MY fellow countrymen and women, I crave your indulgence, please listen to me. I have the belief that you’ll hear me or reason with me. I have long stopped talking to those who don’t seem capable of making a difference between matters relating to politics and those relating to nationhood. These people take the issue of Boko Haram, for example, as an opportunity to settle scores with the sitting president. It ought not to be so. Instead of everybody weeping seeing an eight-old-girl, for instance, being sent on a suicide mission by the insurgents to burn down the country – haul bomb on a motor park or mosque or church or school and other soft spot and then die in the process – you see some people gloating over it and rejoicing and flashing the news all over the facebook the way spectators do when their team scores a goal. Instead of seeing it as a national tragedy or a national calamity, an evil everybody should come together to confront, these people take it as Buhari’s headache and a mark of failure of his government. It doesn’t mean anything to these people that the present government is only just finding its feet or that the problem of Boko Haram is a throw over from the past administration. No, they don’t care a hoot about that.

Fellow Nigerians, I’m hesitant to share opinion with unpatriotic charlatans such as this bunch of people I have described above. Just yesterday I was forced to delete a friend’s name from my facebook on account of this childish behaviour. My friend is tickled whenever he hears that Boko Haram has thrown a bomb in the market and killing several people in the process! And when fuel is scarce or “NEPA” has “taken” light or the so-called Biafran agitators are on the streets harassing innocent people or destroying property, this my friend, like a masochist, a sadist, is at his best element. He becomes the happiest man!

My dear compatriots, you see, all these Nigerians are still carrying on as if campaign is still on and Jonathan is still a candidate competing with Buhari for the presidency! This beats my imagination. Does it mean that these people don’t know that once a presidential election is over and a winner emerges, that the winner becomes everybody’s President? It’s just so annoying the attitude of these people. In the first place those behaving this way never voted for Buhari. Now anytime there is any little issue in the country you’ll hear them with a silly catch phrase: “You’re the one who said you want change; now you see your change.” This remains the slogan of people particularly from a certain section of Nigeria. They are so bitter that Buhari is in government. And I am so surprised that even some of my own town folks too, mostly those of them living abroad who were not physically present here to have a first-hand taste of the Jonathan presidency, also have joined in mouthing the silly slogan. And some of these people, surprisingly, are college graduates, who ought to have analytical brains to look at issues dispassionately. Unfortunately, when it comes to Buhari’s issue their brains take wings and fly to Afghanistan or God knows where or go on recess! I’m petrified. I’m sad and I’m sick!

My dear countrymen and women, let me stop here. Sincerely I cry for Nigeria any time I hear someone say, “Na una want change.” I always wonder what they mean by this. Are they saying that the presidential election shouldn’t have been held in the first place? Or are they telling us that they were satisfied with the way Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan was piloting the ship of state dangerously to the cliff? Or that the man Buhari who won the election should have stepped down so Jonathan their candidate who lost the election could continue in power? Truly, I need some education here. Anybody who has the answer, please come over here and educate me. I’m completely at sea.