Year in, year out, the monotonous greeting-prayer line are oft-repeated: Happy and a very prosperous New Year? Most often than not, it always leaves me wondering, because by the third month of the year or so, most people start gnashing their teeth complaining, and hues and cries of hardship always become more prominent, even than the out-gone year. The cosmic circle take three hundred and sixty-five days to complete and in a Leap year, as we are, a day less. And once this is done, we roll out the drums, holidaying, partying, celebrating, jubilating and most ridiculously, start making New Year Resolutions and several other avowals!
In a celebratory mood. Images by Freepik
Happy New Year and now, either to start a new thing or continue with the old. I would not start differently. But certainly, the New Year portends grave danger to the discerning minds. I can see people wearily ‘crossing’ to the New Year melancholically, in very low Spirits, despite the numerous ‘Cross Over to Take Over’ special church services. The usual passage still rules: Let the weak say I am strong. A hungry man forcing his belly to protrude!
Anyway, just as the old year was giving way to the dawn of a new one, our Prophets, our Pastors, and other colours of Seers, went to town with all manners of prophecies. They claimed to have wine and dine with God. Unknown quantity lots clattering vanities, reeling out what God says or will say, what He intends to unleash or withholds on the people. Please to save yourself of unwanted migraines, I enjoined you to read less of those who have made it a habit of releasing ‘what God intends to do for the Country yearly. All these prophesies are what they are: smart intelligent guessing!
Now we are into the year 2020, the magical year of our governments, beginning of another decade, and a Leap Year at that, I think we should be clapping and laughing more when we look at where we are as a people. Since the turn of the 80s, all manner of visions were drawn up by the successive governments, all to be actualized by the magical year 2020. Housing for all by 2020. Education for all by 2020. Health for all by 2020. Food for all by 2020. Money for all by 2020. Even, love for all by 2020. To God be the Glory, all these remain a mirage today, as we step into the magical year. Perhaps, the rogues drawing up the visionless ‘Vision this and that’ then thought, the World might have ended before the Year 2020. Their visions were tallied towards personal aggrandizements. Vision to build a mansion here and there. Vision to acquire this and that. They ended up oiling their pockets at the expense of the populace. Some four decades after all these ‘visions’, housing remains a mirage, transportation remains dysfunctional, education now in shambles, while life has gone back to the Hobbes’s brutish and short
Still, we should clap and laugh for the New Year. Because we are yet unshackled from the manacles used to bind us. From Kano State, the Dollarized Governor, Umar Ganduje would rather pauperize the people in the name of a Sharia Law. Men are not to be inside a tricycle with women! The one in Jigawa State quickly moved further. Men and women are not to be seen together at night, save a husband and wife, or siblings. Zamfara State’s example is a bit bitter. N1 billion Naira voted to fight mosquitoes!
The killer trio who murdered Favour.
At least for some prophesies to come to pass, some need to pay it. That is perhaps, what pushed the young man, Adeeko Owolabi to approach his Spiritual father, the Cherubim and Seraphim Prophet, Segun Phillip for help. The Prophet requested for the heart and other vital organs of a young female damsel to prepare the ‘pepper soup’. Once this is eaten, money would start following. Let us clap for the Prophet!
Favour, the late LASU final year student killed by her boyfriend.
Adeeko’s girlfriend, Favour, a young 400-level Dramatic Arts student of Lagos State University readily became a target. She was tricked out of her parent’s cosy home in a suburbs of Lagos to a faraway Ikoyi Ile in Osun State. She was slaughtered, her heart and other vital organs were removed and used as the main ingredients for the ‘pepper soup’ that was supposed to draw money from the Esoteric Beings. Just like many of the Nigerian youth’s wild dreams, the process failed.
But on the lighter side, we even should clap more for our dear President, Muhammadu Buhari for causing the nation so much laughter on the New Year day. He bluntly disappointed Femi Falana (SAN) and his ilk, who keep haranguing our medulla oblangata with the tales of a Buhari For President for the sixth consecutive time. PMB nurtured no such idea, he regaled the distraught nation in a novel New Year letter.
But why would a sane man want to do more than the constitutionally stipulated two terms of eight years? The debt burden of 83 billion US Dollars is weighty enough to scare any lily-livered out of Office. The untellable socio-political crises ravaging the land, or the never-ending insurgency onslaughts across the country, or the daily large doses of fake news being churned out by both the opposition and the unhappy politicians, which do not preclude the ruling party, should be enough to drive anyone out of the Aso Rock as fast as he could run. So why would he want another term? Besides, he has not fully resolved the riddle of Jubril of Sudan introduced by Nnamdi Kanu, the fugitive leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) dissidents. Anyway, let us clap for him because if he wanted, the nation is too weary to resist anything of such now. He could easily just get it.
Yet we must enter the New Year clapping and laughing. We should even add dancing and singing to complete the euphoria of completing a cosmic circle and a start of another. The turn of the millennium has seen the country in a topsy-turvy journey. The twenty years of the democracy have only produced super-rich public officials and economically jaundiced citizenry. The hopes of the people fading with each successive governments.
This new decade will definitely set the country on the journey to her political apocalypse. Both the centrifugal and the centripetal forces shall battle it out, at all fronts. The political Soul of the country will be at stake. After the PMB’s Presidency, whatever the tiny chord binding the North and South, particularly will give way. The hawks among the two tribes will bare their fangs, more menacingly. And the people will see clearly the malfeasance tendencies of those angling to govern them. Too bad, as that highly cerebral Ghanaian novelist, Ayi Kwei Armah rightly captured it: The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born!
Afolayan Adebiyi writes from Lagos, Nigeria.