The Lament of the Displaced Stakeholder
By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO
Bịa dị, Alex nwa Otti, let us sit you down gently before you scatter the remaining pieces of our fragile hearts. What exactly is wrong with you, my brother? Who poured sense into your head without our permission? Who told you that a governor must actually govern? Since when did leadership become this serious assignment you are treating like a final-year project you must score A in? You have carried this matter on your head as if Abia is your personal farmland and you are determined to weed every corner before the next rain. It is becoming too much. We are not used to this kind of disturbance.
Look at you, moving around with this strange brightness in your eyes, as if you swallowed a torchlight. You walk as if you have discovered some hidden truth the rest of us have been avoiding for decades. You talk as if governance is supposed to be about service, not sharing. You behave as if the people actually matter, as if their suffering is something you must fix instead of something you must manage with long speeches and empty promises. This your new energy is confusing us. It is destabilizing the ecosystem we carefully built on low expectations and high tolerance for nonsense.
And honestly, we are worried. Deeply worried. Because this your stubborn insistence on doing things properly is killing Abia – killing the Abia we know, the Abia we grew up with, the Abia that raised us in the warm embrace of dysfunction. You are uprooting the weeds we planted with our own hands. You are sweeping away the dust we used to hide our shame. You are repairing roads we used as excuses for lateness. You are paying salaries we used to weaponize during arguments. You are bringing light into corners where we used to hide our small small hustles. How do you expect us to survive in this new environment of accountability and progress? It is too harsh. Too bright. Too clean.
You have turned the whole place upside down with your insistence on transparency. You are publishing figures as if numbers are harmless things. You are calling contractors to order as if they are not our uncles and cousins. You are asking questions nobody has asked since the creation of the state. You are digging into files that were sealed with dust and silence. You are dragging ghosts out of old offices and forcing them to explain themselves. This is not how things are done here. You are breaking the unwritten constitution of “leave it like that.” You are violating the sacred tradition of “we will look into it.” You are destroying the comfort of “e go better someday.”
And what is even more painful is that you are doing all this with a straight face, as if it is normal. As if it is not a direct attack on our heritage of managed decay. You are killing the Abia we built with our own hands – brick by brick, pothole by pothole, abandoned project by abandoned project. You are killing the Abia that allowed us to complain loudly in public and collect quietly in private. You are killing the Abia that gave us the freedom to blame the government for everything while doing nothing ourselves. You are killing the Abia that made us experts in survival, improvisation, and selective amnesia.
Do you not see the damage you are causing? People are beginning to hope again. Hope, Alex! That dangerous thing that makes people start expecting results. That thing that makes them believe change is possible. That thing that makes them look at leaders with clear eyes instead of tired resignation. You are resurrecting hope in a land where we buried it long ago with full ceremony. You are waking up a sleeping giant we intentionally drugged so it would not disturb us. You are stirring the pot we left on low heat so it would not boil over. This is how revolutions start, and you are acting as if you don’t know.
And what about the people who used to benefit from the old ways? Have you considered their feelings? Their emotional wellbeing? Their financial stability? You have chased them out of their comfort zones with your reforms. You have scattered their networks of shortcuts and backdoors. You have blocked the taps they used to drink from. You have turned their free-flowing streams of entitlement into dry riverbeds. They are now wandering around like displaced landlords, clutching old documents that no longer hold power. They are crying in corners, whispering your name like a curse and a prayer at the same time.
Even the ordinary people are confused. They don’t know how to behave in a functioning environment. They are used to dodging potholes, not admiring smooth roads. They are used to calculating bribe money, not receiving services freely. They are used to shouting at government offices, not being attended to politely. You are disrupting their muscle memory. You are forcing them to unlearn survival tactics they perfected over decades. You are making them question whether suffering was ever necessary. This is emotional violence, Alex. You must slow down.
And let us not forget the elders – the custodians of the old order. They are watching you with a mixture of fear and irritation. They don’t understand this your speed. They don’t understand why you are not consulting them before making progress. They don’t understand why you are not respecting the ancient rhythm of “we will do it next week.” They don’t understand why you are not sharing the usual envelopes that help them interpret government policies correctly. They are shaking their heads in disbelief, wondering if you are truly one of us or if you were imported from a functioning country.
But you, Alex, you are moving as if you are on a mission from the gods. You are acting like someone who has seen the future and refuses to let us remain in the past. You are walking through the state with the confidence of a man who knows exactly where he is going, even though the rest of us are still trying to find the map. You are speaking with the calmness of someone who has already counted the cost and decided it is worth paying. You are working with the determination of a man who has no intention of slowing down, no matter how loudly we shout.
And that is why we are crying. That is why we are lamenting. That is why we are raising our voices to the heavens and asking the ancestors to intervene. Because if you continue like this, Abia will change beyond recognition. The old Abia will die. The Abia we used to mock and endure will disappear. The Abia that made us experts in complaining will vanish. The Abia that gave us endless material for jokes and insults will fade away. And what will we do then? How will we cope in a state that actually works? How will we adjust to a life where things are done properly? How will we survive in a place where excuses are no longer valid?
So, Alex nwa Otti, hear our cry. We are not asking you to stop completely. We are not asking you to return us to darkness. We are only asking you to slow down small. Reduce the brightness of your torchlight. Dim the intensity of your reforms. Leave some potholes for old times’ sake. Allow some files to remain missing. Permit a little confusion here and there. Let the spirit of the old Abia breathe small. Let the displaced stakeholders find new hiding places. Let the rest of us adjust gradually to this your new world.
Because if you continue at this pace, you will kill Abia – the Abia we knew, the Abia we mastered, the Abia we survived. And maybe, just maybe, that is exactly what you intend to do.
But must you do it with so much enthusiasm?
To the man who now perches upon the governorship like a gargoyle on a cathedral of rust, gripping that cold calculator as if it were the staff of Moses, I write with the trembling hands of someone watching his entire world collapse in slow motion. You sit there, stiff and unblinking, as if the weight of the state is nothing more than a spreadsheet waiting for your approval. You have replaced the warm, familiar heartbeat of political misbehavior with the icy clicking of arithmetic. You have swapped the sweet, chaotic music of mismanagement for the sterile hum of efficiency. And you expect us to clap for you. You expect us to adjust. You expect us to breathe normally while you suffocate everything we once held dear.
My hand shakes not because of age or weakness, but because I am witnessing a kind of violence that has no blood, no gunshots, no screams – yet it is more terrifying than any war. You are killing something delicate, something precious, something we nurtured with our own hands: the profitable sickness that kept our pockets warm and our consciences comfortably numb. You are not governing; you are dissecting. You are peeling back the skin of our beloved dysfunction with the cold precision of a surgeon who has no emotional attachment to the patient. You are performing an autopsy on a body that was still breathing, still coughing, still groaning, still producing the small, sweet benefits that come from a system that is never fully alive and never fully dead.
