Cacophonous thoughts…

By Dele Farotimi

THERE’s a potentially great nation to make of the undoubted and peculiar mess, with which we have been blessed.
Stop kidding yourselves.
There is absolutely nothing sane, or remotely normal about our sickening realities.
Expatriates are paid risk allowances to come and work here for a reason.
They are living in the same neighborhoods as our political and economic elites, and are watched over day and night by the elite blue bereted mobile policeman, but they are still paid to work in Nigeria, same as if they were posted to Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, or any other country at war.
Nigeria is a country at war with itself.
They see the army of 15 million Nigerian children that are roaming the streets and out of school. They are not blind to the tens of millions who have come out of schools and have learnt nothing from the schools that pretended to educate them, even as they had also pretended to learn.
They see the further tens of millions that have never bothered to pretend to learn any trade, nor had the benefit of a formal pretense at any education. Graduates of the schools of life. They are products of the schools of street survival, the victims of a wicked state that had discounted their very humanity. They are young adults, and they will be asking questions of us all.
Our brightest and best are voting with their feet in droves. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and lands that were once alien to our ilk, have become sanctuaries to a fleeing people, and unknown and unheralded thousands have perished in the desert, in Libya, and in the Mediterranean. All fleeing the affliction that is Nigeria.
I will resist talking about how we have preyed on our own in the insane race to acquire ephemeral riches: but I cannot fail to mention the painful truth of the prostitution of Nigerian women, in the flesh markets of mainland Europe, and particularly in the Netherlands, France, and in Italy.
€5 is the price of sex with a Nigerian girl in the Parc Parisienne. Feel free to watch the documentary on CNN, and there are agents arranging domestic jobs for our women in the Gulf Arab states and in Lebanon. Our own are selling us.
It might very well be that all that we are blessed to do is to lay the moral and spiritual foundation of that nation, before our own lives are spent, but we have a duty to ourselves and the future generations to call it forth.
The alternative is too scary to contemplate.

www.delefarotimi.com