Thirty Letters to Love
Letter 17
Dearest,
I hope you are well.
Today is 20th October, and it reminds me of how Nigeria has failed the young people in it. I used to be a patriotic citizen, but that is no more. I do not love this country as I used to, and that is why, in a previous letter, I said that watching the Super Eagles play was nothing to me. The bigger picture has failed me and my generation of young people.
Whenever I remember 20–10–20, I shed unseen tears, I am held in severe, unbelieving shock again — I still cannot believe that the government opened fire on Nigerians who were waving the flag and singing the national anthem. This country died again during those EndSARS protests. I was in Jos during that period, and we had to go home from work due to some escalations between pro-government individuals who sought to hijack the protests and make a mess of it, and the actual peaceful protesters who were singing, processing and waving their flags. Those who supported the government did so because it was Buhari, a northern Muslim, who was in power, and they believed that Christian southerners were engineering a plot to overthrow their brother. It was most appalling to watch the scissors of tribalism and religious bigotry cut through the fabric of Nigerian unity, dividing it into a North-South, Christian-Muslim sham.
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That afternoon, I heard that the Lagos State government had imposed a curfew on the city because protests were becoming violent. But we had seen government cars and SUVs transport hoodlums to cause chaos among the people. This did not happen only in Lagos, as Abuja also had videos of such government-sponsored thuggery. My heart at this point was going through a slow death; the failure of the country was becoming clearer to me. Young people were already speaking of fleeing the country if the protests fail to yield desired results. I decided to take a nap.
Later in the evening, when I woke up to eat, I saw on my phone that the lights at Lekki Toll Gate, the hub of the protesters in Lagos, were turned off by the contractors. Soon after that, we saw, through an Instagram livestream, that Nigerian military personnel were there to disperse the protesters. And they used live bullets, and they shot at protesters. This was sad. It was heart-wrenching. It was unbelievable. As the bodies of protesters dropped, wounded and comatose, so did my love for Nigeria. The later events of government denial and gradual acceptance of undeniable evidence did not matter to me. I also learnt that no international body for the West was ever coming to help Nigerians gain freedom from corrupt leaders.
My hope in Nigeria was comatose, but not dead. It showed some signs of revival when the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, announced the planned implementation of the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System in the coming national elections. They tested this in some gubernatorial elections, and it proved to be somewhat credible and reliable because polling results were transmitted from the polling booths to the INEC server for collation, thereby cutting out alteration of results. I was encouraged to retrieve and voter’s card and got ready to vote. The surviving EndSARs protesters believed that the protest would continue at the polling booths in 2023, not by wielding placards, but by voting out wickedness. We all hoped in the BVAS, but as Peter Obi’s Obidients took the country by pleasant surprise, INEC’s Mahmood was working in obedience to his puppeteers to sabotage the BVAS’s credibility by switching off the server to prevent on-site transmission of results to the collation centre.
The dawn when Tinubu was announced Nigeria’s president was the Dawn of Death to my patriotism. I believed in my heart that Nigeria had failed me for most of my productive years. I only asked God for help in the chaos that was about to come because I did not believe that the judiciary would call the election for what it was: a travesty.
So dearest, today, as I remember those who have died for this country, I pray that they have not died in vain, because it feels like it. And I think they died with my patriotism.
Achebe would say, ‘There Was a Country’.
Yours,
Stanley
For B, wherever she may be, and C, the one I long to see.
Love song for the day: Burna Boy — For My Hand feat. Ed Sheeran