We had built a universe here, Alex. A whole cosmos of creative decay. It was not written in any constitution or development plan – those things are for people who believe in fairy tales. No, our universe was written in the potholes that doubled as swimming pools during rainy season. It was carved into the faces of abandoned buildings that leaned like tired elders. It was sung in the buzzing of transformers that exploded every other week. It was painted in the brown water that flowed from taps like a stubborn joke. It was a masterpiece of survival, a delicate balance of suffering and opportunity, a place where everyone knew the rules even though the rules were never spoken aloud.
We had a system, Alex. A beautiful, crooked system. A system where nothing worked, yet everything worked for someone. A system where the roads were bad, but the excuses were excellent. A system where salaries were delayed, but the stories explaining the delays were rich and imaginative. A system where government offices were slow, but the backdoors were fast. A system where the people complained loudly, but quietly adjusted. A system where the leaders pretended to lead, and the followers pretended to follow, and everyone lived in a peaceful, profitable lie.
And you – yes, you – have come with your straight face and your straight lines and your straight policies to destroy this delicate ecosystem. You have arrived with your architectural drawings, your engineering reports, your budget breakdowns, your moralistic sunlight that shines too brightly on things we preferred to keep in the shadows. You are not just disrupting the performance; you are burning down the entire theater. You are scattering the actors, the audience, the stagehands, the ticket collectors, the ushers – everyone who depended on the show continuing exactly as it was.
Do you understand the magnitude of what you are doing? You are pushing people into the wilderness of possibility. Possibility, Alex! That dangerous, unpredictable place where people start imagining better lives. That place where they begin to ask questions. That place where they start expecting things to work. That place where they begin to believe that government is supposed to serve them, not the other way around. You are dragging them out of the familiar comfort of hopelessness and forcing them to confront the terrifying idea that things can change.
You have taken our carefully crafted chaos and replaced it with order. You have taken our profitable confusion and replaced it with clarity. You have taken our endless cycle of complaints and replaced it with progress. You have taken our beloved dysfunction and replaced it with a functioning system. And you expect us to clap? You expect us to adjust? You expect us to smile while you dismantle the only world we have ever known?
You are killing Abia, Alex. Not the geographical Abia, not the Abia on the map, but the Abia in our hearts – the Abia of shortcuts, the Abia of selective amnesia, the Abia of “we will manage,” the Abia of “leave it like that,” the Abia of “e no concern me,” the Abia of “na so we see am.” You are killing the Abia that raised us, the Abia that taught us resilience through suffering, the Abia that gave us stories to tell our children about how we survived what should have killed us.
And maybe – just maybe – that is your plan. Maybe you want to bury the old Abia so deeply that it can never rise again. Maybe you want to build a new Abia from the ashes of the one we loved. Maybe you want to force us into a future we did not ask for. Maybe you want to drag us, kicking and screaming, into a world where things actually work.
But must you do it with such cold enthusiasm? Must you do it with such mathematical precision? Must you do it with such unshakeable confidence, as if you are certain that we will thank you later?
We are not ready, Alex. We are not prepared. We are not built for this kind of transformation. We are creatures of the old order, children of the slow decay, disciples of the gentle collapse. And you, with your calculator and your conscience, are killing everything we understand.
Consider, if your heart can bear it, the sacred floodwaters of Faulks Road. You, in your cold, technocratic arrogance, call them a “problem.” You look at them with the dry eyes of a man who has never truly tasted the sweetness of a well‑timed disaster. But we – those of us who lived, breathed, and prospered in the old Abia – knew those waters as a sacrament. They were not an inconvenience; they were a covenant. They were not stagnant; they were strategic. That shimmering, greenish‑brown broth, swirling with the perfume of a thousand rebellious septic tanks and the drifting spirits of countless pure‑water sachets, was our own North Sea, our personal Gulf of Guinea. It was wealth in liquid form, a natural resource that required no drilling license, no geological survey, no environmental impact assessment – just rain, patience, and a government that understood the value of perpetual emergency.
Every rainy season was a festival. A renewal of vows. A reaffirmation of our shared commitment to the economy of dysfunction. The waters would rise like a holy visitation, and the people would gather, wailing and gesticulating for the cameras, performing the sacred liturgy of public lamentation. And then – ah, then – the real ceremony would begin. The machinery of “remediation,” that glorious engine of prosperity, would roar to life. We would commission a study, not to solve anything, but to honor tradition. Experts would arrive with clipboards and sympathetic nods, inhaling the aroma of the flood as if sampling fine wine. Consultants would be hired to interpret the spiritual meaning of the smell. And finally, the contract – our beloved contract – would be awarded to a loyal son of the soil, a man who understood that the goal was not to remove the water, but to respect it. If he chose to de‑silt the gutters with teaspoons, who were we to question his methods, so long as the invoice reflected the labor of bulldozers, excavators, and mythical machines that existed only in the imagination?
Do you know what those waters did for us, Alex? They built futures. They funded dreams. They sent children abroad to acquire accents and degrees. My first son walked into the University of Nottingham on the shoulders of the 2018 flood. My second is there now, courtesy of the miraculous re‑flooding of 2019 – a divine event made possible because the 2018 intervention, tragically and conveniently, was washed away by “unforeseen hydraulic forces.” What is a family without continuity? What is a lineage without a dependable source of seasonal income? These were not just floods; they were scholarships. They were bursaries from Mother Nature herself, delivered through the faithful negligence of the state.
And now, you – Alex, destroyer of heritage – have murdered that tradition. I stood there recently, on that once‑hallowed ground, and what did I see? Dry pavement. Dry, Alex. Dry like the throat of a man who has been denied palm wine. The gutters, once mighty canals of opportunity, now lie there like empty scars, whisking water away with a kind of smug efficiency that feels like an insult. The drains are clear. The road is passable. The air no longer carries that familiar fragrance of fermented despair. You have solved the flood, and in doing so, you have unleashed a drought of biblical proportions upon our bank accounts.
What is progress, if not the slow, painful erosion of a reliable income stream? What is development, if not the death of a business model that sustained generations? When you look at a clear drain, what do you see? A civic improvement? A sign of responsible governance? A victory for public health? But when we look at that same drain, we see the ghost of a BMW X6 that will now never be purchased. We see the shadow of a duplex that will never be built. We see the faint outline of school fees that will now have to be paid from honest work – honest work, Alex! Do you understand the cruelty of that?
You have taken our sacred flood and turned it into ordinary rainwater. You have taken our seasonal miracle and reduced it to mere weather. You have taken our economic lifeline and flushed it down the very drains you cleaned. You have robbed us of our heritage, our hustle, our annual harvest. You have dried up the river that fed our ambitions. And you expect us to clap for you. You expect us to call this progress. You expect us to smile while you dismantle the only dependable industry we had left.
This is not governance, Alex. This is cultural genocide. This is economic sabotage. This is the reckless destruction of a system that worked perfectly for those who understood its rhythm. You have taken away the flood, and with it, you have taken away our future.
