The Road To Kankara…

Kankara was the ventriloquists response to Zamanbari. The peoples of northern Nigeria spoke out unambiguously about the manifest failure of General Buhari’s regime, and they were uncharacteristically frank and damning in their assessment of the security situation in the north, and the entire country.

I am blessed to be able to partially exorcise my demons by writing. Where I might have imploded without a valve to let out the crippling pains that I feel at witnessing the destruction of this blessed country by a myopic ruling class and a stupefied populace, I am offered a measure of relief by the impotent wailing that my efforts truly are, in the face of an audience immune to reason, and incapable of defining what are in its own enlightened selfish interests.

But, writing has ceased offering any relief in recent months.

I once wrote in the hope that I might be able to galvanize my readers into taking urgent actions to salvage our country. I had believed in our collective capacity and willingness to be better. But I am recently afflicted with pain watching men that I grew up with, men that I would have believed to be above the putrefaction, become complicit in the coverup of the evil at Lekki, without any sense of history or shame regarding the task that they had set themselves.

It has now become evident, that preaching truth to a generation acculturated to lies, is not only a waste of time, it is self immolating: this same people, victims of the injustice you fight, would find justifications for any evil, that the system might do, to the ones that have presumed to liberate them. They are in love with their chains, and they resent those that would dare to reject the fetters. These truth deniers, are worse than the perpetrators of the evil that they have helped to cover.

So, I have found neither pleasure nor relief in writing. What used to bring relief, now brings pain. The Nigerian tragedies are coming too fast and too thick. I would usually have a tragedy to mull, and as I would mull the facts, analyze and separate the truths from the legends, track the commonalities of these tragedies across the length of Nigeria, I would write with the intention of drawing our collective attention, to the commonalities of our afflictions, in a bid to let us all, realize that we are doomed as a collective, if we shall have failed to act collectively.

The Lekki massacre of unarmed protesters was the beginning of the current phase of pains, what am I supposed to write about Lekki? DJ Switch has said everything that I might have had to say about the fact that it happened. It was a live feed, damn it! How am I to get a man determined to believe the lie, to embrace the truth that he already knows? The Nigerian army, paid and kitted in the name of the Nigerian peoples, and by their taxes, killed unarmed, national anthem singing, national flag waving “citizens” of the Nigerian state. And the ones that I would have considered Generals in any liberation struggle, became apologists for a murdering state and its evil rulers.

Zamanbari came on the heels of the Kano insanity, where a Hisbah force, kitted from the VAT derived from my alcohol consumption in Lagos, set itself the task of destroying several precious bottles of Bacchus juices, all in a destructive attempt to draw attention away from the evil that had been done in Lekki, Lagos. Our rulers have become pyromaniacs, they set fires to rooms in the homestead, always in their attempts to divert attention from their several evil deeds.

Kankara was the ventriloquists response to Zamanbari. The peoples of northern Nigeria spoke out unambiguously about the manifest failure of General Buhari’s regime, and they were uncharacteristically frank and damning in their assessment of the security situation in the north, and the entire country. The pliant and complicit National Assembly even dared to demand to be addressed by the president. Problem with this request is that the legislature wasn’t asking for a television broadcast, they were actually demanding a speech by the ventriloquist’s doll, who would have to be separated from the wily ventriloquists that inhabits the rock.

Aisha became unsafe in Aso Rock, Malami decreed that Buhari may not be summoned by the National Assembly, and the ventriloquist’s doll was shipped to Daura to play with the herd that never breeds. The Kankara Tales were birthed in the cauldron of the ventriloquists schemes, and the Nigerian ruling class’s latent pyromania has again emerged: they are pointing bandits, terrorists, business opportunists, and the Wadumes of this world, to the new criminal venture, that the criminal state, has initiated.

What comes after Kankara?

DF