Recession and festivities are strange bedfellows. But that is the reality of this season. Hunger and uncertainty packaged as Christmas hampers are hardly anyone’s dream gift. But that was the lot of many this Christmas and it was not funny. We grew up to eat rice and chicken at Christmas. We looked forward to it and to the big festival coming up next. It never mattered the faith we were born into. We lived well even when there was so little. But this Christmas suffered and the celebrants suffered too. First, the staple food, rice, turned plastic. Then rice queues surfaced in some places of excellence giving one a feeling of déjà vu. It was so in 1984. Some queued till Christmas was over and their shocked kids wisen up to the reality of today’s failure.
A friend who lives in elite Omole Phase One in Lagos is ever conscious of the other squalor side called Grammar School. He says for every Ogudu, there is an Ojota and for every Ikeja GRA, there is an Oshodi. The divisions are too sharp and the wise should be worried. My friend calls it dugbedugbe — a sort of alien planet that may soon release itself and shatter this unfeeling world. We created a recession and shut down every home of the poor. Governors had no money and so could not pay salaries. Governors now have money and suddenly realise paying the poor is pure waste. We insist that our gatemen must continue with the old peanuts we paid them before the hardship we caused. We claim the maid cannot have extra because our bloated income too has not increased. On Christmas Day, we locked ourselves up in the comfort and security of our mansions, we said the hungry could roam the street in despondency.
Dugbedugbe is coming, falling free. God will not destroy this world. We will. And we have almost completed the process. Elite greed, elite arrogance and elite wickedness will soon lay waste the beauty of the world we inherited. It cannot get worse than it is.
And, you know it is not only food and drinks that are scarce now in Nigeria. Shame has also disappeared from our thinking shelves. Or didn’t you read the drifting online messages competing last week? The messages introduced the latest national championship. The new craze isn’t football. It is not about Arsenal and Chelsea and Man U. It is no longer my Mercedes is bigger than yours. No. What we have just come up with is creative perfidy. We have come of age so much that we now range our thieves, like Ileya rams, in competition with our neighbour’s thief. Thievery is the game of big boys. The craze is my thief is smarter than yours!
Of course, you know what I am talking about. The South West and the North consecrate and worship their own thieves, so they must leave the South South and the South East thieves alone. Great idea. Monkey no fine but im mama like am. That’s right. If the lunatic on the other side desires to barbecue his mother’s corpse, what the hell is the problem of you living on this side of the Niger? That is the warning you and I are being told to heed. Looks like we have really lost it as a nation. And I feel like pressing the throttle full blast. But then, a good hunter shoots as the bird flies. This is not a time to shoot straight.
Dugbedugbe nfi loke. Yesterday, I looked at forlorn Christian kids in aimless trek on miraged roads of the city. I saw them and remembered we were not supposed to be back here if only we had listened to our ori inu. You are here because you set out on a journey of national redemption and got ambushed by the very forces of decay you were running away from. The Japanese are wise people. They have an old story that fit into the dilemma of today’s ambushed Nigerian. It is about long-legged frog and its many journeys to nowhere. Frogs are cold blooded animals. So blessed are they that they live with equal ease on land and in water. They see far with big eyes on both sides of their mucus heads. With their very powerful hind legs and webbed feet, they jump great distances, they swim, they dig, they burrow deep when they feel the necessity to run away from the elements. But folklore tells us that despite these endowments, they are not so blessed with intelligence. They easily miss their way. And it is really so with some humans. Many who are big in size have been ruined by their petite understanding.
The Japanese tale is of two adventurous frogs from two different cities, one far East, the other far West. Each thought it was the wisest frog in the whole world and its city the most beautiful. They then set out to do what Mungo Park did, seeking the beauty of the other world. They trekked and sweated climbing seven hills, seven mountains. Then, at the tip of the highest of the mountains, they met. Each was surprised at the existence of the other. More surprised, still, they were when each realised the mission of the other was exactly like his. It was a meeting of the west and the east.
“It is just unfortunate we are not taller than this,” the first frog told the other.
“And what would we have done with the height of a giant?” the other retorted.
“ Can’t you see that from this height, you would see my world and I would see yours if only we were taller than this?”
And there wouldn’t have been any reason to suffer more, going further?”
“ Exactly.”
“What a great idea!” said the other frog. “We have only got to stand up on our hind legs, and hold onto each other, and then we can each look at the world each of us is traveling to.” Great idea.
They did just that, and as the storyteller said, they stretched themselves as high as they could, and held each other tightly, so that they might not fall down. The first frog turned his nose towards where he was going, and the other towards his own destination too. But remember — what they have are long legs, not sharp brains. And so, when they stood up, their great eyes lay in the backs of their heads. Their noses might point to the places to which they wanted to go, but their eyes beheld the places from which they had come.
“Dear me!” cried the other frog, “Your world is exactly like mine. It is certainly not worth such a long journey. I shall go back home!”
“If I had had any idea that yours was only a copy of mine, I should never have travelled all this way,” exclaimed the other frog. As he spoke, he took his hands from his friend’s shoulders, and they both fell down on the grass. Then they took a polite farewell of each other, and set off for home again. To the end of their lives, they believed that both worlds (which are as different to look at as London and Lagos can be), were as alike as two peas.
We are like these lost creatures. We have been repeatedly conned so much that we now believe it is impossible to get it right. But what adult girl gets trapped in the rapist’s room twice? Distractions are the nemesis of the unwary. Like these Japanese frogs, the unwary won’t ever see the beauty of their dreams. We were appalled by the raw incompetence of the past. We wanted to live well in peace and we demanded and got a package called change. Whether the ocean is full or lean, we are all now at the beach of reckoning, witnesses to our own moments of indiscretion.