That Jonathan’s Mistakes May Bring Us Good Luck

By Chidozie CHUKWUBUIKE

Let us pray.

Almighty and ever living God, you see through the hearts of men. Look into our individual hearts in this our period of adversity and expunge the hypocrisy that has taken over our entire being. Give us the courage to overcome that other us that is a lie. Give us the boldness to disown the voice of our new education and reconnect us to our forthright and truth telling past. Our fathers told the truth even in the face death. Help us to be true sons and daughters of our fathers.

O God, you were there in the beginning and you know how this country Nigeria was formed. You know how Lugard whom they called lord banded together people who had no business being called one. Before Lugard and his brothers came, the Igbo bought groundnuts from the Hausa, the Hausa bought kolanut from the Yoruba, and the Yoruba bought palm oil from the Igbo. God I do not know the exact sequence but you know that each people had something they benefited from the other. They respected one another without any pretension to brotherhood. They pray to different gods, they speak in different tongues, and they even eat different foods. But Lugard and his cronies came and wanted to Lord them and therefore they must become brothers. And if we live to see 2014 we would have been brothers for 100 years. Brothers in hatred. Brothers in disdain. Brothers in bloodshed. O God is this the definition of brotherhood? But Lugard the lord had since gone and our own people have continued to wear the Lord of Lugard. They tell lies and pretend we are brothers. They only crave to continue eating what Lugard left behind.

In 1966 we massacred ourselves, in 1967 we fought a war but because we did not say the truth, the new Lugards brought us back together. Now here again we are, O God, on the brink of another war. I call on you, O God that answereth by fire, to come down and tear us apart. Let us disengage to engage. If it is Jonathan's bad decisions that will bring us to our senses and disintegrate us, then may he make multiple bad decisions. If Lugard were alive today, I would have asked him if there are no countries in his own part of the world that are less populated than Ijaw.

As I watched a truck load of my mangled kinsmen brought home from Kaduna in 1993, and my dismembered kinsmen at St Theresa's Catholic Church, Maraba, I cannot help but ask God not to let us meet 2014 as one country. They say when you buy a land after 99 years it reverts back to the original owner. O God, this is our time to return to our different roots, and begin to see one another with more respect. Do it for us, O God, do it and take the glory. Untie the lips of our legislators that they may begin to speak the truth and eschew the Lugardian lie. Amen.