by Soyombo Ayomikun

We had no Xbox
The rich saw cable news
We watched ‘Premiership’ on newspapers
But we were happy

DVD players were a luxury
We worshipped the video cassette players
Once power goes the cassette gets stuck in
Generators were quiet expensive

We communicated through hand-written letters
Still we rarely misunderstood ourselves
Mobile phones were a miracle
A miracle our hearts never could imagine

There were no ATMs
You could wait a month to receive money sent to you
But that didn’t cause us to die of hunger
That didn’t turn us into robbers

Browsing was a strange terminology
Far flung from our dictionaries
‘Blogging’ would have gone for a strange tongue
To be blurted out by whoever is experiencing the ‘Pentecost miracle’

There were few ‘yahoo boys’
And fewer still ‘yahoo girls’
With our bowls of ‘eba’ we swallowed contentment
Our soup devoid of meat

 

We didn’t know what IEDs meant

Nobody kidnapped innocent girls

Although not then a stable nation

We enjoyed relative calm

 

We played table-soccer
With bottle covers of soft drinks
We even tagged our players with numbers
Numbers excised off both old and new calendars

The girls amongst us did ‘jerry’
They maintained a plausible beauty
‘Brazilian hair,’ for them,held no sway
Their kinky hair was our definition of heaven

With mud we built castles
As we played beneath the moon
When it’s Christmas we all munch fried chicken
The best moment of the year

We didn’t know what IEDs meant
Nobody kidnapped innocent girls
Although not then a stable nation
We enjoyed relative calm

Then the breeze of hate
Lifting the veils off our eyes
Table soccer became meaningless
A boy of 15years began craving Buggati

Everyone desired to sparkle
With the blings of undeserved money
We became a generation so wild
With our passion for knowledge fizzling away

Now because of hunger
Nigerians go about screaming ‘the Lord has called me’
They open cubicles where deceit is shared
In the name of a church

Now it seems like a myth
That a Nigerian,once upon a time,got the Nobel awards
Wickedness is fast draining our ingenuity
Leaders & followers now gambol about without purpose

Politics became the leeway
Souls without dreams battled for the throne
All because of money & terminal power
They got us really dragged in the mud

How fast we are forgetting
The beauty we once were
The sweetness we enjoyed despite having little
The Nigeria that once was

The Nigeria we buried
Brought us happiness and love
Now may be the time to go exhume her
Before she rots beyond redemption

The Nigeria we buried
Is right inside us all
She’s screaming for liberation again
Like the Chibok girls still in chains

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Soyombo Ayomikun tweets from @alabaster85

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.