And the human cost, Alex – have you even paused to consider it? The brutality of your efficiency is not measured in statistics or budget surpluses; it is measured in the shrinking waistlines of men who once ruled entire neighborhoods with nothing but a plastic chair, a faded singlet, and the authority of a man who knew exactly how to monetize disorder. I went to see Chief Orji, one of the last surviving giants of the old order, a man whose shadow once fell across the bypass like a protective canopy. What I saw broke me. The man is a ghost of himself. His once‑majestic stomach, that proud symbol of uninterrupted cash flow, has collapsed into something dangerously close to fitness. His cheeks have bones now. Bones, Alex. Do you understand the horror of that transformation?
This was a man who built an empire without a single line of code, without a single spreadsheet, without a single policy document. His kingdom was a stretch of road, a sovereign territory carved out through charisma, intimidation, and the sacred art of knowing exactly how much to collect from each passing vehicle. His workforce – our boys – were not mere touts. They were cultural ambassadors. They were the custodians of a living tradition. They were the tollgate of the desperate, the human version of a tax system that the government itself had long abandoned. They were the ones who ensured that no truck passed without contributing to the great informal economy that kept our communities alive.
Their methods were not crude; they were expressive. Their vocabulary was a symphony of threats and endearments, a delicate balance of menace and charm. Their tools – those sticks, those iron rods, those mysterious objects wrapped in black tape – were not weapons; they were instruments of persuasion. They performed a vital economic function. They kept the wheels of commerce turning, one slap on a truck panel at a time. They taught negotiation skills more effectively than any business school. They taught arithmetic through daily practice: how to calculate the exact amount a driver could pay without collapsing into tears. They taught philosophy: the eternal truth that value is not created but extracted.
And you – yes, you – have replaced this vibrant, breathing ecosystem with a QR code. A cold, silent, rectangular insult. A digital plaque nailed to a pole, mocking everything we once held sacred. You have automated humanity out of the transaction. You have taken a living, sweating, shouting, hustling economy and reduced it to a sterile beep on a smartphone screen. You have taken the drama, the negotiation, the ritual, the performance – and replaced it with a scan.
Now the boys, stripped of their purpose, wander around like confused spirits. They speak in hushed tones about “vocational training,” as if that is a natural progression from their former calling. Have you considered the psychological violence of converting a professional intimidator into a welder? Welding is honest work. Welding requires patience. Welding demands humility. But intimidation – ah, intimidation is an art. It is performance. It is poetry. It is the subtle dance of implied consequence. How do you expect a man who once controlled a whole junction with a single raised eyebrow to now bend over a piece of metal, wearing goggles like a laboratory assistant?
You are not just building a state, Alex. You are dismantling a character class. You are erasing a species that evolved uniquely to thrive in the swamp of dysfunction we once called home. These were not mere parasites; they were colorful parasites. They added flavor to the society. They gave texture to the streets. They were the spice in the soup of our daily struggle. Without them, the city feels… bland. Too orderly. Too predictable. Too safe.
Is a functioning society worth the loss of its most vibrant troublemakers? Is progress worth the extinction of a whole ecosystem of creative survivalists? You may think you are improving the state, but from where we stand, you are bleaching the culture. You are sterilizing the streets. You are replacing a living, breathing drama with a silent, efficient machine.
And in that silence, Alex, something precious is dying.
The relentless, pounding heartbeat of your construction sites has become a new kind of torment, Alex. It is not progress we hear – it is punishment. It is a drumbeat announcing the end of an era we cherished, even if we pretended to despise it. There was a time, not long ago, when a project site was a sanctuary of stillness, a place where nothing happened and nothing was expected to happen. It was our own version of a meditation retreat. A single crane, rusted into immobility, stood like a monument to patience. A ceremonial heap of sand, untouched for years, slowly blended back into the soil. A watchman, whose job description was simply “exist,” would sit in a plastic chair, drifting in and out of a decade-long nap. That was the true Abia aesthetic – calm, unhurried, beautifully stagnant.
We lived in what historians will one day call the Expectation Era, a golden age when a road was not a road but a story. A myth. A promise that could be stretched, twisted, recycled, and repackaged without ever becoming reality. A road was a narrative device, not a physical object. It was a tool for speeches, a prop for campaigns, a reason for emergency meetings, and a justification for budget variations. We could flag it off with great ceremony, mourn its delay with theatrical sorrow, re-announce its commencement with renewed enthusiasm, and still never lay a single meter of asphalt. It was a beautiful cycle, a self-sustaining loop of anticipation and disappointment that kept everyone emotionally engaged and financially nourished.
A project, in those days, was not something you completed. It was something you managed – like a long-distance relationship with no intention of meeting in person. It was a financial instrument, a political asset, a bargaining chip. It could be sold, re-sold, pledged, mortgaged, and resurrected. It was a living organism, feeding many mouths without ever taking physical form. A project site was a bank vault disguised as a construction zone. Everyone understood this. Everyone respected it. It was our unwritten constitution.
But you, Alex – you have committed the gravest obscenity imaginable. You flag off, and then you finish. You break ground, and then you build. You start something, and then you complete it. Do you understand how offensive that is? Do you grasp the violence of such behavior? You have taken the gentle art of perpetual delay and replaced it with the crude brutality of actual progress. You have turned our sacred ritual of endless expectation into a cold, mechanical sequence of tasks that end with a functioning road.
At night, the construction lights blaze like interrogation lamps, exposing everything we once hid in the comforting darkness of procrastination. Those halogen eyes stare at us, accusing us of laziness, incompetence, and corruption. The thud-thud-thud of the pile-driver is not just noise – it is the sound of a coffin being sealed. The coffin of political suspense. The coffin of strategic ambiguity. The coffin of the sweet uncertainty that allowed us to stretch a project across three administrations without ever producing a result.
Where is the artistry in completion? Where is the poetry in delivering a promise? Where is the suspense, the drama, the emotional rollercoaster? You have taken a genre of politics that was rich with plot twists and cliffhangers and turned it into a dull documentary. You have replaced the thrilling unpredictability of “maybe next year” with the boring certainty of “it will be ready next month.” You have stripped our politics of its entertainment value.
And what of the Perpetual Project – the backbone of our political culture? You have eradicated it. You have wiped it out with your efficiency. You have replaced it with something as uninspiring as a usable road. A road that people can actually drive on. A road that does not swallow cars or break axles. A road that does not require prayers before use. A road that simply exists and functions. What are we supposed to do with that? How do we campaign on a road that is already finished? How do we promise what has already been delivered? How do we blame the opposition for delays that no longer exist?
You are erasing our narrative heritage, Alex. You are destroying the stories we would have told our children – the tales of the bridge that was flagged off five times, the road that was always “70% complete,” the hospital that was perpetually awaiting equipment. These were our bedtime stories, our folklore, our shared mythology. And now, because of you, future generations will grow up in a world where a bridge is simply built on time and within budget. What kind of dull childhood is that?
