Letter II: The Grief of the Evicted Apparition
By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO
Now, Alex nwa Otti, before you continue this positively reckless destruction of our beloved wasteland, permit me to introduce myself properly. I am not one of those big men you see at the club sipping whisky and complaining about the economy. I am not a contractor whose children are now eating beans because the roads refuse to develop potholes. No. I am something smaller, something quieter, something that existed in the gentle spaces between reality and imagination. I am a ghost. Or rather, I was a ghost, until you came with your bright lights and your biometric machines and your stubborn refusal to let sleeping spirits lie.
For fifteen years, Alex, I was a marvel of modern science. I was a man who lived entirely inside a spreadsheet, a name that appeared on a payroll but never appeared at a desk. The Ministry of Works paid me every month, and I repaid them by staying far away from their offices, by never complaining about the tea, by never using their electricity or occupying their chairs or demanding that they fix the air conditioner. I was the perfect employee. I caused zero trouble. I produced zero work. I was, in every sense that matters, a ghost, and I lived a life of such peaceful abundance that even the ancestors would look down with envy.
Do you know what it means to be a ghost worker in Nigeria, Alex? It is the closest any of us will ever get to heaven while still breathing. Imagine waking up every morning with no alarm clock. Imagine never knowing the horror of Monday traffic. Imagine sipping your tea on your veranda while your neighbors rush past with their uniforms and their stress, and knowing that at the end of the month, a message will come. That message will say “Alert,” and money will appear in your account. Money you did not sweat for. Money you did not beg for. Money that simply materialized because your name existed in the right place at the right time. That is not corruption, Alex. That is grace. That is the universe acknowledging that some of us are not built for the grind, that some of us contribute to society simply by not contributing to its problems.
But you, with your Biometric Verification and your Unified Payment System and your Accountant General who goes around making proud announcements about “saving ₦220 million monthly,” you have performed a mass exorcism that would make even a Pentecostal pastor blush. You have cast out 2,300 of us. You have dragged us from the warm, comfortable womb of the payroll and dumped us into the cold, harsh light of reality. We are now forced to occupy these heavy mortal bodies, to walk the streets of Umuahia like ordinary people, to explain to our wives why the monthly alert has stopped coming. It is a crime against the supernatural order. It is genocide of the spirit world.
I remember my mentor, a man we called the Archangel of the Ministry of Works. This man was a legend. He had seven different names on seven different payrolls across three different states. He was a genius. He understood that the government is not a person but an idea, and ideas cannot count. He would say to me, with the wisdom of someone who had never held a file in his life, “My son, they call it corruption when your plate is empty. Once your plate is full, they call it connection.” And we were connected, Alex. We were a network of phantoms, a brotherhood of the invisible, supporting the economy from the shadows.
When my salary arrived – this unearned, undeserved, beautiful salary – did I bury it in the ground? No. I spent it at the market. I paid my children’s school fees. I bought food from the mama put who has now closed her shop because you killed her best customer. I kept the wheels of commerce turning. By removing us from the payroll, you have not saved money. You have killed the trickle-down economy of our laziness. You have made the marketplace too honest, and an honest marketplace is a slow marketplace, a boring marketplace, a marketplace where groundnut sellers cannot afford to send their own children to school because the ghosts have stopped buying.
And let us talk about the violence of your biometric machines. I stood in that line last year, Alex. For the first time in a decade, I was forced to appear in the flesh. The sun burned my skin because I was no longer used to daylight. The queue stretched for miles, filled with men like me, men who had spent years mastering the art of absence. We stood there shuffling forward, each step taking us closer to the machine that would end our existence. When my turn came, the machine asked for my thumbprint. It looked into my eyes with a red laser that seemed to see straight through to my empty desk in a ministry I had never visited. It was an assault on my dignity. Why should the state know that I have ten fingers if I am not using any of those fingers to work for the state? There is a certain privacy in being a ghost. There is a sacredness in anonymity that you have trampled with your insistence on verification.
Mike Omilusi, that professor who writes about these things, he says that ghost workers are often seen as a development issue. But for us, Alex, it was never development. It was a lifestyle. It was a choice. We chose to be elsewhere while being paid to be here. We chose to pursue our dreams – farming, trading, resting, living – while the government generously funded our pursuits. And you have taken that freedom away. You have reduced us from spirits to bodies, from legends to statistics, from beneficiaries of grace to victims of efficiency.
