The Lawless Greed Called "Nigeria"

   Sweating in a poorly lit room with walls stained with a faded blue paint, there on the floor of this cold room surrounding by strangers who take turns to look at her walls, only one of them she knows by the name Pastor or daddy, not because she is fatherless but because of the societal infused shame at one who calls those who climb pulpits in the name of pedagogy to spew the same old morals that good is good and bad is bad for a fee every week should be transcended to the position of father, they also perform other functions like flogging one for coming late to the house of God and choosing one’s spouse, another matter really.

   So there she labors because the Lord wants her to give birth like the Hebrew women who recently farcically have had their own shares of burglaries, but she tires out for a son, who she prays is worth all the suffering, will he? Is he supposed to be worth a suffering or are you trying to save money instead of going to the hospital. filled by the complication which according to her is betoken of someone great, Laughable she was safe in the midst of “Pastor” and women of Israel (by religion) they promise to leave her enough money for the naming ceremony and first week of pampers.

A little push and pull and the reason for the suffering is born cursed with a statement "Do all you can to make it life", vetted by the what a cute baby isn’t he beautiful, well he is born to do great things. Congratulations mum and what have you, excuse me another woman is here! saying another person is about to face the same routine and regurgitation, And for the new mother the poorly lit room turns a shade darker but with world domination determination as she carries all that she is to bury and bathe.

Given names that we are told labels the special in us, the boy go through the school to find other people with the same promises to let their little light shine from varied poorly lit rooms, with cries so loud determine to deafen the world. But many others have been heard and many still to come.

So what do we do with all these infusions, hope and aspirations when from that poorly lit room we are alienated and told we don’t belong here or there but on a spiral that goes up, and on this crowded step the claustrophobic and weak heart have no choice to be trampled upon, creating within us a lawless greed- A need to own, a need to win, a need to destroy a need to kill, anything to fill that void encroaching our desire to show the world that we are individualized greatness and nothing else.

  The lawless greed in us pushing and shoving as it makes it way pass me and you in a hurry, a nonsensical race inside a big ball, the greed that fill our stomach with bloating, drinks and peer pressured pressures and affirmations that we are closer to a goal, A goal we never stop to wonder who set in the first place. Praise and admiration from fellow vermin who in doing so do their bid and their bid alone to also get in a place of importance and brag a little to the carcass close by.

It is in fourteen jeeps queuing in a road with only thirteen people inside of them each of them unable to tend to a road that they ply daily but will bump and bully the next man  with splash of humility, It is in the extended fence of a prison we call a house just to take a little more and leave nothing for drainage and crate a pond of a road we paddle our cars in and lament ever so seriously.

It is in the voice of “pastors” clamoring for more and more members to fill their pockets in the name of Jesus Christ and matter how big the bible is and how it contains everything it never reads nor do you who read under the influence of the holy spirit never seems to understand the logic of giving back to your community except to buy private jets and expensive cars.

It is the singular reason why there are no fields of play in our community every middle class insatiable and angry and wants to bully so bad and want to be called “land lord” a name we don’t know the origin of, to build houses like birds everywhere for somebody who also is renting for the time he build a house for somebody he can get rich from, caught in the illusion of suffering.

The greed that pile the bodies on a young woman who sees her reproductive organ as a shop to invest in and make money to buy a vehicle that ends up killing her. Poor people that make poor money decisions, masons that suffer a tired more than you and me for a little change that he piles up to buy a phone that ends up getting stolen on the day of purchase.

The greed in the mother’s care, father’s scare and lover leer, a big house a car and lot of phones - junks in their true sense and the white man taps into that greed and create a more expensive bauble for you to toil and feel unhappy about. Another phone another car, another girlfriend same dissatisfaction the same emptiness.

The greed that make me see another man as nothing, a greed that make young boys drive around stupidly in weapons going nowhere carrying virtual need for appreciation in our hands to prove far from reality we really are. The need to own colored paper we might eat feaces with bread, we might see our own relatives and say off with  their head. Lawless greed we might kill you for a land we will never build many graves are soaked with young men who died just for a piece of land that once belong to the dinosaurs,

Lawless greed we might shunt in traffic even though we are going to the same place, we might steal from you we might sleep with your wives, rape your daughters just to prove that we are as great as we were promised we were, this feeling of entitlement, this greed. 

  A spinster is holed up somewhere in shop plaiting the hair on a mannequin hoping one day she will drive a car and be as the big as the stupid fool who will put on her plaited wig and snap picture with a  new car that her boyfriend bought for her. That will make her sad, that will make her unhappy. Until she is told that for prostitution in Italy she might just have that exact kind of picture on Instagram and proudly  say to a hundred people who don’t care about her that yes that is my car and I spend so much money to repair it than I feed.

Tell me I made it, Tell me I am great. Don’t tell me that I am just a stupid vermin crawling on the face of earth with no sense of self and could be taken out with as little as a stray bullet which she is and can, as the men in black, patrol our streets with rusted irons pointing them for fifty naira the amount every human life is truly worth.

Until we tell it as it is, and not me infused with my own illusion of greatness and self of entitlement to the millions given birth in shack up halls poorly lit and surrounded with pregnant women of Israel that what you are doing is populating a dumb statistic that believe the world is theirs  and you could as well as closed your legs and planned your life gently you could live life without complaining, and not put your wares on the pedestrian walk way because you have mouths to feed or carry a set of twins at Oshodi bus stop asking people to help you, or cry at public transport without thinking that someone might have it hard than you.

You really don’t have to open your own church, school, or have another kid because of societal pressure, You don’t have to eat so much food, you don’t have to buy so much clothes or spend excessively on a piece of garb. You really don’t have to get you a mouth to feed in the name of a woman once your head is afloat, You don’t have to waste money on a wedding day, You really don’t have to do anything at all.

Really look at it and reassess your life, You are not going to make it, even when you make so much money you are still going to die, and nothing absolutely nothing will follow you along. Stop feeling particular God is not your father and he doesn’t have special plans for you. Rather he can be likened to a working mechanism that satisfies the need of everything good and bad to create a balance that endures for long. If a cheetah can eat a bison’s fawn minutes after its being born, there are and you are nothing special.

  You don’t have to suffer for your children, You don’t have to give that man on the pulpit money just because your neighbor another foolish waste of space is looking at you. You don’t have to go to another man’s country to inconvenience him just because you want to drive a car past me and make me wish I could risk my life just the way you swallowed cocaine to go home and count a stupid wad of money in front of a prospective gargoyle. The world is big enough for every man’ need but not every man’s greed, But with a teeming population that seems to be spiraling out of control and in every single fetus infused is the dream of becoming a bully in his own right, You had better stop us at your airports, if we come to dance with you, run from us, For me and you who hope to make do in this ephemeral life with the bare minimum, be happy, and run far from the lawless greed called Nigeria.

by Victor Samuel