Of Work, Absence, and the Rituals We Mistake for Repair:
By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” – Angela Davis
Sometime in the late 1980s, as a young boy, I asked my uncle why May 1 mattered. He was a civil servant then, though I did not quite know what that meant, one of those men who rose before dawn, wore modestly pressed shirts, and returned home in the evening carrying a worn leather briefcase that contained more frustration than papers.
He thought about the question longer than a child expects.
Then he said something I have never forgotten: “It is a day the government tells us we are important, and we pretend to believe them.” He did not say it with anger.
He said it with the exhausted clarity of someone who had long stopped expecting the ceremony to change anything.
Decades later, I understand what he meant with an intimacy that borders on grief. Every first day of May, the Nigerian state engages in a grand, theatrical ritual.
In stadiums and public squares across the federation, from Eagle Square in Abuja to the Tafawa Balewa Square in Lagos, a familiar pageantry unfolds. Government…
