By: Ibrahim Williams
On this occasion of your birthday, democracy, please accept my condolences.
It is with a heavy heart that I serve you this congratulatory message to mark the twenty-first year you were born onto this land. Funny how it feels like yesterday when the Khaki boys consummated the marriage that led to your christening by Prophet, Doctor, Evangelist, General, President Baba Iyabo Alagbada. How time flies my dear.
You might be in wonder as to why I have decided to write this for you when you and I know I love you so much that I shouldn’t have cared about this day. But then, should there be a reason to insult one’s favorite wife?
I choose to recount your story in retrospect — for no reason other than the fact that I have known you to fancy backwardness in your affairs. Yet who am I to question your choice of motion? In this past two decades plus one year, the only progress you’ve witnessed is the exponential growth in the number of people that wear your title as citizens, of the democratic republic (of Nigeria) — see how difficult it is to even say your name.
Demo, Democracy. It’s a funny tragedy that the countrymen who witnessed your christening had so much hope in your future: like, you were going to grow so fast and so robust that your health and development would mean wealth and betterment for them. And that maybe, just maybe you were the divine shelter that would shield them from the blessed rains of the Khaki boys. Fortunately, and unexpectedly, you cat-walked over the red carpet, and choose Aso Rock as your lawfully wedded home.
Yet, who no like better thing?
From this rocky-home, a lot has happened. In fact, the number of achievements you have attained as a toddler, and till this moment, sits you comfortably in the high ranks of odious democracies. It is in this house that you have created the system of systems where kings become kinglier, and the subjects are mute and repressed. You fortified the kitchen with dubious utensils that bake and serve corruption, nepotism, and avarice as national cake.
It is in this house that you sat to establish and orchestrate the circus of political clowns who give us, your countrymen, a source of laughter amidst abandonment and pains. Democracy, who can mention your name without a glorious curse for your role in creating the institutional nonsense we live by?
Speaking of institutional nonsense, you remember how one of the first things you established was a reformed Nigeria? Ha! Good old days. A Nigeria with a doomed legislative building, sorry domed building called the National Assembly where family reunion is held every now and then between former khaki boys, holders of umbrellas, holders of circled stars (which today is a luxurious broom), and other distant cousins. Remember how you and these highly placed ‘higher’ animals established agencies in multiple repetitions? And created avenues to fatten their stomach like cows, by any means necessary? Before now that you allow them do more of sleeping and practicing Anthony Joshua with chairs and punches than making laws that bring smiles to the common people.
But let’s not focus on one positive alone. Under your watch, you created jobs and joys that were unimaginable for thugs and area boys by encouraging Nigerians to come out every four years to sing the democratic anthem with our thumbs. During this national exercise, we have seen miracles unseen by the Israelite under Moses — you know, the likes of those stunts and acrobatic disappearance that ballot boxes do. More importantly, the touch of economic generosity which you add by sharing a cup of rice to voters willing to starve for four years is just top-notch. On top of this, you have helped us create snoring political parties that don’t even campaign during the election because, you know, the big men will settle them regardless.
Following this, your massive clampdown of press freedom these past five years is a new tune to your sad music. You have thought of it in all wisdom that Nigerians don’t need to be feed with old information about the mismanagement going around, for medical reasons of course! So I understand why you have become a chameleon who wears forest green on Mondays, dashiki on Tuesdays, suit and pant on Wednesdays, agbada on Thursdays, jalabia on Fridays, senator attire on Saturdays, and boxers on Sundays.
But it’s all good!
Permit me, at this juncture to pray to the All-mighty Lord to bless you, your kinsmen, and associates the same way they have used you to bless us. And that in a million years to come, they and their unborn generations who will lick from your sour soup be faced with the hardship enjoyed by the common man. In fact, I’m suddenly in the mood for prayer. I pray to God to grant the curses of all of the misled citizens of the country who shuffer and shmile during the day, and sweat in discomfort during the night, yet are issued powerful power bills to pay. May the bountiful woe of God reach all the ‘higher’ animals in government agencies who have helped and still helps us keep our national asset safe in their personal vaults. On this occasion of your birthday, Democracy, I put you and your usurpers in the court of God to judge.
No thank you, no bye-bye to you.
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