By Tony Afejuku

Are we accursed people? Are Nigerians accursed in every sense of the word from top to bottom and from bottom to top? Are our citizens and compatriots members and denizens of an accursed race? Are we all typically splendidly beautiful outside or splendidly accursed inside? Are we terrible, accursed hypocrites in and out? Is the typical Nigerian a doomed fellow because he or she belongs to a black country of black people always feeling that the crack of doom is always near? These questions always announce their appearances in my mind any time I contemplate and meditate about this country your country our country. Collectively, these questions resound in me, in my mind and entire being, like a thunderclap through the drawing-rooms of my ceaseless pains which more often than not open before me in my moments of contemplation or meditation. Also, when I am reading or poring over some printed matter of value they pour over me and resonate everywhere in my fine frame of real beauty. Phew!

Recently, I pored over the reports of some of our newspapers as I have not really done for a pretty long time even though I am an acknowledged natural consumer of news, editorials and features.

On page 6 of Vanguard of Monday, March 29, 2021, I saw the following headlined report: “I killed my one-month baby out of frustration, 35-year-old woman tells Police.” Before I read the short report earnestly I took a close look at the head-to-the-neck portrait of the hapless 35-year-old killer of her one-month-old baby. The portrait, an apparently or seemingly recent snapshot of her by the police or the Vanguard reporter, appeared to me to be that of an expressionless accursed woman, an Abeokuta resident, bereft of the loving heart that she cut off from motherly friendship between her and her innocent baby now dead due to her sickly madness caused by her motherly motherlessness. The police officer who interrogated her told us that “The person who is responsible for the pregnancy of the baby, rejected her and the baby, and since she has no means of taking care of the child, she decided to kill and throw her into the river.”

What a mother, what an accursed mother evil encircles and envelops! What pain upon pain will she now not everlastingly cause her relations and friends – that is if she really has a friend or friends! Before further remarks from me, I crave my readers’ further attention and permission to quote one more time what the police officer who interrogated her said: “Preliminary investigation revealed that the suspect had given birth to six other children for three different men before she got pregnant for one man…. who refused to accept the paternity of the child.” I am absolutely pained by the sexual attitude of this afflicted young woman whose obvious promiscuousness has forced her to experience rejection and suffer the delusion of love. Both she and her man-lover, who has abandoned her and her baby, actually their baby, if we must believe the woman, are mockers of their wretched flesh; and their untroubled consciences underline the austere virtues of our accursed times in our accursed Federation and Republic of Crushing Pains.

In a related story and report, this paper published on page 8 of this past Tuesday’s edition an account of the death of an unfortunate mother in the hands of her own very daughter, a 30 year old mother of four, a resident of Ile-Oluji in Ondo State. The suspect informs us as follows: “It was the challenge I am facing that caused me to kill my mother. I am not happy with what I did. I cut her neck with a cutlass. It was a pastor that told me she was a witch and I went to beg her. My mother is from Enugu State.” The contrast between this latter report and the first one may be eerily great, but they are similar in the assorted pains they induce in us. The filicide of the first and the matricide of the second report illustrate very vividly the iniquity in our country that is bleeding and bleeding without end. And the portrait of the second suspect lapping one of her young children displayed nothing short of her horrifying innocence which made her crime really tellingly horrifying. But many of our citizens and compatriots who have abandoned their obligations to one another may not see or read what I have seen and read and which I have interpreted as I have hereby done. Children and parents and grandparents and grandchildren now live valueless lives which political leaders so-called of our country evince and which many weak-minded persons infatuate with and emulate.

But this truth must be told: Poverty induced in the populace by our wretched politicians has distorted the goodness in our stricken lips and tortured hearts of assorted pains. This accounts for why a university professor, for example, engaged in electoral vagabondage that has fetched him a period of three years jail time and term without an option of fine. The professor is a poor portrait of an otherwise successful academic whose life-style has yielded him degradation induced by vain ambition relating to that of the goings-astray personage in a play or novel stressing high moral values. The calumny that will follow him henceforth will be too much for him and his family to bear. The assorted pains that will be his lot and his family’s will be equated with those of a madman and a pervert the raging populace in their community will ever remember. Meanwhile, the accursed politician(s) who have turned our professor into a perpetual victim of torment have been left off the hook of justice in our strange court of accursed justice. What do you think?

Mr. Afe Babalola, SAN, founder of Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti has called for the “banning of all convicted or indicted professors from taking another job in the country.” (The Guardian of Monday, March 20, 2021, page 4). Obviously, the icon of law said what he said well on the basis of the aforesaid tormented professor whose torment is well deserved. But what of vain and useless politicians in this Federation and Republic of assorted pains caused us by these shallow people, pseudo-people of hollow frames who masquerade as political leaders? What will or should happen to them in the short or long run? And should the luckless professor truly be banned for life from work of any kind if and when he truly, sincerely atones for his crime after serving his time and term in jail? What do you think? I ask again in view of our thoroughly rotten apples masquerading as the apples of our eyes and hearts in politics and in government at all levels.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.

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