You are not just building infrastructure. You are dismantling a culture. You are not just constructing roads. You are paving over our identity. And in your ruthless pursuit of progress, you are killing the Abia we once knew – one completed project at a time.
You have murdered suspense, Alex – slaughtered it without ceremony, without remorse, without even the courtesy of a farewell parade. Suspense was not just an emotion for us; it was nourishment. It was the protein that built our political muscles. We were connoisseurs of the interval, experts in the art of the pause, masters of the long, luxurious silence between promise and fulfillment. That silence was not empty; it was alive. It was where deals were struck, where alliances were formed, where excuses were crafted, where hope and despair danced together like old lovers who knew they would never marry.
A project, in our world, was never a physical object. It was a horizon – always visible, always shimmering, always receding. It was the mirage that kept us walking. The “flag-off” was our highest cultural expression, a ceremony of pure potential. We would gather under the sun, sweating in our best clothes, smiling for cameras that were half-buried in laterite, and we would cut ribbons with scissors that had cut a thousand ribbons before. And then, with the solemnity of priests, we would enter the golden age of Waiting.
Waiting was not passive. Waiting was an industry. Waiting employed rumor-mongers, who whispered updates that were always wrong but always exciting. Waiting fed blame-assigners, who pointed fingers with the precision of surgeons. Waiting sustained promise-renewers, who could repackage the same lie in ten different flavors. Waiting kept palliative-distributors busy, handing out bags of rice that tasted like apology. Waiting was our economy, our entertainment, our identity.
And at the center of this sacred ecosystem stood the bulldozer. Not a working bulldozer – no, that would ruin everything. A parked bulldozer. A bulldozer frozen at a poetic angle, its blade half-buried in the earth like a sword in a stone. It was our Sphinx. Its riddle was simple: “When will I move?” And the answer, whispered with reverence, was “Never.” That “never” was the source of its power. That “never” was the heartbeat of our politics. That “never” was the lullaby we sang to ourselves when the rains came and the roads dissolved.
But you, Alex – you have solved the riddle. You have made the bulldozer move. You have awakened the sleeping giant, and in doing so, you have destroyed the delicate balance of our political universe. The bulldozer now growls. The excavator now swings. The cement mixer now churns. The workers now work. And in the relentless, deafening monotony of actual progress, you have suffocated the space where speculation once flourished.
Do you understand what you have taken from us? You have robbed us of the sacred space of the unfulfilled promise. That space was where our politics lived. That space was where our leaders performed their greatest magic tricks. That space was where we, the people, found meaning in the endless cycle of expectation and disappointment. Without that space, what is left? What is politics without the delicious uncertainty of “maybe next year”? What is governance without the thrill of perpetual postponement? What is leadership without the ability to stretch a project across three administrations?
What you have created, Alex, is not politics. It is administration. It is clerical work. It is the dull, colorless business of doing what you said you would do. It is beneath us. It is beneath the grand tradition of our political theater. It is beneath the legacy of men who understood that a promise is not something you fulfill; it is something you manage.
You have taken our drama and replaced it with a schedule. You have taken our suspense and replaced it with certainty. You have taken our mythology and replaced it with measurable outcomes. And in doing so, you have killed the Abia we knew – the Abia that lived in the gap between announcement and action, the Abia that thrived in the fog of ambiguity, the Abia that found comfort in the eternal “almost.”
But your most violent act, your most graphic betrayal of everything our ancestors whispered into the ears of their successors, is the brutal sanitization of the spiritual realm. You have marched into a sacred dimension with your laptop and your spreadsheets, waving your biometric incense like a deranged priest of modernity, and in doing so, you have desecrated a temple older than any constitution. The civil service payroll was never just a list of employees; it was a shrine. A haunted mansion. A thriving necropolis where the gainfully departed continued their noble service to the state. It was a delicate ecosystem where the living and the dead collaborated harmoniously to maintain the balance of the universe.
Take my cousin Nnanna, for example. You call him a ghost worker. That is an insult. He was not a ghost worker; he was a spiritual economist. A metaphysical consultant. A pioneer in the post-work economy. For fifteen glorious years, he served as a Senior Consultant on Ethereal Projects in the Ministry of Potential Affairs – a ministry that existed more in theory than in practice, which made it all the more prestigious. His office was a sunlit balcony in Lagos, where he performed his duties with the dedication of a monk: sipping juice, adjusting the angle of his chair, and occasionally nodding at the horizon as if receiving divine instructions.
His monthly salary alert was not theft; it was a sacred annuity. A blessing from the gods of institutional rot. A reward for understanding the system so deeply that he no longer needed to physically interact with it. He was a visionary, a prophet of the future, a man ahead of his time. While the rest of the world is still debating universal basic income, Nnanna lived it. He embodied it. He perfected it. He was the living proof that society could function – even thrive – when people were paid not to interfere.
And then you came, Alex. With your biometric voodoo. Your digital exorcisms. Your scanners and your tablets and your cold insistence on “verification.” You performed a mass eviction on the ancestral spirits who lived peacefully on the payroll. You demanded that ectoplasm register its fingerprints. You insisted that beings who had transcended the physical plane must now queue under the sun like ordinary mortals. You forced Nnanna – a man whose most strenuous physical activity in a decade has been raising a remote control – to stand in line, sweating, blinking, confused, exposed. You made him visible. You made him accountable. You made him real.
Do you understand the violence of that act? You did not just eliminate a ghost; you shattered a man’s entire cosmology. You ripped him out of the spiritual economy and threw him into the harsh, unforgiving world of labor. You forced him to confront the terrifying possibility that he might be expected to work. Work, Alex. Do you know what that does to a man who has built his identity on the sacred principle of non-interference? It is like asking a fish to climb a tree. It is like asking a cloud to sweep the floor. It is a cosmological crime.
You have not merely cleaned the payroll; you have disrupted the metaphysical order. You have severed the link between the living and the comfortably absent. You have destroyed a philosophical system that was perfectly adapted to our environment – a system that acknowledged that not everyone needs to be present to contribute, and not everyone who contributes needs to be present. It was elegant. It was efficient in its own way. It was ours.
And now, because of your reforms, Nnanna sits in his living room, staring at his hands as if seeing them for the first time. He is asking questions no man should ever have to ask: “What is my role in society?” “What does it mean to earn?” “Why must I be alive in order to be paid?” You have plunged him into an existential crisis. You have forced him to confront the terrifying possibility that he may need to acquire skills. Skills, Alex. Do you understand the cruelty of that expectation?
Is efficiency worth the death of a perfectly adapted philosophical system? Is progress worth the destruction of a spiritual economy that sustained families, communities, and entire belief structures? You may think you are cleaning up corruption, but from where we stand, you are erasing a culture. You are wiping out a way of life. You are killing the Abia that existed in the spaces between the living and the ledger.