Consider my friend Eze. We called him Principal Accountant Eze, though he had never touched an account book in his life. Eze had a small poultry farm in the village. For years, that farm thrived on what he called the “subsidies” from the Ministry of Finance. Every month, his salary arrived, and every month, he bought feed for his chickens, expanded his coop, sent his children to school. He was a productive farmer! He was contributing to food security! But because he never showed up to sit in a dusty office and pretend to move files from one tray to another, you labeled him a ghost and cut him off.
Now his chickens are hungry. His children are home. His farm is collapsing. Do you see what you have done, Alex? The ghost worker was the original venture capitalist of Abia State. We took the dead capital of the government – money that was just sitting there in spreadsheets – and we turned it into living, breathing economic activity. We were the middlemen between the treasury and the people. By insisting on attendance records and clock-ins, you are killing the creative flexibility of the Nigerian worker. You are turning us into employees, and that word, Alex, that word sounds suspiciously like slavery.
And do not think we do not know about the six high priests you sacked from the accounts department. Those men were artists. They were indicted for knowingly benefitting from irregular payments, but in the old Abia, that was not an indictment. That was a job description. They understood that the payroll is not a document but a living thing, a river that must sometimes flood its banks to water the surrounding farmland. They manipulated the system, yes, but they manipulated it with skill, with precision, with the kind of craftsmanship that comes from years of practice. You have replaced them with software. Software that does not have a family to feed. Software that does not understand that April salary is actually bills for September paid. Software that cannot look at a name and think, “Ah, this one, he has been here since before I was born, let me just leave him.” By automating the process, you are killing the empathy that once defined our bureaucracy. You are making the system cold, heartless, efficient. And efficiency, Alex, is the enemy of humanity.
You are killing the Abia where a man could retire while still in his twenties, drawing salary until the day he actually died – and sometimes for ten years after that, God bless the loyal clerks who kept the names alive. You are forcing us to be value-driven, and value-driven is a philosophy that is entirely alien to the loaves and fishes tradition of public office. As we say in the village, a nation can survive its fools, but it cannot survive a leader who expects the fools to actually work. Stop this reform, Alex. Stop making the civil service efficient. It is un-African to be this organized. It is unnatural to be this honest. Give us back our shadows. Give us back the budgetary leakages that watered our private gardens. You are killing the ghosts, but be warned: a state without ghosts is a very haunted place indeed. The living are noisy. The living make demands. The living want roads and light and water and accountability. The ghosts asked for nothing but a monthly alert and the freedom to stay home. We were the perfect citizens. We were the dream population. And you have evicted us.
The sheer absurdity of your new Abia is that you have replaced the comfortable, velvet fog of bureaucratic nonsense with the sharp, jagged edges of reality. In the old days, the ministry was a cathedral of paper. Beautiful yellowing stacks of files moved with the glacial dignity of a dying empire. There was a sacredness to the missing file. It was a mystical object, a thing that could be invoked to explain why a bridge did not exist or why a pension had vanished into the ether. When someone asked a question, the answer was always the same: “The file is with the director.” And everyone understood. The file was always with the director. It had been with the director since 1999. It would remain with the director until the director retired, at which point it would be transferred to the new director, who would also keep it until retirement. The file was eternal. The file was the excuse that never expired.
But you, Alex, have introduced the digital archive. You have stripped the civil servant of his most potent weapon: the ability to say, with a straight face, that the evidence has been eaten by termites. Termites were our allies. They consumed the paper trails of our indiscretions. They turned inconvenient documents into dust. We fed them well. But you cannot feed termites to a server. You cannot blame a hard drive for corruption. You cannot look a citizen in the eye and say, “Sorry, the cloud ate your pension.” By digitizing everything, you are killing the poetry of the administrative loophole. You are forcing men who once dealt in the sublime art of pending approval to actually hit a submit button. It is a soul-crushing literalism that leaves no room for the imagination. Where is the artistry in a system that actually works? Where is the beauty in a process that concludes?
Consider the tragedy of the inspectorate. In a properly functioning Gogolian universe – and I invoke Gogol because you remind me of those Russian reformers who thought they could organize chaos – an inspector is a man who travels to a site, accepts a warm beer and a heavy envelope, and writes a glowing report about a building that consists of nothing but four sticks and a prayer. This is what we called the social contract of the envelop. It kept the wheels of the hospitality industry turning. It kept the printers of fake progress reports in business. It created a whole economy of mutual deception that sustained families for generations.
