From time to time Nigerians have to converge, hold hands, look to the sky and collectively scream:

“WHAT THE HELL?!”

Maybe then someone will hear us. As Nigerian citizens, we are perhaps remiss in our duty to call to account those that rule us. Of course as many of these imbecilic psychopaths were put in place by selection not election, we sensibly assume that our voices matter even less than our votes. Yet, we must still call to account those that by hook or crook (largely the latter), rule us.

In a nation composed largely of the mentally circumcised; our leaders have connived with our circumstances to castrate our essential parts and anaesthetize our minds rendering us impotent and powerless. It is little wonder that we are often left with no option but to blow vaporous words out of mouths too heavy with disappointment, sorrow and defeat. In a bid to regain some of this sapped strength, we engage in vicious wars on the hardened streets of the World Wide Web…when the true battle is really outside our doors and inside our minds. We determine policies in beer parlours, at house parties, at dinner rendezvous; extrapolating and expatiating on political stratagems we will never be a part of. What an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness I feel in being a Nigerian. How frightening it is to realize that in all my twenty seven years, I have never known a good Nigeria. Scratch that, I have never been a citizen of a merely decent Nigeria, good is a stretch. I am afraid, what is the inheritance for my children?

Two days ago a bomb blast occurred at a crowded bus stop in Abuja, killing scores of Nigerians.

That thing blew the wind out of my sails; I’m talking folded my ropes, pulled up my anchor and pushed my weeping boat to sea. I was at a loss. Now I’m not particularly diabolic but I think at some point we must wonder if our politicians are using the copious amounts of Nigerian blood lost daily for something. Do they have some weekly politicians’ body paint event where the coleur de jour is Blood Red?

The comments of politicians following the event made me realize that in the end, there can be no better Nigeria with the current crop of politicians. How do I know this? The comments of interviewed politicians following the crisis told me so. I watched the devastation on TV, watched as a politician swaggered into the middle of the explosion scene predictably weighty with the sorrows of broken hearts, saturated by a condensed mass of roaming ghosts and the immobile-living stationary from shock, I heard this politician order citizens to, “…stop being too emotional, keep the emotions in check and calm down.” I wonder how calm he might be if a bomb rocketed through the cosmopolitan areas of Asokoro or Maitama….not the impoverished Nyanya region where it occurred. The death of a rich man it seems is equitable to the death of 1000 of the poorer masses.

Somehow, we have misplaced priorities; money is everything…life means nothing.