Your war on phantoms, Alex, exposes the shallow, materialist poverty of your worldview. You behave as if a worker must be a body in a chair, as if productivity can only be measured in sweat, attendance, and the clacking of keyboards. You think labor is something that must be seen, touched, supervised. But we – those of us who understood the deeper mysteries of governance – knew that the most powerful work is done in the realm of intention. In the realm of spiritual alignment. In the realm where a man’s physical presence is not only unnecessary but an actual distraction from the purity of his contribution.
The ghost worker was not a parasite; he was the ultimate civil servant. He consumed no office space. He demanded no electricity. He never quarreled with colleagues. He never clogged the toilet. He never asked for promotion or transfer. He never filed a complaint. He never took sick leave. He never created pension liabilities. He never attended meetings where nothing was achieved. He was the perfect employee precisely because he was not there. His absence was his gift. His invisibility was his efficiency. His silence was his productivity.
His monthly stipend was not waste; it was a peaceful subsidy. A small price to pay to keep a man in Lagos quiet, loyal, and blissfully disengaged from the affairs of the state. It was social stability in its purest form. A man who is paid to stay away is a man who will not disturb the system. It was elegant. It was balanced. It was sustainable. It was a philosophical masterpiece.
But you, with your obsession for “clean payrolls” and “accurate records,” have shattered this delicate metaphysical arrangement. You have dragged spirits out of the shadows and forced them into the harsh light of corporeal existence. You have demanded that beings who have long transcended the physical plane must now materialize, stand in line, and press their fingers onto a cold machine that does not understand the subtleties of spiritual labor.
Do you know what it means to force a ghost to manifest? It is not just administrative violence – it is metaphysical assault. You have created a crisis of embodiment. Thousands of men who once lived in peaceful semi-existence – neither fully employed nor fully unemployed – are now wandering the streets in confusion. Their divine right to effortless sustenance has been revoked. Their sacred detachment has been violated. They are being asked to produce. To contribute. To justify their existence. It is cruel.
You have traded a manageable, spectral overhead for a chaotic, flesh-and-blood demand for real jobs. You have replaced quiet, invisible beneficiaries with loud, visible, frustrated humans who now expect opportunities, training, placement, and purpose. You have taken a system that required nothing but silence and replaced it with a system that demands actual work. This is not fiscal prudence; it is alchemical idiocy. You have turned philosophical gold into leaden, grumbling reality.
And what of the spiritual economists like Nnanna? Men who had perfected the art of existing lightly, floating above the burdens of labor, contributing through intention rather than action? You have dragged them down to earth. You have forced them to confront the weight of their own bodies. You have made them queue under the sun, blinking like newborn goats, clutching documents they have not touched in years. You have made them visible, and in doing so, you have destroyed them.
Now they sit in their living rooms, staring at their hands, wondering what these strange appendages are meant to do. They ask questions no man should ever have to ask: “Must I now work?” “Is this what life feels like?” “Why is the government suddenly interested in my pulse?” You have plunged them into existential despair. You have disrupted their spiritual equilibrium. You have forced them into the terrifying realm of productivity.
Is efficiency worth this? Is progress worth the destruction of a perfectly adapted philosophical system? You may think you are saving money, but what you have truly done is unleash a legion of bewildered, newly embodied citizens who now expect employment, relevance, and meaning. You have replaced peaceful ghosts with restless humans. You have turned a quiet metaphysical arrangement into a noisy social crisis.
And for what? For numbers on a spreadsheet? For the satisfaction of seeing a payroll that matches reality? For the shallow thrill of “clean governance”?
You are not just killing corruption, Alex. You are killing a worldview. You are killing a culture. You are killing the Abia that understood the beauty of the unseen.
Your obsession with “quality control,” Alex, is nothing short of aesthetic vandalism. You have taken a sledgehammer to the delicate, expressive imperfections that once defined our public infrastructure. I went to inspect one of your new bridges, determined to find at least a whisper of the old artistry – a hairline crack that hinted at future drama, a damp patch that promised a contract renewal, a tasteful sag in the middle that foretold a collapse worthy of a documentary. But what did I find? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Just a bland, soulless slab of competence stretching across the landscape like a dictator of durability. It was an insult to the senses. A bridge that will stand for fifty years is not a triumph; it is a cultural catastrophe.
Have you no poetry in your soul, Alex? Do you not understand that a bridge without cracks is a story without conflict? A road without potholes is a budget line without destiny. A building that refuses to crumble is a slap in the face to generations of engineers who perfected the art of strategic weakness. You are building a future where our grandchildren will have nothing to renovate, nothing to patch, nothing to urgently repair at midnight with inflated invoices and dramatic press releases. You are depriving them of the joy of lamentation, the thrill of emergency committees, the sweet adrenaline of “we are on top of the situation.”
You are hoarding durability for yourself, Alex. You are stealing the “Rebuild Legacy” from future leaders. How will they justify their own tenures if everything you build stubbornly refuses to collapse? How will they commission inquiries, award contracts, or pose heroically beside broken beams if the beams never break? This is not just selfishness – it is generational theft.
The Nigerian cycle is simple and elegant: Build. Collapse. Lament. Rebuild. Loot. It is the circle of life, the rhythm of governance, the heartbeat of our political culture. You are trying to turn that beautiful circle into a straight, bleak, utterly boring line. A line that begins with construction and ends with functionality. A line with no twists, no turns, no suspense, no opportunities for creative accounting. A line that leads nowhere except stability.
And what are we supposed to do with stability? How do we thrive in a world where things simply work? How do we navigate a society where infrastructure does not double as a retirement plan? You have taken the drama out of development. You have taken the mystery out of maintenance. You have taken the romance out of ruin.
A bridge that stands firm is a bridge that refuses to participate in the national conversation. A road that remains smooth is a road that denies future administrations their rightful share of glory. A building that does not crack is a building that has no ambition. You are creating a sterile landscape, Alex – a future where everything is functional but nothing is meaningful.
You call it progress. We call it erasure. You call it quality. We call it cultural extinction. You call it durability. We call it the death of opportunity.
Finally – your most unforgivable sin – you have murdered our darkness. You have taken a blade to the soft, velvety, all‑embracing 7 PM blackout that once wrapped this state like a mother’s shawl. That darkness was not a failure; it was a national cloak. It was the hour when the world softened, when the outlines of wrongdoing blurred into a gentle haze, when the shadows grew thick enough to hide both sins and solutions. In that darkness, magic happened. Figures moved unseen. Agreements were sealed with nothing but a handshake and the mutual understanding that no camera could possibly record what the night had swallowed. Transactions left no paper trail, only a warm feeling in a pocket and the faint smell of diesel on the air.
The collective groan of a million generators was our lullaby. That sound – half complaint, half triumph – was the anthem of a people who had mastered the art of private solutions to public failure. It was a philosophy, a worldview, an economic model. Every generator was a small business, a personal rebellion, a declaration of independence from the tyranny of functionality. The darkness created opportunities. It created markets. It created men. It created entire industries built on the simple truth that when the government cannot provide light, someone else will provide it at a markup.
