by Dayo Olugbemi

“Me I like my country
I like the land and people
Everything e dey for Nigeria
Make we join hand
To make Nigeria better!”

I used to love that song. Yea, used to. Now that song is … well, I’ll just pick out the Everything e dey for Nigeria part. Indeed, everything dey. You can find everything in Nigeria: including politicians who’s favourite pastime is sports, extreme sports. Like who can throw a chair the farthest, who can swing the mace the most(and how many hits to a head one can give), and the newest sport; who can go all Snake-in-the-monkey-shadow on a fancy gate.

Yea, those are some of my leaders. No, there wasn’t a fire, no gunman on rampage either. They just wanted to get in at all cost. They were
locked out of the national assembly, Speaker of the national assembly and all.

It was reported that at least 15 lawmakers of the APC scaled the National Assembly fence to access the building. Why? No logical reason. And asides the illogical gate there was illogical tear gas and illogical hundreds of policemen. Having to go through this as a lawmaker in your own country though.

But this has happened before.

That picture was taken in 1963. I don’t know what happened to warrant that but it must have been roughly similar situations. Or maybe these
ones were running for dear life. Looks like a lion was let loose in there.

So while these sportsmen are showing their amazing capabilities, my country’s naira is free falling against the dollar. And even as that comes as bad news, I must say it’s a welcome news for we in the diaspora that have to send money home. Yes, it favours us greatly. I believe I speak for a large majority of Nigerians living abroad. This is not a particularly welcome territory so I will cease from the digressing.

So here we are, a country flowing with sour milk and fake honey. A country with great minds. The largest black nation on the face of earth. Faced with a situation so minute that it has become silly.. no that was mild.. stupid! Yes, that’s it. We are faced with a stupid problem requiring a very simple solution. But the fellow at the helm of affairs couldn’t do enough for himself to have shoes to start with so how we expected him to be our messiah beat and still beats me. The present crop of leaders will do just about anything to maintain and brandish power. If we can’t go the way the Swiss run their government, if we can’t return to the Parliamentary system, how about we go the China/Ghana way. a quick ‘Off with their heads!’ program will do us a lot of good. Seeing as this present system of things is doing us alot of bad.

Corruption is a snake that every government, sane or otherwise, has a sword for. But it also seems ours is beyond corruption, the sheer amount of embarrassment that reeks from our government is irking. Still, to a warrior, there’s nothing a sword can’t solve. But where are the warriors?

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