City of Glass and Dust - by Favour Umoakpan

They said Abuja was built from dreams...‎wide roads, clean lines, promises in concrete.‎But dreams, it seems, have price tags here,‎and not all of us were meant to afford them. In Maitama, the lights don’t blink,‎they glow steady, like certainty.‎Water runs without question,‎and silence is soft, not suspicious. Behind tinted glass and guarded gates,‎laughter rises easy, untouched by want.‎Even the night feels curated,‎a calm that money carefully protects.‎But cross a bridge, just one‎and the air changes its accent.‎Dust clings to your name,‎and generators hum like tired prayers. The roads forget their smoothness,‎potholes speaking a different language.‎Here, darkness is not a choice,‎and light must be begged from fuel and noise.‎‎Here, a child learns quickly:‎which gates to admire from afar,‎which streets to lower their gaze,‎which dreams to shrink until they fit.‎‎They learn the weight of “not yet,”‎how hunger sharpens ambition‎but also bends it into survival before anything else.‎‎Two cities, stitched into one...‎one that sips wine behind high fences,‎and one that fetches water at dawn,‎hoping the day won’t ask for too much.‎‎One where names open doors like magic,‎and another where names are questioned twice.‎One where futures are planned in comfort,‎and one where tomorrow is negotiated daily.‎‎The distance isn’t measured in miles,‎but in last names, in school fees,‎in the softness of your hands‎and the way security men look at you.‎‎It lives in the pauses at checkpoints,‎in who is waved through,‎and who is asked to explain themselves,‎again and again and again.‎‎Abuja smiles in postcards,‎glass towers kissing the sky.‎But beneath the shine,‎there’s a quiet arithmetic of worth.‎‎A calculation no one writes down,‎yet everyone understands.‎A balance where some lives add up easily,‎and others are always in deficit.‎‎Some are born into doors that open,‎others into knocks that echo unanswered.‎And every day, the city whispers...‎know your place, know your place.‎‎It echoes in polished offices,‎in crowded buses,‎in the silence between opportunity‎and those who are never offered it.‎‎Yet still, in the margins,‎in the noise, in the heat,‎hope flickers stubborn and bright.‎‎It lives in roadside vendors‎who smile like resistance,‎in students who read under dim bulbs,‎refusing to let darkness define them.‎‎Because even dust,‎when it rises,‎can cloud the glass.‎And maybe one day,‎when enough voices rise with it,‎the city will have no choice‎but to see itself...clearly.‎

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