But now, your accursed streetlights vomit a cold, institutional glare onto everything. They shine with the arrogance of a system that suddenly believes in itself. They expose corners that were never meant to be seen. They illuminate the faces of the people, and what we see there is terrifying. They are not scowling in the familiar, comforting mask of resigned anger. They are not muttering the usual curses under their breath. They are looking… curious. Hopeful. Their eyes are widening, adjusting to this strange new brightness, and in that brightness they are beginning to imagine things. Dangerous things. Things like possibility. Things like change. Things like accountability.
You have assassinated the Culture of Despair, Alex. Do you understand the magnitude of that crime? Despair was our most potent tool of governance. It kept expectations low, which kept tempers calm, which kept the streets quiet. A hopeless citizen is a manageable citizen. A hopeless citizen does not ask questions. A hopeless citizen does not read budget lines. A hopeless citizen does not wonder why a project cost ten times more than it should. A hopeless citizen does not ask, “Where did the rest of it go?” A hopeless citizen simply shrugs, sighs, and moves on.
But a hopeful citizen – ah, that is a different creature entirely. A hopeful citizen is dangerous. A hopeful citizen begins to believe that things can work. A hopeful citizen begins to expect results. A hopeful citizen begins to compare yesterday to today and ask why tomorrow cannot be better. A hopeful citizen begins to demand explanations. A hopeful citizen begins to think. And thinking, Alex, is the enemy of the old order.
You are replacing the gentle, manageable darkness of apathy with the blinding, unforgiving light of expectation. You are creating a population that sees too clearly, asks too loudly, and hopes too boldly. What monster thrives under such scrutiny? Certainly not the ones who built their empires in the shadows. Certainly not the ones who understood that darkness is not the absence of light but the presence of opportunity.
You have turned on the lights, Alex. And in doing so, you have exposed everything – every crack, every lie, every shortcut, every ghost, every phantom, every quiet arrangement that once flourished in the safety of night. You call it progress. We call it exposure. You call it illumination. We call it betrayal.
You have killed the darkness. And with it, you have killed the Abia that lived comfortably inside it.
Oh! Nwa Otti… I can’t stand you. Can you imagine – there is light in Mazi Okoro’s house. Light, Alex. In that house. A house that has not seen electricity since the era when NEPA still had confidence. A house that once depended on a generator so old it had become a family heirloom, passed down like a chieftaincy title. A house where darkness was not just a condition but a personality trait. And now, because of you, the bulbs are shining with the arrogance of a new convert. Even the lizards on the wall are confused. They keep blinking, wondering if the sun has relocated indoors.
You must understand, Otti, that some ecosystems are not meant for sunlight. They are delicate cultures of mold, thriving in the warm, damp darkness of perpetual deferral. What you are performing is not governance – it is botanical violence. You are uprooting the very fungi that gave our rot its rich, productive flavor. You are bleaching the swamp. You are disinfecting a culture that evolved beautifully in the absence of light. You are sterilizing a habitat that was never meant to be clean.
We had achieved a sublime balance, a homeostasis of half-measures where every problem generated its own self-perpetuating industry. A pothole was not a defect; it was a job creation scheme. A blackout was not a failure; it was a business model. A collapsed drainage was not an emergency; it was an opportunity. We lived in a world where dysfunction was not a crisis but a climate. And like all climates, it nurtured life – strange, resilient, profitable life.
You have mistaken this for disease. It was not disease; it was our weather. A swamp does not yearn to be drained. A swamp is proud of its murk. It teems with creatures uniquely adapted to its stagnation – amphibians with flexible morals, insects with entrepreneurial instincts, fungi with generational wealth. We were those creatures, Alex. We were the magnificent amphibians of the old order, gliding effortlessly through the murky waters of ambiguity. We were the luminous fungi, glowing softly in the dark, feeding on the nutrients of deferred maintenance and recycled excuses.
But now, you are creating a desert of accountability. A dry, harsh landscape where everything is visible, measurable, and expected to function. A place where sunlight exposes every corner, every ledger, every intention. A place where nothing can hide, nothing can ferment, nothing can quietly multiply in the shadows. And we – creatures of moisture, of mystery, of muddiness – are gasping on the dry land of your good intentions.
We were not built for this. We were not designed for clarity. We were not engineered for transparency. We thrived in the fog, in the twilight, in the comforting uncertainty of “we will look into it.” You have dragged us into a world where things must be done properly, where outcomes must be delivered, where systems must work. It is suffocating. It is unnatural. It is cruel.
You call it reform. We call it habitat destruction. You call it progress. We call it extinction. You call it light. We call it the end of everything we understood.
And now, because of you, there is light in Mazi Okoro’s house.
Consider, Alex, the profound insult contained in your so‑called “questions.” You fling them around with the blunt force of a man who believes reality is something that can be interrogated into submission. “Why is this not done.” “Where did the allocation go.” “Who is accountable.” You utter these phrases as if they are harmless inquiries, but we – those who lived through the golden age of interpretive governance – know the truth. These are not questions. These are acts of war. These are grenades lobbed into a perfectly functional ecosystem. These are assaults on a worldview that has served us faithfully for decades.
In the Abia we built, money was not a static resource to be pinned down like a butterfly on a board. It was a living, migratory creature. A bird of paradise. A shimmering, unpredictable thing that would alight briefly in one account, feather a few nests with its soft, comforting presence, and then take flight again before any census could be taken. Its movements were not meant to be tracked; they were meant to be admired. Its path was poetry, not data. To demand a paper trail is to murder the metaphor. It is to take a wild, beautiful creature and lock it in a cage labeled “audit.”
When you ask, “Where did the allocation go,” you are not seeking information – you are committing sacrilege. You are asking a magician to reveal the secret behind his trick. You are asking a chef to quantify the sprinkle of fairy dust that gives his sauce its soul. You are asking a priest to explain the mechanics of a miracle. You are institutionalizing literal‑mindedness, and in doing so, you are killing wonder. You are killing creativity. You are killing the delicate art of financial improvisation that sustained entire generations.
You call it transparency. We call it vandalism.
You are dismantling a philosophical system that understood money not as a prisoner of spreadsheets but as a free spirit. A wanderer. A pilgrim on a sacred journey through the labyrinth of governance. It was never meant to stay in one place. It was never meant to be counted. It was meant to move, to bless, to disappear, to reappear, to confuse, to delight, to sustain. It was a dance, Alex. A dance older than democracy itself.
And now, because of your obsession with accountability, you have forced this graceful dancer into rigid choreography. You have demanded that every kobo declare its address, its occupation, its next of kin. You have turned a fluid, expressive art form into a bureaucratic hostage. You have replaced metaphor with mathematics. You have replaced mystery with receipts.
But tell me, Alex – tell all of us – what is a state without wonder? What is governance without the thrill of creative financing? What is leadership without the freedom to let money roam like a wild animal, grazing where it pleases, fertilizing the soil of loyalty and silence?
