ARTICLE: Some Sunshine In The Rain

SOME SUNSHINE IN THE RAIN

By: Muneer Yaqub

I understand democracy can't be yanked off us at this stage. We're so lapped up. Quite fundamentally. Otherwise, I'd have moved that we find for ourselves some other governmental system. Save frustration and desperation, and other 'tions' that end turmoil and sorrow, we've earned nothing in the last twenty years of doing this. Our Democracy has morphed savagely: a government of some people by some people and for some people.

The rest are objects of kidnap and banditry, mobbed and robbed, rid of their lives and hard-earned possessions. But some others here are suffering and agonizing, yet wake up every morning chanting the names of those bloodless rulers, and sometimes in gruesome kerfuffle with their antagonists. If truly this is Democracy, methinks, we've been conned. It's not working—for us!

Democracy looks innocent and fair, easy, but crazy. A blend of what-nots, of those tyrannical systems we think we'd left behind, a resurrection of those colonial monsters we believe had vacated our shores. A recipe of anarchy, of totalitarianism, of dictatorship. A revitalization of those brutal junta years, of those thorny khakis and gagging jackboots, of a freedom of speech trapped in papers but free behind bars.

In his Prison Notes, "The Man Died", Wole Soyinka spoke of how brutal and bloody the military days were and how, in spite, some of them still dared to speak up. "The man died in he who keeps silent in the face of tyranny," he crooned. But if those who laid their lives fighting for democracy had known what would later become of their sacrifices, maybe they'd have had a rethink. Was it really worth dying for? Those junta days Soyinka was busy describing in his notes still endure. A few elitists have continued to hold us folks to ransom, living exploitatively off our toils.

Democracy seems a coloured offshoot of the lives we'd left behind, the days we thought had vanished, at last, from our shadows. But The Man has continued to die in us, over and over again. For this version of tyranny which democracy has availed us—in the form of celebrated corruption and indifference towards people's safety—are huge morsels in our throats. We try to speak about them but we're confused: where do we start from?

A classmate has just been released from captivity, he was kidnapped on his journey here from home. He's missed some exams. Only God knows whether he wouldn't be needing an extra year to make up for this lost. So nowhere in this country is safe anymore. But who's playing these road? Them? No. It's us. It's our brothers and sisters. It's our friends and kids. And it's us at risk of losing our lifetime savings to huge ransoms while trying to rescue them.

So when I see some folks here glorifying our leaders, singing their names as if all is well, making it look as if we're the ones raising false alarms, dismissing our cries as mere wails and tagging us miserably as 'wailers', I raise my hands to the sky and say some prayers, that one of their loved ones be abducted. Maybe then, senses will begin to sprout, from their careless bootlicking brains..

© Muneer Yaqub