Our Gate, Our Cemetery

By Onyekere Ifeanyi Mandela

As a Nigerian, you must have come to understand how to make jokes with every issue including those that pose threats to life.

This is a ‘pain-killer’ attitude; a survival mechanism, a fruit yielding from decades of preachings to hope and trust tomorrow. Is there anything wrong with that?

There’s no week that passed by without a saga; one that has direct effect on people’s lives and well-being. Yes, people lose their lives each time it happened. We burry these people and we burry the saga too. Just two different cemeteries. One of them: social media. And when we burry them, we have solved the problem immediately we mount ‘gates’ on them.

Could you please remind me where we buried the Deziani-gate? The NNPC-gate? What about Dasuki-gate? You recall the fuel-subsidy-gate? Farouk-Lawan-gate, Police-pension-fund-gate, Stella-Oduah-Bullet-proof-car-gate…They now seem decades ago.

“And the punishments for these cases: NONE.”

“And the punishments for these cases: NONE.”

Recently, fresh ‘gates’ were opened again. Babachir Lawal-grass-cutting gate. Maina-pension-fund-gate. NIA’s Ikoyi-cash-gate. Some believe we’d have had Buhari-gate has the amount spent in London while PMB was sick revealed. The list goes on.

The biggest ‘gate’ so far is the…drums roll please…the Jamb-N36million-gate. This ‘gate’ is even spiritual. A housemaid, reportedly confessed she connived with her mistress’s colleague in the office to have, spiritually, stolen N36M with or through a snake. Yes. We can go to any extent to get money; and now, we are going spiritual.

Let me predict, there’d be new gates with ‘spiritual’ ingredients, but they won’t last because it sounds dumb even to spiritual beings. Madness.

Onyekere Ifeanyi Mandela is a graduate of Mass communication, University of Nigeria (UNN), in Enugu State. He is a political analyst as well as an entrepreneur who believes in team work.