They Think We are Fools

                        CHAPTER   SIX

                  My father, Mr Agbanusi, passed on at the young age of Fifty-five after a long battle with prostrate cancer. Dad in his usual way, did not show his emotions. He hid the ailment from us for a very long time, even from my mother, and he acted as if everything was okay.Though he was secretly seeking medical attention, he didn't want us to be thrown into any panic as all his children were at school, pursuing one academic laurel or the other in order to make him proud and also to make something meaningful with our lives.      

                   According to our Mum, Dad had thought that it was something he could easily handle on his own but as each day passed, the health issue wasn't getting better. At a point, he wanted to fly out of the country to a specialist hospital in India for medical attention, possibly  for a surgery and treatment of the ailment. He had mustered almost all his life savings for the medical trip. But he cancelled the trip when Chimezie and I ignorantly came back from school with a long list of school needs: Mine was my first year school fees, accommodation and other school requirements. Chimezie's was his final year school fees, house rent and his final year research and project cost. I could remember submitting our requests together to our Father.

               I could vividly recall how he calmly went through our requests and afterwards he took a very deep breath but said absolutely nothing. He carefully folded the lists and walked into his bedroom with them. Little did I know that he went into his room to make the decision between life and death. A decision between his future and our future; one between his well-being or our well-being. He could handle only one of those projects at that moment due to financial constraints; either his health project or our academic projects.           

              Dad decided to finance our academic projects; to sacrifice for his children's future rather than going for a medical trip abroad which costs a fortune, just like our academic bills. He decided to leave his fate in the hands of the medical attention he could get around him here in our country. 

              I wouldn't forget the day he broke the news of his ailment to us, his children, and although he tried to play down on the seriousness of his ailment, we knew it must be serious for him to have told us in the first place. We all knew our Dad; if it was a mild issue, he wouldn't have bothered letting us know of it. 

             Again we could read the seriousness of the matter from our mother's face. She was almost coming down to tears as she tried hard not to. She avoided eye contact with us because it would definitely give away what they were trying to play down on. 

             Dad admonished us to be strong, focused and work harder on our studies, that there was no cause for alarm as he would definitely pull through the ailment and everything would be okay again.

             Throughout the health crisis, we made it a duty to be there with him whenever we could, always asking what we could do to help. But he would always say he needed nothing but our company and that he was getting better. I didn't know how much pain he was concealing, smiling and chatting with us all those times till I decided to find out things about the ailment on my own. 

            I found out how painful it was to pass out urine and stool for those suffering from the ailment. It got to the stage that he could no longer walk without an aid: to the stage that he could no longer walk at all and had to use a wheel chair, from there he couldn't stay on a wheelchair but became completely bedridden. 

             The doctors were always going on strike and downing tools as if they didn't care. The hospitals became ghosts of themselves; no doctors, nurses, drugs and good medical facilities that the people need. Every well-to-do person in the country that had medical issues sought help and attention outside the country.

              In fact, it became a hobby for political office holders to embark on medical trips abroad. It was the easiest excuse with which to loot and launder money abroad. Every day the news had stories of millions and billions of dollars looted and stashed away in various foreign countries by our past leaders even as the present leaders were still looting and relooting the recovered looted funds.

            Sometimes I wondered if those leaders thought we were fools; that the masses did not know what they were doing to their Commonwealth. This led me to write this poem at my father's bedside in one of the hospitals he was admitted in.

            THEY THINK WE ARE FOOLS

A bunch of jesters

See their posters

Nothing but impostors

Pretending to have the answers

During elections, they pet and court us

After it, they rape and dump us

It is clear how much they hate us 

Even when they swear how much they love us

Their aim is just the common cake

They just take and take

Sparing none for those who bake

To them equity and fairness is fake

Is it because like in freelance

We give them time and chance 

To show us the sweet dance

But they gave us their distance.

They think we are fools because in their hands we've made ourselves tools

They think we are fools because we have become their stools

They think we are fools because they use us like bulls

 They think we are fools because our strings they can easily pull.

To abuse us is now their right

Because we won’t give them a fight

To the ground they held us tight

Forgetting it’s we that gave them the might.

Why are we even afraid to kick, push and pull?

As if with oppression and suppression we are cool 

Over our eyes they pull the wool

Because we chose to play the fool

We are not fools; we know you don’t give a hoot

We are not fools; we just chose to be mute

We are not fools; we are just afraid you will shoot

We are not fools; we are just waiting to grow a tooth.

Then we will bite

We will Fight

With all our might

Till we get things right.

