In a week where a political chieftain is gunned down on his way to the airport in Owerri and a former Commissioner of police is murdered while taking a break on his way to Jos, I have chosen not to write about death. Devastated as I am by these meaningless deaths, I am going to Afghanistan.
My heart is heavy and I condole with the relations now without their breadwinners. No one deserves to die at the hands of hired bandits, political miscreants, and misled thugs.
This is the nation in which we have now found ourselves. Hard to decipher, more complex by the day. It was in this same country that we would travel from Lagos to Makurdi by road as a family.
A whopping nine hours. As we grew older, we would take a break in Akure and see the countryside and would often throw in a bushmeat pepper soup with pounded yam in the mix. Like Benue people, the people here understand their Poundo, fresh sizzling and well pounded.
Between all of this, the children would find adventure in the hotel and make friends with kind and welcoming receptionists.
Today, the receptionists will inform the kidnappers about your journey plans, your route, and how much you spent on pounded yam. He/she will eavesdrop on your conversation and sell you like Judas with neither conscience nor empathy.
Nigeria has gone to the dogs and we need more than a miracle to pull us out of this new God we worship. Money. It is the end-all and be-all. Trust has flown out of the window as grandchildren trade their grandparents to kidnappers for ransom sharing and children are abusing their parents at will.
I never knew I would get to the point as a columnist when all I will talk about for weeks is blood money, blood-shedding, and bloodletting. We have all let our nation down and have become the laughing stock of smaller nations. Bandits are everywhere and family and strangers are selling the nation piecemeal for a fee.
Many years ago I spent time with an expatriate from a Latin American country at the very highest ranking of his country. He told me that Nigeria is run like a deal, not a business. In trying to explain, he told me a business has ethical standards but a deal is something you arrange outside of propriety in shady places behind closed doors.
He had lived in Nigeria for six years. He said everyone is taking a cut of the nation without giving back. He told me from his cooks to his driver to his staff inside the embassy, everyone who is Nigerian was trying to cheat the system. What he considered fraud was considered being sharp by Nigerians.
When I interviewed him for my column, Five Favourite Books with Eugenia Abu in the Sunday Trust many years ago, he told me he did not read fiction because Nigeria presented fiction in all its ramifications. You have to look again to see if anything is true, he told me. I felt shame, (now missing in our national lexicon) wash over me. When citizens of a nation depart shame, that’s when you know we are in trouble.
And talking about shame is what brings me front and center to today’s topic, hanging body parts and other related matters. At once hilarious and profound, ThisDay Columnist Joseph Edgar describes a party he attended in Lagos where the ladies were so made up by makeup artists that he could hardly recognise them. He added the now breast pumping trend by women old enough to be his mother to the mix. It was hilarious but very sad.
It is true that we all have things we are ashamed of, personal to us and also from images we see. Nothing beats the imagination and gives you personal shame on behalf of another than a shrivelled wrinkled breast on display. Even the ones that are worthy embarrass you on behalf of the owner. It’s everywhere now.
Breasts as accessories in Nollywood, at parties even at funerals. Shame has departed us and we now walk naked in our marketplaces. Thunder legs are now the rave as mini dresses and skirts return with a vengeance. A combination of wrinkled breasts and thunder thighs does not make a good sight. Add this to rouge, false eyelashes, nails like claws, and I certainly now belong to the stone age generation.
I hear some women are injecting poison to give them big bums and big boots. Shame! We are emulating women on entertainment channels across the world. Our bodies are not the same and our cultural ethos different. Whose wives and daughters are these showing their inner recesses in the global marketplace?
I may just be a little old-fashioned but hanging breasts and a 70-year-old man in shredded jeans are not my cups of tea.
Please save us these sights. In the face of mourning as a nation where kids and families are abducted and people are gunned down in broad daylight, we need people in ash cloth begging God to rescue us not watermelons and lemons, shrivelled tangerines, and ill-dressed men dangling ill-dressed stuff distracting us from focusing on our national challenges.
