The green and yellow flag, By Odi Ikpeazu

“Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges even if there are no rivers.”

– Nikita Khrushchev

Honestly, 2023 can’t come quickly enough for me, for the election to fly by and respite be had from these noxious fumes of partisan hostilities that foul the breathing space.

Nothing is more welcome by our people obviously, than any opportunity to hate thy neighbor and heighten the toxic levels of the antagonisms that characterize us. This time the election season is the current reason for it.

Two hundred million pundits have been frenziedly permuting and pontificating for months while perambulating around the familiar axis of bigotry and sectionalism disguised unsuccessfully as ideologies and sophistry.

2023 will come and go and I know for sure that very little will change regardless of who is victorious. This is because there is almost nothing the leaders can do to alter our fortunes to any significant extent. They are as equally handicapped as the people they lead by a collective lack of positive vibrations and the requisite allegiance to the patrie.

To start with, a nation is nothing if not its citizens. So, I lift up my eyes unto the hills and wonder from whence a new population will come to replace the cantankerous ones of this dear country. Will there be a mass immigration of aliens from outer space? I wonder.

Being in that wondrous state of mind, my thought then wanders to the new leaders, who would have won the election by then. In my mind’s eye, I see them triumphantly waving the flag.  Not the green and white though but the green and yellow. You may wonder what flag that could be but that is the flag that our leaders proudly fly in the closet, unbeknownst to most of us.

GREEN – for their frail, juvenile and amateur grasp of the imperialistic imperatives that impede the economies and societies of Africa, prominently including ours.

YELLOW – for the cowardice and spinelessness that discourage them from formulating the Pan African socioeconomic framework that will provide the only meaningful foundation of any true emancipation.

 All the while, however, the leaders will play to the eager gallery, keeping them diverted and spellbound with the farce and tragicomedies they love so much. Day and night in the national theatre of the absurd, they will keep the audience captive with skits about paying pensions and pittance, routines about leadership rotation and federal character, tragedies of separatism and terrorism, parodies of primordial sectional passions, cameos of religious mundanities, pantomimes of partisan inanities and so on.

The audience is often ill tempered and irascible, ever ready to have a go at each other about their perception or interpretation of the scenes being played out on the stage. The crescendo of enmity in their midst is traditionally powered by intolerance, pride and prejudice. The actors know this. The whole affray will reach yet another climax in 2027 when the next election might have come around, by which time the negative forces of the people would have been re-energized, recalibrated and relaunched for yet another vicious four-year social cycle.

The above is not a prophesy. It will only come to pass. It is not a promissory note but can be taken to the bank.