15th February, 2024
By Niyi Osundare
(When a cache of mine-size dynamite lives in a neighbourhood bedroom)
I
The year was young
Our woes were old
The day plodded to a dusty twilight
Unfazed by the harmattan hassle
Then came the wails of a lampless night
When supper lost its way to penniless homes
And the night masticated the moon
Like a hapless morsel
The minaret was mum
The bell tower loomed forlorn
In its tongueless height
The wind wound a whisper
Round the restless lips of absent horns
Pigeons coed ceaselessly in their busy holes……
And suddenly, so suddenly,
A blast, a big, battering blast
And the evening’s blissful quiet
Was shattered into a thousand bewildering shreds
The ground shook beneath our feet
Solid mansions crumbled like cardboard boxes
Flipped luxury cars littered the streets
Like piles of scrap yard junk
The road now is a running tale
Of broken glass and mangled metal
II
It all happened in the famous part
Of a famous city; proud, gentle zone
Of the top cream, tempered by law and learning;
Mapped out and built once upon a very long time
When place-builders doubled as people-builders
And Statesmen were wise and just and clean
Architects of multiple mandates who knew
How to turn a house into a home
That was once upon an epoch
When leaders THOUGHT before they acted
And “life more abundant” was in every way
More than an empty slogan
Now, the Grand Old Dream
Has withered into a deadly nightmare
Where the Law is dead, the wrong is right. . . .
A mountain of military-type dynamite
Has become a furniture item
In a top-class residential haven
A corrupt “carry-go” security conspiracy imperils
Our being even in our safest enclaves
A big battering blast has shaken us to our very roots
Behold venerable old men and women crawling
Out of their rubbled homes, their heads double-grey
From the ashes of their blighted bowers
Here they are in wreck and ruin:
Glorious legacies of Master-Builders of old
Now houses of horror
In this era of prodigal inheritors
* In the evening hours of January 16, 2024, there was a massive explosion caused by loads of dynamite piled up in a house in a top-class Ibadan neighborhood, resulting in human casualty and the destruction of many respectable houses. The vibration from the blast was felt 20 miles away. The most devastating peacetime blast in this part of Nigeria. Are you still wondering how deadly dynamite became a welcome domestic furniture item in a country of multiple laws and zero compliance? Ask the demon called Corruption and watch it come up with a thousand answers….
*Niyi Osundare, one of Africa’s foremost poets and academics, is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English, University of New Orleans.