LIFE'S CONSISTENT INCONSISTENCY

IT has been over a decade but the words come resonating through time like it was yesterday. Emmanuel, the ‘immaculate’ he called himself, and his task was to make sure we understood the essence of the English Language. The immaculate one didn’t just want us to blindly cram the idioms or read the comprehension passages without insight. He would always say life itself is a teaching board, one cannot learn in isolation for every element, every event works to make us or break us.

One of his favourite sayings was this: “Change is the consistent inconsistency of life,” he said it way too often that it became a mantra, a cliché and at some point, a sentence of beguilement for members of my class, but as I starred at the heap of tomatoes the seller just said was N50, I couldn’t help but remember, Emmanuel ‘the immaculate.’

How many months ago was tomato as precious as or even more precious than rubies? I genuinely blinked back my surprise and asked her for a second time to ascertain the price of the fresh, beautifully red fruits. The seller affirmed N50 to my utter amusement. I gave her a N100 bill and requested for two bowls. I made a pot of stew that lasted me 4 days…

Wasn’t it just a few months ago that it seemed like the entire nation would crumble at the feet of the magnificent valour of tomato ravaging Tuta absoluta? Three balls of tomatoes sold for as high as N500. Nigerians resorted to tomato paste and for those who couldn’t stand its stale taste, leafy green vegetables. However, how readily available and affordable were the vegetables?

In those few months, while the price of tomato sky rocketed like Niel Armstrong’s rocket landing in the moon for the first time, leafy green vegetables as well became like princely emeralds. A tiny moth eaten bunch sold for N100 or even more.

Cooking became a hobby for several Nigerians, even the classy ladies with long nail extensions took them off and entered the kitchen. Tuta absoluta waged war against Nigerians and it seemed as though the nation would never recover from its ravenous rape, but did it?

GOD WILL NOT COME DOWN!

IT is becoming unarguably irksome and disgusting the way we sit, fold our arms and exclaim ‘God will help us’ over the innumerable ills and adversities that have taken the nation hostage. For decades, submerged in incredible religiosity, we have continued to like mantra, chant those words, failing to see this harsh reality – they have become too much of a cliché to change our pathetic situation!

Harrowingly however, we have become too complacent and content with mediocrity; we never strive to pull the scales off our eyes so that we can awaken to the consciousness that this nation’s ship has, for over a long period, hit an iceberg.

With the breaking of every dawn, water of minus degree temperature is unequivocally submerging the lower deck and keeps spilling uncontrollably to the middle class areas, but who cares? So long the first class deck is not overrun, all is well but how long will the water hold?

The lives of the occupants of the third class deck are seemingly inconsequential and they can drown for what it’s worth, isn’t it? In their craftiness and in a bid to protect their own lives and property, occupants in the first class deck instruct the sailors in the control rooms to seal off the lower areas of the ship, dooming the third class dwellers to a horrifying stone cold death and we chant, ‘God will help us!’ No one raises an eyebrow, no one asks any questions, we simply say, ‘there is God o,’ the 21st century remix of the ancient ‘God will help us’ coined by by the nation’s incredibly hilarious first lady whose theatricalities, posterity will yet guffaw over.

The word corruption is spoken and we all disdainfully cast our glances at the huge old rock which provides shelter for the nation’s number one citizens and occupants of its highest pedestal. While we may be right to look in that direction with intense abhorrence, we must remind ourselves of the legend of the sanctimonious pirate that went to sea with a tablet on which Moses’ ten commandments were engraved only after he had unscrupulously stricken out ‘thou shalt not steal’. Perhaps, we are doling out selective judgments!

Though we may not be committing any fatal errors by pointing our so called ‘holy’ and unsullied fingers at the pot bellied politicians who no longer have necks because they have been vacuumed in by several layers of unhealthy fat gained from illicit grubbing on the sumptuous national cake like ravenous maggots not to mention the indiscriminate sucking of the udder of the ‘oryel’ cow but do we point the same ‘holy’ fingers at the PHCN staff that brings a crazy bill to extort money from a struggling single mother while threatening to disconnect her electricity? No, we simply say ‘God will help us’

MTN’S MEGA FINE: KARMA OR VINDICATION FOR THE COMMON?

Like the Draconian measures that were doled out on the Israelites by Pharaoh’s stooges, having them make bricks from nothingness, MTN has done no other than ferociously rape the proverbial goose that lays the golden egg-Nigeria. Sans a scintilla of sympathy, in over a decade of carrying out its telecommunications business in Nigeria, MTN garnered over 35 million subscribers in oil rich Africa’s pride but what percentage of these devotees are genuinely happy?

They endure the eccentrics of this service provider like a wife whose love for her husband has run dry but remains in a sour marriage out of obligation, societal values and the future of her seeds.

Like several other Nigerians, I was also stuck in that catastrophic and dysfunctional marriage to a Machiavellian who rapes me of air time as he pleases, never gives me bonuses even in festive periods, avariciously yanks away my subscription fee but never gives me internet till my blood pressure almost reaches 250 from nagging and works an irksome voodoo on my data, making it disappear magically.

But I stay married to this piece of garbage, why? I tell myself these hideous lies, like several other wives of the beast- ‘he is my first love (my first phone line), we have many children (all my contacts know this line), and we have been married for so long (I have used this line for over a decade).