The Fetish Dancers

The fat bellied baboons are still dancing in small circles, and chanting
To the rhythmic crescendo of the impecuniousness of the green monkeys.
The wailing of the hoi polloi has deliberately swollen the bellies of the head tortoises.
An ever-readiness of a tyranny of choices;
Civically pilfering the best part of their own people in euphemisms.
I laugh at the repertoire of their ploy, and their agile skanking,
Unearthed by their own embellished unwisdom to fall into a disposition of angst.

I am haunted by the ghost of my childhood in nostalgia
Like a mouth-watering dish of amnesia.
When the spoil of their oil boom rolled their nation to a mental inertia.
Yet, the headship still thread on the same roads their forefathers travelled;
Now they are even uprooting the sign posts to their children’s future.
Even as they hold a candle to the shame of their malicious mischief
In the frenzy of their dance on the precipice of their own fate.

Until now, they have told me that my ears are still too young
To hear the pulsating throes of the sufferers, thicken into funeral songs.
Every desire of their polity churns in the people, a wanton ire.
Alas! Even the schools are dead and gone.
Subsequently, their youths diffuse into a diaspora
Of their every whims and debased forms,
Hoping to grasp on something to hold; a procreation of Area Boys.

A dear friend was ill some days ago
In a town of a thousand physicians, he died anyway of common colds.
Even his sister on her way to see him, had to
Settle toll fees of egunje to the men in black, at every roadblock.
They said it was the juntas that connived
To steal morality out of our storehouse,
Bequeathing a den of crooks and vermin as a lasting legacy.

Who can we blame, when precept upon precept
We have learnt Never to Expect Power Always,
And all trunk calls are ever too busy to connect.
After all, we are the ones who reap from oilfields
Which we rape with negligence.

And shamelessly queue for long hours to pay for adulterated fuel.
Even the birds are jealous of an eternally resting airways.
A worker deserves his wages, that we know
Yet not until the fat bellied ones have become full from feeding their flames.
Their people are daily becoming homeless in one thousand and four ways
And though some have prayed for freshwater
What we get instead is pure water,
The sachets of which later mingle in assortment of debris
Adorning the streets and waterways of Lagos;
The tiara of lost vestige.

What more can I say that has not been said at 9 o’clock?
Is it the ones wearing Agbada and Kaftans
With their bullet proof underwear?
Or the exchange of “Ghana must go bags” laden with
Their loot, then in secrecy, now blatantly;
Or is it the untold story of how they use the resources
Of their people to woo their daughters into their adulterous rendezvous.
Dividends or rather incentives of democracy.

We are the everyday people,
We see and we hear of their mundane luxury
Swiss accounts, hummer jeeps and private planes,
Contractors and white elephants; an ovation.
Some of have angels
And some f us have demons
Yet some still sojourn our terrible roads and some in penury.

…At a time when they began to salt their excrement
To eat, even the salt lost its taste.
Then the redhead lizard lost his voice too
On the day when it can only nod with no other choice.
…At a time when the truth incessantly thumps
On the eardrums of their hearts;
From these axioms we have hitherto eaten the yam of life.

Now is the right time for stepping out of place.
There is something in us that knows that
The echoes of our heartbeat have long gone out of tune with the Great Spirit.
And we even behold that the centre can hold no longer,
As a devious wind rocks the leaders and the led to sleep.
On the day when we finally wake up,
I pray that we may yet dance, but together in wholesome harmony.

©Uche (2004)