You believe a state is richer when it knows where every kobo sleeps at night. But is that truly wealth? Or is it the bleak poverty of certainty? Is it not better – more humane, more poetic, more culturally aligned – to let money drift like harmattan dust, settling where it chooses, leaving behind a trail of stories rather than spreadsheets?
You are replacing a living ecosystem with a filing cabinet. You are turning a symphony into a checklist. You are taking a vibrant, improvisational culture and flattening it into a ledger.
And for what? For numbers that add up? For budgets that balance? For a treasury that behaves like a disciplined child instead of a wandering sage?
You call it reform. We call it the death of magic.
Biko ndị Abịa, make una come o… this man is killing us. He is killing the Abia we knew, the Abia we mastered, the Abia that raised us in the warm, familiar embrace of dysfunction. You are not just disrupting a system, Alex – you are committing cultural homicide. You are dismantling a habitat where we, the glorious parasites of the old order, thrived like royalty. You are draining the swamp we called home, and you expect us to breathe on dry land.
“God’s Own State” was never a boast. It was a coded cry for help. It was our way of admitting that only divine intervention could fix what we had so lovingly, so meticulously broken. And even then, we prayed with one eye open, hoping God would be too busy to answer. We didn’t want salvation; we wanted the performance of salvation. We wanted the drama, not the cure. We wanted the ritual, not the result. We wanted the comfort of knowing things would remain exactly as they were, wrapped in the soft blanket of perpetual mismanagement.
But you – oh Alex – you have taken it upon yourself to play God. Not with thunderbolts or burning bushes, but with a contractor’s hard hat and a spreadsheet. You walk around with this terrifying confidence, as if competence is a virtue, as if efficiency is a blessing, as if progress is something to be proud of. You wield development like a weapon, swinging it carelessly through the delicate webs of decay that held our world together. Your progress is not medicine; it is poison. A toxin in our ecosystem of rot. A disinfectant poured into a pond where the fish have evolved to breathe filth.
We were magnificent amphibians, Alex. We were creatures of the swamp – slick, adaptable, thriving in the murky waters of ambiguity. We knew how to glide through the mud with grace. We knew how to survive in the half-light of half-truths. We were luminous fungi, glowing softly in the dark, feeding on the nutrients of deferred decisions and recycled excuses. We were not built for sunlight. We were not designed for clarity. We were not engineered for accountability.
But you have dragged us into the harsh glare of functionality. You have created a desert of accountability, a dry, unforgiving landscape where everything is expected to work. A place where questions have answers, where budgets have destinations, where projects have completion dates. A place where citizens begin to hope, and hope is the most dangerous substance known to governance. Hope makes people ask questions. Hope makes people demand explanations. Hope makes people believe they deserve better.
And now look at us – gasping on the sand, blinking at the brightness, confused by the idea that things might actually improve. You have taken away the swamp, Alex. You have taken away the darkness. You have taken away the rot that nourished us. You have taken away the chaos that gave our lives meaning. May Ama adị ọha visit you… But Oh, we forger that you are feared by even Amadioha!
You are killing us, Alex. Not with violence, but with competence. Not with bullets, but with progress. Not with oppression, but with order.
And somehow, that feels worse.
The most profound violence, Alex, is not the roads you have paved or the drains you have cleared or the payroll spirits you have exorcised. No. The deepest wound you have inflicted is existential. You are forcing us – yes, us, the elders of the swamp, the veterans of the fog, the custodians of the grand dysfunction – to stare into the mirror of a functioning society and see not heroes, not survivors, not wise men navigating chaos with flair, but obstacles. Obstacles, Alex. You have turned us into the very thing we spent decades pretending we were fighting.
You are retroactively criminalizing our instincts. You are rewriting our entire history with the cold ink of competence. We were not looters; we were resource re‑distributors in a complex, informal economy that required agility, creativity, and a deep understanding of human psychology. We were not saboteurs; we were custodians of a different timeline, one where development was a slow, reversible ritual, not a brutal, linear march toward improvement. We were the guardians of the “Not Yet,” the priests of the “Soon,” the prophets of the “Almost There.” And now, because you have succeeded where we intentionally did not, you are turning our past into a crime scene.
That is unforgivable.
A working streetlight does not just illuminate the road; it illuminates the thirty years we spent in the dark. It shines directly on our excuses, our speeches, our committees, our emergency meetings, our “we are on top of the situation,” our “contractors will mobilize soon,” our “funds have been released,” our “technical challenges,” our “unforeseen circumstances.” It shines on all of it and asks a single, devastating question: “What were you all doing?”
Your progress is the accusation. Your functioning systems are the evidence. Your completed bridge is a verdict on our entire lived experience. Every smooth road is a testimony against us. Every working drain is a rebuke. Every streetlight is a witness. You are not just killing the Abia of graft; you are killing the Abia of our memories, our identities, our sophisticated rationale for failure. You are erasing the mythology we built to survive ourselves.
You are leaving us alive, but historically annihilated.
And so we cry out – not just for the return of our darkness, but for the return of our narrative. Our reason for being. Our justification. Our elegant explanations. Our philosophical frameworks. Our swamp logic. You are stripping us of the stories we told ourselves to sleep at night. You are taking away the comfort of believing that nothing could have been done differently. You are forcing us to confront the unbearable truth that maybe – just maybe – we were the problem.
Stop this clarity, Alex. It is too bright. It is too honest. It is too sharp. It cuts through the fog we lived in, the fog we depended on, the fog that protected us from the weight of our own history. You call it transparency. We call it a historical massacre.
Please, Alex – biko, for the love of all that is profitably broken – stop. We are begging you with the last strength in our nostalgic bones. Give us back our glorious, money‑making floods, those shimmering green lakes of opportunity where every raindrop was a potential invoice. Return our artistic potholes, those sculpted craters that told stories of resilience, improvisation, and budget padding. Restore the dignified shadows where our ghosts and our gains could mingle freely, unbothered by the harsh interrogation lamp of your streetlights. Bring back the darkness that protected us, the murk that nourished us, the gloom that allowed us to thrive like rare swamp orchids.
Let us return to the beautiful, crumbling, lucrative ruin that was our home. Let us sink once more into the warm, familiar mud of perpetual “almost.” Let us breathe again the comforting fumes of malfunction. Let us hear the sweet chorus of generators harmonizing like a choir of diesel‑powered angels. Let us feel the thrill of a road that might collapse at any moment, offering fresh opportunities for emergency contracts and heroic press statements. Let us enjoy the suspense of a project that will never be completed, the poetry of a budget that will never balance, the romance of a promise that will never be fulfilled.
Otherwise – tell me, Alex – what are we? What becomes of a people condemned to a functional, equitable, and dreadfully boring future? What becomes of a society where things simply work, where systems behave, where leaders deliver, where citizens hope? What stories will we tell? What legends will we pass down? Who will we be in a world without chaos to interpret, without decay to monetize, without darkness to hide inside?
