By Tony Afejuku

Your country my country our country, as it currently is, is a land of lamentations. It has been so; for quite sometime now – in fact, for a pretty long time beginning from PMB’s era and even beyond that era. But things have come to a head now. We really have not had, we really have not experienced, what we have, what we experience, now.

Can hell be worse than Nigeria, their country, of the current times? And who are the “their” of “their country”? Of course, without beating about the bush, without giving you any long rigmarole about who the “their” are (or is), the reference is to the current presidencynologists and their cohorts, that is, their fellow political elite. They are the ones who are the lords of our current circumstances. They are the lords of the hell that is Nigeria today. They are the lords of the pain that is worse than the pain that Nigeria and Nigerians are experiencing and over-bearing today.

Lamentations are loud in the land – they echo from everywhere to everywhere in the land: from the coast to the forest to the plateau to the middle belt and to the savanna thence to the desert and the sky and willy-nilly jump from there to the ocean. And the presidencynologists are bureaucratising and over-complicating the lamentations continually without continual conscious compassion. Nigerians everywhere are buried alive – if they are lucky to be so buried. Hell that is worse than hell!

Very recently, Dr Albert Onobhayado, an egg-head that is an egg-head, of the University of Benin, Benin City, said this of this glitterer:

“Prof., a few match your dedication to your calling. You speak truth to power with grace and courage that a few possess, and your imagination lets you see what others overlook.”

There are more than several readers who share the opinion and thoughts of this University of Benin Humanities creative scholar as they pertain to me. As I am composing these lines of discourse Dr Obahbayedo’s appealing words enter my memory and imagination. And the fascinating Ernest Hemingway’s pearls of sentences and words on white pages roll to me. Are they helping to give the glitterer an exact painting, an exact picture, of the dreadful lamentations in the land, and their creators of them? You can ask this question again and again as the glitterer sees the torrent of Nigeria’s current hell and hell opening his eyes to his country as a peculiar subject in itself – with respect to the un-exaggerated, raw movies about terrorism everywhere and everywhere.

The pictures of abducted 39 pupils and their teachers in Oyo State enter the glitterer with a sudden jump of thought – as he tries to carve sentences upon sentences, and words upon words relating to the event: A beheaded teacher, pupils being tortured and tortured, losing their freedom to play about and jump from place to place like birds jumping from branch to branch in joyous joy. The picture of the caged children and their Headmistress – who in her forlorn, sorrowful face has been pleading with the powers that be to do something that is something to saddle them out of the forest – startles the glitterer. His warbling lament on behalf of the abandoned, miserable captives that mirror all captives in the land up to Borno’s horrid desert compels him to echo this trembling whimper: “The cause of death… the cause of death is birth.” Where did he first read or hear about these words heavy with a lament he cannot truly fathom or properly express as he wishes – in a poetic or lyrical strophe?

As he gives thought to the case of the melancholic pupils and their primary instructors, and to those of others whose circumstances are not different from those abductees in the forest kingdoms of their abductors in the longitude and latitude of Nigeria, he tries to formulate a theory of lament and lamentations in Nigeria in 2026 under Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s presidency. What is the rhythmic pattern of the lamentations of Nigerians in contemporary Nigeria under the presidency of Bola Ahmed Tinubu – the PON (President of Nigeria) – and his presidencynologists?

Will the glitterer run out of breath as he races to catch his imagination to give him the pearls of words and sentences to formulate his theory of lamentations forced on us in our land yielding day by day to the horrifying rituals of terrorists paralysing our land and the President of Nigeria’s (the PON’s) presidency? The glitterer is furiously thinking and shall upload publicly his formulated theory at the appointed time. But know this before then: The terrorists shall be halted to halt their terror that has birthed lamentations in the land at the unusually fantastic rate known to us today.

May the presidential election happen in 2027 if it must happen. Need I say more? No, no, no – for now.
Afejuku can be reached via: 08055213059.