But your inspectors now carry tablets. They carry GPS trackers. They take photos that are time-stamped. They are killing the creative fiction of the construction industry. By demanding that a wall actually contain cement rather than a strategic mixture of sand and optimism, you are stifling the entrepreneurial spirit of the shortcut generation. You are turning the construction of a road into a boring, scientific exercise instead of the high-stakes theater of contractual deception it was meant to be. In the old days, we built roads with poetry. We built them with hope and prayer and the occasional bag of cement hidden somewhere in the middle. Now you build them with specifications and standards and quality control. It is so… predictable. So… German. Have you no respect for our Nigerian creativity? Have you no appreciation for the ingenious ways we learned to stretch a budget until it screamed?
And let us interrogate this thing you call stomach infrastructure. There was a time, Alex, when a leader understood that the people did not need sustainable development goals. They did not need long-term economic rejuvenation. They did not need small and medium enterprise support. They needed a bag of rice with a politician’s face on it and five hundred naira crumpled into a ball. That was a direct transaction. It was honest in its dishonesty. The politician gave. The people received. Everyone smiled for the cameras. The rice lasted a week, and by the time it finished, everyone had forgotten that the roads were still bad and the water was still not running. It was a beautiful cycle. It kept the masses in a state of grateful subservience. It reminded them that the governor was not a public servant but a benefactor, a provider, a kind of secular god who distributed blessings at election time.
But you? You talk of infrastructure and employment and economic transformation. You are killing the handout culture. When you provide a man with a steady job and a functional environment, he stops looking at the governor as a deity who dispenses crumbs. He starts looking at you as an employee who must perform. He starts asking questions. He starts demanding results. This is the ultimate assassination of the political class. You are teaching the sheep that they do not need a shepherd if the pasture is finally fenced and watered. You are making yourself irrelevant in the minds of the people, and that, Alex, is the greatest political sin of all. A leader who is not needed is a leader who will be forgotten. And a forgotten leader is a leader who will not be reelected. Or so we thought, until we saw your approval ratings. But we will get to that betrayal later.
There is a graphic, almost grotesque health in the streets now that offends the sensibilities of the old guard. I saw a man in Aba last week – a man who had spent forty years navigating the holy mud of Ariaria. This man was a legend of survival. He knew which potholes to avoid, which floods to respect, which gutters to leap. He had mastered the terrain of failure. And now, I saw him walking on a sidewalk without lifting his trousers to his knees. He looked diminished, Alex. He looked lost. The struggle had defined him. The filth was his element. By killing the filth, you have robbed him of his daily martyrdom. He no longer has a reason to complain to his creator about the wickedness of the leaders. He cannot stand at his church on Sunday and testify about how he nearly drowned in Faulks Road but the Lord delivered him. You have snatched away his cross and replaced it with a paved walkway.
How is a man supposed to enter the kingdom of heaven if he is no longer suffering in Abia? Suffering was our identity. Suffering was our bond. Suffering was the thing that united us across ethnic and religious lines. We were all suffering together, and that suffering gave us a common purpose. But now? Now people are walking on dry roads. Now they are sleeping with their lights on. Now they are opening shops that do not flood. You are jeopardizing the very salvation of your citizens by making their earthly lives too tolerable. You are a secular saboteur of the highest order. You are destroying the spiritual foundation of our collective complaint.
We must also address the boredom of transparency. A state budget used to be a document of high fantasy. It was a Tolkien-esque map of hidden treasures and dragon-guarded hoards that only the chosen few could decipher. The rest of us looked at it and shrugged. We did not understand the numbers. We did not know where the money was supposed to go. We simply trusted that the leaders knew what they were doing, and when the roads remained bad, we blamed the federal government or the oil prices or the weather. The budget was a mystery, and mysteries cannot be questioned.
But now you publish these things online. You invite the public to consultations. You hold town hall meetings where ordinary people can stand up and ask, “Where did this money go?” You have killed the esoteric art of the budget. When everyone knows where the money is going, there is no room for the surprise expenditure. There is no room for the miscellaneous diversion. There is no room for the emergency fund that somehow ends up in private pockets. You are turning governance into an open-book exam, and for those of us who spent our lives perfecting the art of cheating from the back row, this is a death sentence.
