Blind Republic #IAmNigeria

    I am Nigeria. I am as blind as a bat but I see red. My children call it blood, I call it color. My children call it pain, I still call it color. Like the green and white of my flag with the red stain on it. Art! It’s in its purest form when it leaves a message like a punch in the gut. I am a gluttonous mother to those children that I eat. I am the absentee father to those children who I have refused to name because their voices are like sirens when their stomach are empty. When will they learn that in my kingdom silence is the language of the majority? My earth is green because heaven convulses to let the clouds lose their weight. Rain drops become louder on the street of blood and build to a flood in the street of hunger, which is also the street of money. Money, a bandage on my gangrene foot, and a metaphorical blade on the wrists of my neighbors who are willing to foster my children. My ambitious children learn the world by running away from their homes. By running away from a country on fire, drinking the blood of its own to stay wet. I am Nigeria. My mouth is full of prayers in different languages to raise an aching bone from its flesh and the blood that’s corroding it, as if it were metal which had tasted salt water. Sweet sorrow I have planted on the tongues of my children who wish to but can’t forget me like stones haunted by the memories of the mountain they broke from. My children with the western wind on their backs rode their hard luck until every wall became a door. The national anthem leaves no furrows on their foreheads when it’s sang on a foreign soil. I am Nigeria, a mother with a dark cave for a womb, growing her children like flickers turning to a sunbeam. A loud light from the throat of darkness – a thunder. The world has listened to this sound that echoed the color of my blindness and it has given me different names to pride itself on its high moral standards and charity.

   I have earned my woes, but inspite of everything, there’s a violent hunger for success that grows on an empty stomach. A painful history stitched to the skin, like a thread through a needle, the bad go with the good. A thirst chasing the flood. To ache long enough until you’re notoriously eager to be great. I am Nigeria, a seemingly barren land holding stagnation like a trophy, but my seeds have become trees and the world may not survive its own greed without their shade. The leaders of tomorrow are leading today, abeit with the caveat that their home is in their rearview…

    I am Nigeria.