The nigeria I never met but will create

I have never ceased to wonder if there was not a time in the history of this country when the present-day senior citizens convened to fabricate fantasies with which the present-day Nigerian youths are constantly tantalized. What if they aren’t just fantasies? What if they actually happened? What if a back-travel in time is the way forward ?

I can’t imagine the streams of congratulatory messages that’ll be sent to the presidency, if by some government policy, a Nigerian Naira grows as tall as the American Cent (If $1 = 100 naira), yet I’ve been severally regaled with tales of Once Upon A Time the US Dollar was not Worth the Head of Herbert Macaulay ($1 < 1 naira); can you imagine that? I can’t.

How many times has it been said and proven incontrovertibly that unlike the container-loads of inapplicable craps I was fed with for 9 years in school (6 years at the secondary school and 3 years at the university), timeless values were taught in schools in the old system. How else could anyone explain where Farouk learned to pull the “Hat Trick” that made him $600,000 richer? The most plausible deduction is that he applied what he was taught in school to the present day.

How else could anyone explain Alamieyeseigha’s transformation into Agbani Darego in order to jump bail from the UK? (Some male UK prison wardens probably made passes at him on his Prison Break Episode: a beautiful man )-he also applied what he was taught in school.

Didn’t General AbdulKareem Adisa’s (Of Notorious Memory) sissy show before Abacha (Of More Notorious Memory) pay him off?

All we are told in schools now is that we are the “Leaders of Tomorrow”, without being told that life only gives you Today: you will have to decide when to christen your Today as Tomorrow for yourself .

Now I smile wryly when a senior citizen looks at me and says “The standard of education has fallen”- our professors know some things they aren’t telling us in schools.

Didn’t I also hear that in days of yore, there were no tribal seams in the relationships existing between Nigerians from different ethnic groups? Well, I was told that all that’s needed to initiate a bromance with an Igbo man was a little knowledge of his language, and yes! The Hausa man was very honest andaffable ( Babangida must be an Haitian or a product of Hausa Genetic Mutation ), of course, the Yoruba man just lived a-day-at-a-time and never pored over schemes that’d make him amass superfluous wealth at the expense of neighbours (Sufficient proof that Obasanjo should be deported to Bangladesh where he hails from. ).

What happened to those meritorious virtues? I can’t find them around here now. Can you?

Are these graduates that can’t find gainful employment after years of graduation really culpable? Is the government that appropriate the national cake and screams back at the aggrieved populace that they “ don’t give a damn ” really a victim of a disrespectful population?

Whenever I am engrossed in the thoughts of how? where? when? the Utopia that Nigeria used to be became the Hell I have comfortably adapted to, I take solace in Swanand Kikire’s GIVE ME SOME SUNSHINE: this song synopsizes the life of the Nigerian Youth, although it’s majorly sung in the hindi language.