You are killing the darkness where we did our best work. The darkness was our friend. The darkness blurred edges. The darkness softened accountability. The darkness hid both poverty and wealth in the same shadow, so that no one could be sure who had what. Under darkness, everyone is potentially innocent. But now the streets glow like interrogations. Faces are visible. Shops stay open. People walk with purpose. Hope leaks into places where resignation once lived. Have you thought about what hope does to obedience, Alex? A hopeful citizen asks questions not as satire but as demand.
A hopeful citizen remembers promises. A hopeful citizen votes differently. You have replaced despair, that most reliable stabilizer, with expectation. And expectation, as we both know, is unruly. Expectation wants evidence. Expectation wants results. Expectation wants the governor to keep performing miracles, and when the miracles slow down, expectation becomes disappointment, and disappointment becomes anger. You have set a trap for yourself, Alex. By raising the bar so high, you have ensured that the only direction left is down. We wait. We watch. We ghosts, we have learned patience.
In the final analysis, Alex, what you are committing is nothing short of civic genocide. You are systematically eradicating a species of Abian that has existed since the dawn of the Fourth Republic. The scientists call it Homo Politicus Parasitus. We call it the loyal party man. This creature feeds on patronage. It breathes connection. It reproduces through recommendation letters and godfather blessings. It does not know how to apply for a job; it only knows how to lobby for a slot. It does not understand CVs and interviews; it understands waivers and settlements. It has survived for decades by attaching itself to the body politic like a benevolent tick, sucking just enough to survive but leaving the host alive.
You have retired this species. By insisting on merit, by demanding qualifications, by advertising positions and conducting interviews, you have rendered an entire generation of loyalists unemployable. These men do not know how to write a cover letter. They do not know how to answer interview questions. They only know how to say, “I supported you during the campaign.” They only know how to show up at the government house with their chests out and their hands outstretched, expecting to be fed. And you have locked the gates. You have turned the government house from a twenty-four-hour buffet into a laboratory of competence. You have left the old guard shivering in the cold, clutching their empty plates and wondering why the national cake has suddenly been replaced by a state budget with line items and accountability.
The humor in your wickedness lies in the sheer, unmitigated boredom of your success. There is no drama anymore. Where are the frantic midnight press releases explaining why the state capital has been submerged by a two-inch rainfall? Where are the Judas commissioners defecting to the opposition because their stomach infrastructure was not adequately lubricated? Where are the protesters burning tires because the fuel has disappeared again? You have killed the political thriller that was Abia State and replaced it with a documentary on urban planning.
It is gut-wrenchingly funny to see the old elites trying to find a fault in a road that has not cracked after a year. They stand over the drainage pipes like frustrated archaeologists, praying for a sign of collapse, only to find that you used actual steel instead of the traditional hope and prayer reinforcement. They bring out their measuring tapes, their levels, their experts, searching for something – anything – that can be criticized. And they find nothing. It is the funniest tragedy I have ever witnessed.
You have robbed the opposition of their only weapon: the truth of our former failure. In the old days, the opposition did not need to manufacture scandals. The roads themselves were scandals. The hospitals themselves were scandals. The schools themselves were scandals. All they had to do was point at the potholes and say, “Look what they have done.” The potholes did the campaigning for them. But now? Now the opposition stands at rallies and struggles to find something to say. They talk about the past. They talk about what might have been. They cannot talk about the present because the present is functioning, and functioning is very difficult to campaign against. You have not just fixed the roads; you have fixed the political game. You have made it nearly impossible to run against you because running against you means running against results. And results, Alex, are stubborn things. They do not lie. They do not exaggerate. They simply exist, and their existence is the best campaign speech anyone could write.
Instructive, too, is the way you have weaponized normalcy. In the old Abia, it was a miracle when a transformer was replaced. People would dance in the streets. They would name their children after the governor. They would write songs of praise and distribute them on WhatsApp. Electricity was not a right; it was a blessing, a gift from the gods of the government house. When the light came on after six months of darkness, it was a celebration. It was proof that someone up there cared.
Today, it is a maintenance schedule. The lights come on because they are supposed to come on. The water runs because it is supposed to run. The roads stay smooth because they are supposed to stay smooth. There are no miracles anymore. There is only performance. And performance, unlike miracle, does not inspire gratitude. It inspires expectation. It inspires the attitude of “what have you done for me lately?” You have made good the standard, and in doing so, you have made bad an abnormality. You are teaching the citizens that they should not thank a governor for doing his job any more than they should thank a pilot for not crashing the plane.
