This Sallah said it all

Under this city are dreams, secured between shiny floors and unreachable roofs, tucked in silence and expectation. History lives here too. Abuja is built on dreams, haunted by the pennilessness that these same dreams eliminate.Last Tuesday, Sallah day was as horrific as it was festive. It was the day that the poverty that the Goodluck […]

Under this city are dreams, secured between shiny floors and unreachable roofs, tucked in silence and expectation. History lives here too. Abuja is built on dreams, haunted by the pennilessness that these same dreams eliminate.
Last Tuesday, Sallah day was as horrific as it was festive. It was the day that the poverty that the Goodluck Ebele Jonathan administration planted in the country germinated. People exchanged despair instead of pleasantries, agony and frustration instead of tales of gratitude. Most could not afford the ritual of slaughtering rams to mark the eid. The Imam of the Gwarimpa eid ground had to do three retakes while reciting Sabbi, and someone joked that the Imam probably was agonising on his own lack of a ram.
After the prayer, when the imam began sermonising on the proper way to slaughter your ram, most people simply vamoosed from the prayer ground. A few of us observed in astonishment the inter-connectivity of the situation with the harsh economic realities in which Nigerians find themselves.
All this is because dying dreams live in the capital as dying people live in and beyond it. In Kano, Kaduna, Katsina and Sokoto, the story is the same. Don’t think that the people in Maiduguri would have fared better without the threats from terrorists and other agents of death. These would be mere excuses as hunger fears no levels. The sallah stampede in Ilorin in which many died fighting for gifts said it all. Poverty has banished common sense from Nigeria.
Most Nigerians are already a living-dead. They are not those killed by bullets and bombs, whose last vestments chant Islamic incantations. They are the half-dead, interrupted in their journeys to stores and tailors by their sudden lack of economic wherewithal. Women and their weeping babies, who can barely afford to mourn the promise of their lives, weep their fragile calculations of existence.
The purchase of a sallah ram defines the reality of this death. Many would call and plead and beg but no ram would bleat.
The truth is that sallah brought out a nightmare without the romantic tales of urban realities. That Nigerians have been driven to penury. That these people who thronged Abuja beckoned by a distant cousin who returned to the village every year with a shiny new watch, demanding a young wife are only hallucinating. To their utter surprise, their cousin’s realities are indeed, a mirage.
The almost-dead are not just the poor. The facilitators of death are all over government offices, watching the masses teeter on the edge of life from their cooled offices. Being barely alive is exacting beyond death and it is to the credit of public officials that Abuja acquired its notoriety.
Many wonder how it is possible that in a country of such abundance middle class Nigerians would spend sallah without a paltry fifty thousand naira animal. This in a city where, true or false, there are more than forty thousand vacant houses saturated with currencies of all varieties. I am not sure, but the grapevine has it that septic tanks in Abuja do not contain water but mint. Brand new cars parked in pouches of beautiful mansions are full with money. Yet people are suffering hunger, starvation and abject poverty.
Nigerian big men’s hearts must be trained in selective understanding. They care only for their own. There, is a reason for concentrating this story on Abuja. I heard some visitors say they were in Abuja not because they so much loved the holiday but because their families would be better off with the little at hand outside their villages. In thinking about all these I began to see the sense in President Jonathan’s lampoon of the Transparency International instrument which he ridiculed because it is a “Corruption Perception Index”.
However, unknown to President Jonathan, reality can be turned off, side-lined, or even forgotten; in Nigeria, reality has become obnoxious and despicable. The clerk who comes from work in the city of dreams kills his wife’s dreams when he declares that this sallah would be low-key. In plain text, it is another way of picking a fight with madam. It is the same for the executive who switches on a foreign channel and begins to watch big league soccer as his children salivate on the feast in the neighbourhood. Both would have banished reality, and hoped that whatever mayhem lacking a ram may have caused lies outside. Alas, they are oblivious of the cost of such interventions.
If certainty is life’s gift to the dead, uncertainty, its malformed twin, is an award for the almost-dead. Like the incremental build-up of scars of torture, the pain of uncertainty, the comings and goings of electricity, the presence or absence of the doctor, ASUU strike and 2015 can paralyse an entire population.
The Nigerian lives a life of not knowing, of guessing and conspiring, of endless and meaningless doubting. In the past couple of years, Nigeria’s nearly-dead have wept on television and newspapers, buried hundreds, and learned to ignore discomfort. The value of life has become paltry, as cries for help from women and children have become inadequate to move this nation’s conscience to action. It is a pity we are nurturing the same yardsticks ahead of 2015.