PASTOR Professors and Pastor Engineers and Pastor any profession you can think of, populate the country with threats of abundance. They threaten super miracles and mega miracles and declaim and proclaim, they confirm and affirm abundance of blessings over every Nigerian great and small, male and female, chief or plebeian, and still yet (as we double every adjective and every adverb) . . . kaka kewe agbon de, koko lon le!!! In spite of these threats of abundance and victory over our enemies and over evil, what do we live? We live a life in which there is scarcity of everything, where our enemies are winning and evil predominates.

The fellow-word with ëabundanceí is ëexcessí, an excess of adjectives, an excess of stealing, an excess of possibilities plus a trade in humans and for those who do not need the whole human being, then a trade in parts thereof. Nigeria gba wa laye. Our country permits us to do what we like and what we like is abundance and excess of inhuman practices that our law enforcement encourages with an excess and abundance of bribery and corruption.

What should any profession in this country do about such a situation as the one described above? The police look the situation in the face, promise to do something about it and immediately sell it to as many interested parties as possible. The armed forces look at it and declare a coup díetat that would clean the Aegean stables without knowing where those stables were in the first place and not caring to look for them before threatening to clean them. After thirty or so years of looking for Aegean stables and not finding them and cleaning other places that were cleaning and so dirtying them, they stepped aside. Now they work and walk in parallel with politicians to, yes, you got it, clean the same incredibly unfindable stables. So, every politician is still cleaning the wrong places and dirtying places that were previously clean. They also react to this situation by putting Pastor in front of their titles and professions and names: Pastor General, Pastor Carpenter, Pastor Plumber and Pastor President etc.

What should a writer write in this circumstance? There are two types of writers. There are writers who write to change the world, the unacknowledged legislators of the world, according to the English poet Percy Shelley of the Ozymandias sonnet, remember? I met a traveller from an antique land who said . . . And there are the writers who write for the greater glory of their art, art for artís sake, which Chinua Achebe labelled deodorized shit, begging your pardon for that French! For now, we can forget about the art for artís sake writer and take on the unacknowledged legislators of the world and their performance in Nigeria. What tools can they deplore to write, as Wole Soyinka would have us do, hurling each word as a bomb at the bad situations we live in to turn them to good?

Just before we examine the tools of the interfering writer, whatís the use of stories anyway? Stories are what these writers write anyway. So, what use are they? Can our governments budget for stories, like they budget for prayers? Story-telling and story hearing helps us to understand our reality by exaggerating it and restoring us to our condition. But what if our reality is itself an exaggeration of reality, where do we return after hearing and reading the fiction of our writers? Is it not like waking up from a nightmare into daylight horror? What relief can story-writing and story reading and hearing give us?

The tools of the writer in using words are subtlety, ambiguity, drama, irony and, of course, exaggeration. But how do you deploy these tools where the reality has no subtlety and does not understand it, where nothing is ambiguous and everything is in your face, like the declaration over a slope of hills that this was paradise! Everywhere you turn to, drama is the order of the day!!! Do you know who I am? The reality is full of irony of those who do not run for elections but win elective posts, of people who do not write examinations and pass those same examinations, of those who were never pregnant but give birth to babies.

Alleluyah!!! Allahuakbar!!! Ire o!!! How does a writer exaggerate an exaggeration? In the same way we wish to produce students and professors who will win Nobel Prizes by the miracle of wishful thinking and prayers, not the miracle of hard work and persistence in the pursuit of hard work! As one great Yoruba wit says we Nigerians are diligent in the pursuit of evil! A ja fafa ninu aise dede!!!

We do not know that manual production was followed with mechanical production and that was followed by electrical production and now we are at the era of 3-D production. We are still at the point of choosing where we shall cultivate for our farms while our mates have already made their heaps, planted their yams and are now tendering their farms. Still yet, we want to be among those who will be considered for the prize usually given to the best yams in the market. If we have no respect for time and no respect for hard work, how can we expect the miracle of the reward of hard work and of working hard over time?

Miracles take more than bullying and shouting at God, commanding Him to do this and accomplish that for us. Miracles take time. The impossible can be done immediately, especially by those who use their heads. Miracles take a little longer. Miracles take time. We do not have time. We do not have any sense of time. Anytime we say is daybreak is daybreak and that is when we go to work. The writer who wishes to help through the process of changing this nightmare and daylight horrors must write faction, fiction suffused with the fact on the Nigerian ground. This country is an exaggerated fiction.