Republic of Embers

Our eyes, red from the flames,the annihilation, burned into our retinas.Is it freedom when my country is a living cell?<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/7952.jpg"/>Up north, the shepherd bleeds while his flock is scattered to the harmattan,crosses pulled from rooftops like weeds,yet the congregation in the south,sips communion wine and calls it peace .A silence so holy, it has become its own heresy.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/7955.jpg"/>We have learned to pray differently here.Not for abundance, nobut for the mercy of a bullet,that knows someone else's name.We negotiate with God at every junction,let this pothole not swallow my axle,let these uniformed men not see me as revenue,let me arrive.Survival has become a prayer we recite before we open our doors.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/7956.png"/>The naira, once a thing of weight,now flutters like a wounded bird nobody rushes to catch.The market women do arithmetic in grief,counting yesterday's price against the cruelty of this morning's.We are a people eating the seed yam,because the harvest has been interceptedby men in agbadas with foreign accounts and local amnesia. Abuja sits on a hill of ivory and stolen marble,fat on the commonwealth of the famished,waving at us from inside air-conditioned palaces.Those men who were once us, who have since traded their reflections, for a class that has no memory of hunger.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/7953.jpg"/>And then there is this oldest wound;the Yoruba eye that watches the Igbo hand,the Hausa lip that curls at a southern name,as if Lugard's lines were drawn in blood we are still obligated to inherit.We have turned our differences into ammunition, while those who planted the division, dine across ethnic lines in Abuja,laughing at how well the wall holds. Zik dreamed a nation.Awolowo mapped a mind.Ahmadu Bello prayed a people.But we buried their blueprints and built a government on the ruins of their intentions,a house of zinc on a foundation of sand that floods every election season.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/7959.jpg"/>We are a Lazarus nation.Always at the mouth of the tomb,always waiting for a voiceloud enough to call us out,but the stone keeps getting heavierand the mourners have grown tired of weeping.<img alt="" src="/media/inline_insight_image/7958.jpg"/>Still, somewhere, a mother ties her gele at dawn,and faces east, because east is where light still has the audacity to show up.She prays not for revolution.She has buried too many revolutions.She prays for tomorrow,that small, stubborn word that refuses to die in the mouths of Nigerians,no matter how much fire we are asked to swallow. We are not yet ash.But God! We are so close to the flame. The Republic of Embers still burns.And its people, God help them, still breathe.

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