This is the ultimate subversion of the big man complex. If the people stop worshiping the leader, the leader becomes a servant. And in the twisted logic of our failed past, there is no greater humiliation than for a king to be mistaken for a worker. You have demoted yourself from royalty to civil servant, and the people do not even realize the magnitude of your sacrifice. They simply expect. They demand. They complain when the light goes off for two hours. Two hours, Alex! In the old days, we went two years without light and called it Tuesday. Now they cannot survive two hours. You have spoiled them.
You have created monsters of expectation who will never be satisfied, who will never say thank you, who will always want more. And when you finally leave – because all governors eventually leave – they will not remember you with gratitude. They will remember you as the one who set the standard, and they will curse the ones who failed to meet it. You have doomed your successors, Alex. That is your legacy. Not the roads. Not the lights. Not the water. The impossible standard that no one else can meet.
Let us be clear: you are killing the Abia of the consultants of chaos. Those strategic advisors who specialized in creating problems just so they could be paid to manage them are now wandering the streets of Umuahia like lost tourists. They used to thrive on crisis. When the roads flooded, they were there with proposals. When the hospitals collapsed, they were there with feasibility studies. When the schools failed, they were there with needs assessments. They built entire careers on the foundation of failure, and you have pulled that foundation from under them. Now they have nothing to consult on. Now they have no problems to solve because the problems have been… solved. It is a professional genocide. They will have to find real jobs, learn real skills, contribute real value. The horror.
You have disrupted the inflationary cycle of failure where every missed target was a reason for a bigger budget. In the old days, when a project failed, we did not ask why. We asked how much more we needed to try again. Failure was not an ending; it was a beginning. It was the start of a new funding round, a new contract, a new opportunity for distribution. Failure was the engine that drove our economy. It employed architects to design buildings that would never be built. It employed engineers to supervise roads that would never be finished. It employed auditors to investigate funds that would never be found. Failure was a job creation machine.
But you, with your hitting of targets on time and under budget, are committing fiscal homicide. You are proving that the money was always there. It was just the will that was missing. And that, Alex, is the most offensive truth of all. It exposes the last twenty years not as a period of limited resources but as a period of unlimited greed. It shows that we could have had these roads in 2005. We could have had these lights in 2010. We could have had this water in 2015. But we chose not to. We chose to let the money disappear because the disappearing was the point. The disappearing was the purpose. The disappearing was what kept the system running.
You are not just building roads, Alex. You are building a mountain of evidence against your predecessors. Every kilometer of smooth asphalt is a testimony to their failure. Every functioning streetlight is an accusation. Every working tap is a verdict. You are constructing a museum of shame, and the exhibits are the ghosts of our past leaders, wandering through the galleries of your success, unable to explain why they could not do what you have done. It is a historical massacre. It is a rewriting of our collective memory. It is a judgment that will echo through the generations.
The tragedy concludes with the execution of the excuse. For decades, we told the people that Abia was difficult to govern. We told them that the soil of Aba was cursed and could not hold asphalt. We told them that the federal might was working against us, that the central government was stealing our funds, that the oil prices were too low, that the exchange rate was too high, that the rain was too much, that the sun was too hot. We had excuses for everything. Excuses were our national language. We spoke excuses fluently, with accents and dialects and proverbs. We could explain any failure, justify any delay, rationalize any disappearance. It was a skill passed down from generation to generation, refined over decades of practice.
You have killed all our favorite excuses. You have shown that the soil is fine. It was the contractors who were rotten. You have shown that federal might is no match for local sanity. You have shown that the money was sufficient, the weather was manageable, the challenges were surmountable. You have stripped us naked of our justifications, leaving us standing in the bright light of your streetlamps with nothing to cover our shame but the tattered rags of our old political structures.
It is a hilarious, brutal, and deeply necessary slaughter of the old ways. We stand exposed. We stand revealed. We stand as monuments to our own incompetence, while you walk past with your spreadsheets and your timelines and your stubborn insistence that things can actually work. We hate you for it. We hate you with the burning passion of a thousand suns. But we also, in the quiet corners of our hearts, respect you. Because you have done what we said was impossible. You have made Abia work. And in doing so, you have made us irrelevant.
So go ahead, Alex nwa Otti. Continue your massacre. Kill the darkness until every corner of the state is blindingly bright. Kill the ghosts until the civil service is a place for the living only. Kill the potholes until our mechanics are forced to learn new trades. Kill the excuses until our politicians have nothing left to say at rallies. Kill the consultants of chaos until they find real work. Kill the handouts until our people learn to produce rather than receive. Kill the mystery of the budget until every citizen can track every kobo. Kill the suffering until our only complaint is that things are working too well.
