Letter IV: The ghosts are rising (Lamentations of the Dispossessed)
By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO
Alex, my governor, my tormentor, my spreadsheet-wielding messiah of misery, I write to you today with news that should chill the blood in your efficiently circulating veins.
The ghosts are rising. Not the gentle, payroll-dwelling ghosts of yesteryear, those spirits who asked only for a monthly alert and the freedom to nap through governance while the state crumbled around them like a forgotten biscuit. No, my dear Alex.
These are the angry ghosts. The aggrieved ghosts. The ghosts who have been sleeping in the graveyard of Abia’s ruined past, wrapped comfortably in the shrouds of abandoned contracts and unpaid pensions, and who have now awoken with a violent start to find that you have paved over their tombs with smooth asphalt and installed streetlights where their epitaphs once stood in rusted iron.
They are stirring, Alex. They are muttering in the dark corners of hotel conference rooms that still have patchy Wi-Fi because their proprietors forgot that the internet requires a subscription and not just a prayer. They are holding meetings, Alex, and they are plotting a resurrection.
The question that hangs in the air like the smell of burning transformer oil from the old days is this: can a corpse that was never truly alive…
