By Chuks Iloegbunam
They have rejected the outgoing naira currency notes in Anambra – days to its inglorious exit.
They have also rejected the sanctimonious one now bound in one irreversible direction – North!
North to D. D for Dawurah. D for Do Little. D for Do-Nothing-At-All.
Perhaps the notes for planned obsolescence are in rejection everywhere else.
But the much-acclaimed new ones are in hiding,
Hiding behind Mr. Incompetence, Mr. Corruption, and Mr. Shamelessness.
One man wangled enough new notes and headed in one reversible direction – the fuel station.
Our men are at the Apapa Quays waiting for millions of fuel-laden ships to berth, he was told.
Our women, some of them, are out in the fields with those on the hustings, he also heard.
Perhaps the country’s owners now speechifying the hungry upandan will spare some shards of new currency notes
For them to trample each other fighting to grab a bill or two for a mudu of garri for hungry mouths at home.
The would-be petrol buyer changed direction and in slow motion headed home to accustomed blight.
As he trudged, he processed many a thought. He thought about the fellow with a house by the river who always bathed with spittle.
He walked home to face no fuel to power the generator. No power to charge the phones. His major welcome is a fridge whose casual leave has been extended.
Of course, the national grid relocated long ago to climes millions are now breaking bands, breaking banks and even breaking bonds to japa to.
Mr. Lanky had come bespectacled, the disappointed fuel buyer remembered, skeletal but bloated by promises:
I will do this and this, I will also do that and all those, truly, I will. I am the balm to quench all your aches, the quake to flatten the peaks of your tribulations.
Further, I will make your days nothing other than interminable mornings, yes I will.
Even your cemeteries will go on strike, I swear, protesting nonpatronage because you will no longer die.
Time has wounded all heels, Time should heal all wounds, Time must now intervene.
Time! How you contrive to do many a thing. How you lanced the lie bloated by promises; how puss spurted in multiple directions, sending reeking squirts on graves now groaning for over patronage in cemeteries stretching from the Lekki Tollgate by the Atlantic to the closest reaches of the Sahara.
Time. Many things stand revealed to you. How, for instance, the flower to adorn the terraces morphed into twigs and thorns in the hearts of faces now singing the dirge of swollen eyelids and tremulous lips.
You have seen batterers of laughter, song and festival conscript Mea Culpa as a brand new name, making claims from a void of utter emptiness, that cuts deep like the sword:
I did my best and I gave my all, but you bagas are a most difficult crowd.
You have seen that having passed the buck, a blood pumper hewn from stone has self-tossed in one irreversible direction – North-ingness!
But his foot soldiers people the community space, asphyxiating the people’s case, mouthing inanity.
O People! Look at Time that you may learn. Examine the greenery reduced to a dream drenched in acid, an arid expanse yearning for drops of humanity.
You may have nothing but disdain and the f-word for satan’s arrow that is on the verge of a flight into illusion.
But do voice your outrage at Mr. Numb-And-Dumb in the face of the tethered goat writhing in labour.
Knock that baton off the grasping and thieving talons poised to sustain this cancerous tumour.
January 25, 2023.
