this country, something is happening here. But what? What is it? What really is going on? It is simply real. It is the season of change. It is the season of democracy. But democracy, as you know, never comes like a bolt from the girthless skies. It comes rather upon the ripening. Whether in our bodies or our characters, or our large, tall and considerable affairs, democracy is a ripening, stage after stage and after stage. The trouble, however, is: we live half-blind, usually even totally blind to the obvious processes of liquidation being sponsored by our rulers against our nascent democracy.