I have been living in a different city from the one I grew up in for sometime now. I’m used to being away from my city and so this isn’t a first or a second but this is the first time that I’m truly away from everything familiar and I have welcomed unfamiliar things and people. I’ve had to accept that English may never truly be Nigeria’s official language and that a good education surpasses knowing about your city but those around you as well.
Acceptance of things can be really difficult. Like how this woman serves me stew with freckles of egusi even less than the ones on my face. It’s accepting that garri would never be the same as I’m used to. Accepting that my people are more minorities in their own country than I even thought them to be.
Accepting ‘culture’ and differences dissipates the action of anger but it doesn’t kill anger. Anger pollinates on inaction.
When I see a wrong and I’m unable to change it, there’s a cross pollination between the anther of the flower that is the problem and the stigma that is my emotion. The pollen grains transferred is that of my anger. It blooms into this horrible flower that destroys and eats all in its path — friendships, boring conversations, annoying questions and maybe, just maybe me too eventually all because I cannot act, cannot change what my angers wills to.
I do not know how to be quiet about things that annoy me. It’s the way the anger dies. Keeping it in, storing it in heaps until there’s not enough room for you to breathe chokes you to death and destroys you with it.
You see, acting reasonably on anger is cathartic. Whenever I talk about the reason I’m upset about these things I’ve witnessed over the past few months, when I’m able to show how angry I am for the too many wrongs, I breathe easy. It’s keeping it in that hurts.
I am angry that this girl looks at me boldly and tells me as she sways her hips and claps her hands to a song that is playing only in her head, that she will vote this Yoruba man who has shown interest in the 2019 presidential elections because he’s from her tribe. I remember the 2015 elections and how the same thing had happened, how too obvious it was. I did not keep quiet and when I told her how that kind of thought made her look, I was no longer angry, I felt pity for her and every other person who still thinks this way.
2019-2023 will be a repetition (if not worse) of 2015-2019 in Nigeria if we do not all act reasonably on our anger. Inaction does nothing. When Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu wrote that Nigerians suffer selective amnesia he wasn’t wrong at all. I hope these four years are forever stamped in our hearts. These past four years do not deserve your selective amnesia dear Nigerian. I hope the anger we felt as we read each page of this book I’d finished before it was published by the government of the Nigerian people in 2015 makes us think better on what we want for our country. It’s important to own a PVC but a PVC not rightly used is an even more disastrous sin than rigging an election.
