by Bolade Ogunfuye
It’s almost time! I hear my insides sneer and cast sidelong glances at me. It’s almost time for that ‘new year, new me’ crap we subject ourselves to every year. You know it, that time of the year when we pretend to pre-program ourselves into a shiny new version of us and, for a dizzyingly brief couple of weeks, our lives pretend to actually seem to take on a new lease.
But, wait, what does your gut feeling say? Well, here’s the deal. No longer is it viable to rely on your intuition to know where your life is heading. Our world is now quietly pessimistic, directly domineering, depressingly suppressive and hell-bent on wringing every iota of humanity from us. Between the crap we face daily on our commute to our lives and the dreary lives of contrived activity we live outside of it, we have somehow managed to lull ourselves into a sense of accomplishment and success and convinced each other that we got it good.
Nope, we don’t.
In 2017, the government will do their best to pretend to be doing good on our behalf, tell us they are fighting for us, yet be quietly oblivious to the plight of the common man; in 2017, basic amenities will become even less basic and even more expensive, we will flog the lives out of our generating sets because public power remains a dream, and same applies to other general services, which, by the way, we continue to pay for every month through taxes. Prices for food and other household crap will continue to sky-rocket, because, hey! forex continues to increase; complain to a market woman and she will blithely blame it on the dollar.
We will continue to slave to tenuously hold on to the jobs we’ve got, because people keep getting fired every day, with everyone complaining about the economy, yet queues at ATMs get longer and banks get more crowded. I asked someone lately, and he calmly said: MMM, with a look that said: “where have you been since?”
Men will be even less interested in getting hitched, just as ladies will be even more determined to tie us down. A friend of mine has been seeing the same girl for the last 4 years or so and keeps dodging her “let’s take it to the next level” requests. His reason? “Why should I buy when I can keep leasing”. I can’t blame him, though. Rising costs of ….well, everything is enough to scare anyone. Renting apartments from shylock estate agents is now an adventure in losing your money, and don’t even go near buying or mortgaging a house. And you have not even started on the furnishing. And even if you can afford to get the apartment or house, you have to be careful where you end up, because, as they say: the Lekki paradise you think you’re getting may just be Iyana Ipaja with make-up.
Case in point, a colleague bought a house in Lekki to avoid traffic because he works in Ikoyi. One year down the line, he is regretting the purchase because he still has to sit at work till 9 pm or 10 pm so he won’t die in traffic to his house at the 4th, abi 5th, Lekki roundabout.
In short, we did not get the revolution we were promised. And till 2019, at least, there’s nothing we can do about it. Anyways, we can keep suffering and smiling till then, abi? We will be waiting for the inevitable promises from both leading parties then, and we hope we can get it right next time, or somehow be able to hold these leaders accountable to their promises.
Till then, we will each have to hatch a plan to survive the coming year and the next. If and when you finalise your survival plan, don’t shout, don’t gloat, just play it cool and take the above into consideration when finalising your strategy. The trick is to do better than just survive, the goal is to actually thrive.
The shining light in the distance may not be the end of the tunnel, but an oncoming train. Just know now, you have been warned.
Bolade is a writer and multi-media development professional. He began as a writer, and has since expanded his repertoire to include media content design and development, brand strategy, new media, advertising and PR with a career spanning the last decade. He is addicted to caffeine, sartorial excellence, sarcasm, true crime and media content of the highest quality; and is very fluent in double-speak.
put simply, this writer with his write-up is pessimistic. well, I’ll pretend i didn’t read it, cos no matter how much doom he decides to propagate, people will still make it-like me, & more importantly life will still go on. and you know what, where there’s life, there’s hope, hope that will eventually break through & break out of any & every gloom. just have a 2nd look at your article, there’s no iota of hope. even with the tunnel maxim, you couldn’t avoid been pessismitic there too, saying it might be another train coming thru. well, I wish you the writer all you have envisaged in your article & more in the coming year. stayed doomed, negative author.