We, the victims of progress, will continue to complain from our shrinking islands of irrelevance. We will gather at the club and grumble about the arrogance of your results and the tyranny of your transparency. We will tell stories of the old days, when a man could be a ghost and live like a king, when a road could be a perpetual project and fund generations, when a flood could be an economy and a pothole could be a livelihood. We will mourn the Abia that was, the beautiful, broken, dysfunctional Abia that asked nothing of us but our absence and rewarded us with abundance.
But deep down, in the places we do not admit even to ourselves, we know the truth. You are killing the Abia of our sins so that the Abia of our dreams can finally breathe. You are performing an autopsy on a corpse that was not quite dead, and in the process, you are discovering that it could have been alive all along. You are holding up a mirror to our failure, and the reflection is devastating. We see ourselves not as victims of circumstance but as architects of decay. We see our choices, our compromises, our collective decision to let things rot because rot was profitable. And we cannot bear to look.
So we write these letters. We compose these laments. We perform this grief for anyone who will listen. But the grief is not for the Abia you are killing. The grief is for the people we became in that Abia. The grief is for the ghosts we chose to be, the excuses we built, the darkness we loved. You are killing more than a system, Alex. You are killing an identity. And the funeral, frankly, is the best party this state has seen in a quarter of a century.
We dance at your progress even as we mourn our obsolescence. We cheer your roads even as we miss our contracts. We celebrate your lights even as we long for the shadows where we once hid. It is a strange, contradictory, deeply Nigerian grief – a grief that laughs even as it weeps, that celebrates even as it mourns, that thanks you even as it curses you.
You have given us the one thing we never expected: a future. And we do not know what to do with it. We do not know how to be citizens instead of subjects. We do not know how to demand instead of beg. We do not know how to hope instead of resign. You are forcing us to learn, and learning is painful. Learning is humiliating. Learning requires admitting that we did not know.
But we are learning, Alex. Slowly, reluctantly, with much complaining and many sideways glances, we are learning. And when we have finally learned, when we have become the citizens you are trying to create, we will look back at these letters and laugh. We will laugh at our own foolishness, our own short-sightedness, our own desperate clinging to a past that deserved to die. We will laugh, and then we will thank you.
But not yet. Not today. Today, we are still ghosts, still mourning our eviction from the payroll of the dead. Today, we are still angry, still confused, still wandering the bright streets of your new Abia with our hands outstretched and our mouths full of complaint. Today, we write these letters and hope that someone reads them and understands our pain.
Tomorrow, perhaps, we will wake up and realize that the pain was the price of progress. Tomorrow, we will see that the killing was actually a healing. Tomorrow, we will join the living and stop mourning the dead.
But tomorrow is not today. And today, Alex nwa Otti, we hold you responsible for every ghost you have banished, every excuse you have destroyed, every darkness you have illuminated. We hold you responsible for the unbearable brightness of this new Abia, where a man can no longer hide in the shadows and call it a living. We hold you responsible for forcing us to become real.
And frankly, it is the best thing anyone has ever done for us. But do not tell anyone we said that. Let it remain our secret, buried somewhere in this long, rambling, contradictory lament. Let it be the truth we cannot admit, the gratitude we cannot express, the hope we cannot yet feel.
Continue, Alex. Continue your positively reckless destruction of the past. Continue your massacre of our comfortable failures. Continue your assassination of our beloved dysfunction. We will stand here, complaining, grieving, mourning, while you build. And one day, when the complaining finally stops, you will know that you have succeeded not just in fixing the roads but in fixing us.
That day is not yet here. But it is coming. And when it comes, we will have you to thank.
For now, we remain what you have made us: ghosts in transition, spirits learning to be human, parasites discovering that independence is possible. It is uncomfortable. It is terrifying. It is the most alive we have felt in decades.
And we hate you for it. But we also, in ways we cannot explain, love you for it.
Go figure. That is Abia for you. That is Nigeria for you. That is us – complicated, contradictory, impossible to satisfy, and somehow, against all odds, still here.
Still here, Alex. Still watching. Still waiting. Still learning.
And slowly, painfully, against our will, still hoping.
Gburu gawa! Kill on, Governor. Kill on.