    Life is "brutish, nasty and short" said Thomas Hobbes, the political philosopher. It is a reality. Let's not deceive ourselves: there is no order anywhere. The family is in disorder: Parents are torn between working to pay bills and spending time with their children.

Fathers now leave their houses by 5am and get back by 11pm: They are totally alienated from their family. No one can ever blame them for not sparing a moment for their children because they must provide for their family, pay bills as well as school fees. What time will such fathers find to put the home in order?

Mothers who feel compassion for their burdened husbands having to provide the skyrocketing bills, have had to join in the rat race in order to support the man before he dies young. No one could ever blame them for abandoning their homes to support their husbands.

They send their kids to school and dump them in the hands of less-motivated teachers who are being paid peanuts because schools that were supposed to be run as missions have become commercialised. 

The less-motivated teacher could not bring order to the classroom because the children who lacked home training had overwhelmed them with their bad attitude.

You won't blame the school either for paying peanuts because the governmental levies are way too much for them to pay, and added to this are the heavy loans they were yet to pay off.

When the kids get back from school they are then trained by maids and neighbours who know nothing about parenting.

Often times these children get bullied and abused at school and can't get justice until they are finally convinced by their classmates on places to go and things to do so they could be made into objects to be feared rather than bullied. These are children sent to school to read, who now abandon books for something else.

When their parents have gotten tired of their bad and terrible decisions and its consequences, they run to pastors for help, only to discover that the pastors are busy gathering a crowd and have no time for individuals. The ones who have time blame demons and ancestral curses as the root cause of the problem and collect so much money to dig up what they actually go and bury secretly before hand.

You run to the government, only to realise that they are battling international trade sanctions plus the reduction in the price per barrel of crude oil. The Gross income can't even pay the wokers' salaries let alone take care of the budget. They have no other option than blame previous administrations for not saving for rainy days. They now use force to curtail the wailing masses... We cast our stones on government like we have no sin. Like we have already put ourselves in order without knowing that we all are victims of the same maze. 

Waiting for your parents, school, church and government, who are torn between pursuit of personal interest and doing what is right, is a waste of time.

You need to find the order of your own life. Over the years I figured out that there were individuals who have figured out the order of their lives and they had left their clues in Bible, books, magazines and tabloids.

I was once caught up in the trap of the blame game; I was sent to school to read only to graduate without the capacity to solve problems. Truthfully, no one can use the methods of the industrial age we are being taught in school today to solve the problem of the digital age where factories have been reduced into smart phones and machines made into apps.

 I  blamed government and disdain my nation until I discovered a book in the In Bible where I saw how Joseph found due order within himself in the midst of slavery and that order made a way for him from the prison into the palace. I also read how Daniel found order as a slave in Babylon and I  decided to find order within myself. These moves delivered me from the vicious cycle of blames to the sweet side of life. I learnt that most problems could be solved through reading the right books.

***

               Dad fought the ailment to the best of his ability, with the resources available to him and with the medical experts he could afford, from one hospital to another till he could no longer fight. He had to surrender and leave for the great beyond. 

               I shudder each time I recollect that day, when he breathed his last. Mom had been so distraught that it had taken the combined efforts of the doctors and nurses on duty that day to take her out of the room where dad's body lay. I was the first person to get to her, and it was an emotional scene as she had clung to me and sobbed profusely.

               "Nwam, (my child) he has gone! Oh, my love has left me and gone!" she had said incohorently as she wept in my arms. 

              My younger sister, Adaobi, had remained inconsolable, and our elder brother, Chimezie, who came home for dad's burial, had had to take her to Kano with him after the burial so that she could have a change of environment.

               We wept like babies during dad's burial, especially when we saw how much he was loved by his people; even strangers praised him for his good works. Dad was given a beffiting burial like the true son of the soil that he was. The womenfolk were exceptionally there for mom as they rallied round her and helped her with whatever she needed. They took it upon themselves to bring our three square meals to our house on a daily basis; they never got tired. The hospitality stopped when my younger sister, Adaobi, returned from her sojourn with my brother in Kano six months later.

         "Nwam, (my child) now that our Adaobi is back to keep our sister company, we can reduce our visit to once in a while," the spokesperson of the village women had said when they came to welcome my sister back home.

          I had merely nodded at the kind-hearted women, who, despite our being at least comfortable enough, had taken it upon themselves to feed my family in the months after my father's demise.

          My mother had given them a nanny-goat in appreciation of their selfless service. Life soon returned back to almost normal; though it was like life would never go on again but later it did. But believe me, things were never the same again. Dad's absence rocked our world like a boat storm-tossed on the sea.