Cisi Eze: PREFRON, Let Our People Glow!

Dear PREFRON (President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria),

If every kiss were a promise, all of your kisses have been lies.

One thousand Naira means nothing the minute it gets broken down into “change”. Change. You puckered your lips and on our faces, you slathered “change”.

Behind the smiling faces you see, stands sadness –dark, dreary. PREFRON, let our people glow!

Humans, like other living organisms, adapt to situations. You have taken advantage of this fact and flung hardship in our faces. You have taken advantage of the fact Nigerians never bounce back. We carve out uncomfortable spaces in walls – we never bounce back. We adapt, we don’t fight.

I was rooting for you. My friends were rooting for you. I convinced the ones that weren’t rooting for you to root for you. All that rooting. Two years down the line, here we are.

“Unemployed people would get five thousand Naira.”

“School children would get free lunch.”

If you had your way, you would have said, “I will walk to the end of a rainbow and get you a pot of gold.”

“I will fight corruption,” you said. We cheered so loud we did not hear the concluding part of that sentence, the part that said, “Only among the opposition.”

But one question I have for you: “What has happened to the “recovered money?” I meant to write blood money.

Yes, all that stolen money is blood money.

Money that would have been used to fix roads has been diverted into an individual’s pocket. Those roads are accident snares.

Greedy people stack and stash money that would have been used to provide better health care for Nigerians. Were health care so good, you would not travel out for mere headache.

You know, the reason we put you there – yes, WE PUT YOU THERE – was because we thought you had our interest at heart. We felt you gave a fudge about us. There was a Messiah-like aura around you; it lured us, enthralled us – we gravitated towards it. Your words were reassuring, promising, soothing.

You seduced us with something we so desired – change. You promised something different, a breath of fresh air that would fill our lungs, give us hope.

We should have known this would happen when there was a debate about your educational qualifications. I did not care, truly. Education and literacy are different concepts we have confused to mean the same thing. I felt it did not matter if you wrote that external exam or not. All I was after was you were educated enough to rule a country.

But here we are.

You had one job – fix Nigeria. You blew it. Did you have a plan? I wager not. All you had was a six-letter word. “Change”. If I think clearly, you were honest. You promised change. Yes, there has been change. Only that it was not the change we expected.

Your praise-singers would take to the streets and chant your name. They would say you squashed the insurgent group that drank the life juice of Nigerians. You crushed them, agreed. But what about the next group that would come up soon? Something tells me we would get fed up to the point we decide to act.

We won’t continue hewing out spaces in walls, PREFRON. Our elastic hearts, hearts you stretch with hurt and pain, would stretch beyond elastic limit and “deform” into porcelain. Hard porcelain. You would load us with more pain and then, our hearts would break. When it breaks, blood would seep out our chests and become the fuel of a revolution. Soon, gullibility would leave the room as darkness leaves the room and it would be a new dawn for our people.

PREFRON, LET OUR PEOPLE GLOW!