You are not just killing graft; you are killing memory. You are not just killing inefficiency; you are killing identity. You are not just killing decay; you are killing the narrative that made us who we are. You are leaving us alive, yes – but historically annihilated. A people without their excuses. A tribe without its myths. A generation stripped of its sophisticated rationale for failure.
And so we cry out – not merely for the return of our darkness, but for the return of our story. Our reason for being. Our swamp logic. Our ecosystem of profitable dysfunction. Stop this clarity, Alex. It is too sharp. Too honest. Too revealing. It is a historical massacre, a cleansing so thorough it leaves no place for our ghosts to perch.
In the end, Alex, what you have done is nothing short of deicide. You have slain the small household gods we worshipped – the god of Perpetual Delay, the goddess of Emergency Contracts, the ancestral spirit of Ghost Payrolls, the trickster deity of Flood-Based Revenue. These were not mere idols; they were our business partners, our spiritual mentors, our co‑authors in the grand novel of dysfunction. Now they wander the earth unemployed, confused, clutching their CVs and asking if your administration is “still recruiting.” And as they drift, so do we, realizing with a slow, painful horror that perhaps the gods we served were never gods at all, but reflections of our own laziness, our own greed, our own fear of a world that works. Your competence has forced us to confront the uncomfortable truth that progress is not the enemy – our comfort in decay is. And so we stand here, naked before the mirror of your reforms, discovering that the monsters we feared were always inside us.
Let it be known, then, that today we bury the Abia of our fathers – not with tears, but with the uneasy laughter of people who know the joke is on them. The old Abia, our beloved swamp of profitable chaos, has died under the weight of your competence. But every funeral is also a birth, and the child born today is terrifying: a functional state. A place where things work. A place where citizens expect results. A place where leaders cannot hide behind darkness, potholes, or ghost workers. And the lesson, whispered like a reluctant confession, is that the death of a bad system is not a tragedy – it is a liberation. Though we mourn the loss of our familiar ruin, we must admit that maybe, just maybe, we deserved better all along, even if we were too afraid to ask for it.
Once upon a time, a man built his wealth on a flood. He prayed for rain, not because he loved water, but because he loved the contracts that came with it. And every year, the rain came, and the man prospered. Then one day, a new leader built a drainage system. The flood disappeared. The man wailed, tore his clothes, and declared the end of civilization. But when the waters receded, he saw something he had never seen before: a road. A real road. A road that led somewhere. And he realized that while the flood had filled his wallet, it had drowned his future. Sometimes the things we cling to are the very things holding us back, and the progress we fear is the only path to the life we pretend to want.
And lo, a streetlight shone in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not. For the people were accustomed to shadows, where excuses grow like mushrooms and accountability dissolves like mist. But the light persisted. It revealed the potholes, the broken promises, the missing funds, the ghosts on the payroll. It revealed us. And in that revelation, we discovered a truth we had long buried: that hope is not a threat, but a seed; that expectation is not a burden, but a compass; that a people who demand better are not rebels – they are citizens. So let the light shine, even if it blinds us at first, because only those who dare to see can dare to change.
So here we stand, Alex – magnificent amphibians dragged onto dry land, blinking in the harsh sunlight of your reforms. Our gills are drying. Our slime is cracking. Our excuses are evaporating. But as we gasp for breath, something strange happens. We begin to grow lungs. We begin to stand upright. We begin to see the horizon not as a threat, but as a possibility. And in that moment, we understand the final lesson of your tyranny of competence: that the swamp was never our destiny; it was only our comfort zone. And comfort, when worshipped too long, becomes a cage. Yes, we cry out. Yes, we resist. Yes, we mourn the death of our profitable decay. But deep down, in the quiet chambers of our reluctant hearts, we know the truth: you are not killing us, Alex. You are forcing us to live.
Ọbụ anyị ndị 2 plus 2 = 10 na edere gị leta a – a proud people who mastered the arithmetic of survival, who turned impossibility into livelihood, who built empires out of shortcuts and legends out of potholes. We write to you now with trembling hands, begging you to stop saving us before there is nothing left of us to save.
Now, Alex nwa Otti, for all these crimes – for the unforgivable cleanliness of your drains, for the heartless silence of your automated tolls, for the tyrannical durability of your bridges, and for the spiritual genocide of our ghostly workforce – we, the displaced stakeholders, the connoisseurs of decay, are left with no recourse, no weapon, and no strategy but one: to give you another four years. Yes. Continue. We implore you. Continue your positively reckless destruction of the past. Persist in your vandalism against our venerable traditions of collapse. We shall stand here, amidst the terrifying order you are imposing, and we shall watch, with a complex grief, as you methodically assassinate every sacred inefficiency we ever worshipped. Bury us deeper in this horrifying future you are digging. Let your bulldozers of integrity finish their work; let them grade not just the earth, but our very souls, flattening the comforting, familiar mounds of our excuses into a bleak, featureless plain of accountability. We see now that our lamentations are but the death rattle of the old creature, and since you have proven yourself the more determined predator, we shall cease our struggling. Feed. Consume what is left of our beautiful, rotten world. Let your legacy be the total, utter, and irreversible extinction of the Abia that could not, and therefore would not, be saved.
Grant us the full measure of your clinical, sunlit nightmare. Complete this unholy exorcism. Drive out every last demon of deferred maintenance from our temples of patronage. Illuminate every shadowy alcove where a kickback once comfortably slept. Replace every anecdote of hardship with a Cold data points, every emotional appeal with a pie chart. We will learn, through a pain akin to spiritual detoxification, to breathe this thin, austere air of transparency. We will learn to walk on sidewalks that do not crumble beneath the weight of a metaphor. We will learn to expect the light to come on with the switch, and the water to run from the tap, and the salary to arrive only in exchange for labor. We will be born again, screaming, into the demanding grace of consequence. So yes, take your second term. Wield it like a scalpel. Cut away the necrotic tissue of our expectations. Leave us scarred, but clean. Leave us homeless, but in a house that finally stands. You have shown us the diagnosis, and it was us all along. Do not stop the operation now, in some misguided moment of pity. You have opened the cavity; you must now remove the tumor, even if the tumor’s name is Us, even if its memories are ours, and its favorite songs were the sounds of generators and the symphony of stagnant water.
We award you this grim mandate, this permission to finish killing us, because what else is there to do? The alternative is to live as ghosts in the machine you are building, forever haunting the efficient hallways, whispering of the good old days of dust and diversion. We choose instead to be euthanized by progress. So continue, Alex. Continue to murder our beloved wasteland. Pave over its soul. Banish its comforting, lucrative darkness with your arrogant, unwavering light. We will stand in that light, naked and shivering, stripped of our stories and our scams, and we will become – God help us – citizens. Perhaps, in four more years of this relentless, positive destruction, the last echo of our lament will fade, and all that will remain is the quiet, dreadful, and immaculate sound of a state that works. That is your sentence. That is our surrender. Now go, and kill what is left of Abia, until only a phoenix of wretched, undeniable functionality remains, clawing its way out of the ashes of our perfect, profitable failure.
AI-KO
