Thread by @Moonchild509

Nigeria's Quadrennial Hunger Games
(A thread)

Every four years we offer a sacrifice of peasants and dreamers, gilded maidens and prized fellows, young ones in their prime on the altar of our politicians’ avarice.

Every 4 yrs the leaders we (s)elect dance over the casket of our country's children, our dreams & our hopes to sit on thrones too high for our cries to reach, too sturdy for our anguish and grief to shake, too fleet for our wrath to catch. Every 4 ys we bleed to choose a leader.

Every four years our (s)intellectuals bleed their brains and senses, their sacrifice in our quadrennial ritual. They are afflicted by verbal diarrhea, desperate to seek, remain relevant. Our sheikhs and pastors preach hate, not love.

Professors of journalism champion fake news, and the PhDs peddle cheap propaganda like charlatans. Every one sacrifice their senses to become SM analyst who can't look beyond their keyboards.

Fake prophets mistake the voice of their own pervasive minds for the voice of God and rise chanting, “He will die! He will die! He will die!”
The only ones dying are us.

Every four years half the country, this time this half, the next time the other, offer a sacrifice of disappointment, of long faces, broken hearts, stained thumbs, tainted sentiments and resentment.

When they ask why there is no winter here, know that it exists in the collective cold sigh we heave at the end of every Hunger Games.

Before the stains on your thumbs disappear, there will be calls for breakup, a permanent divorce from a marriage contracted in a white man's shrine. These calls will echo and fade.

The professors and priests and failed politicians will realign, they will find their voices, and we will gift some of them back their honour even when they have no rights to them, because we don't know how to hold them in shame.

We groan for another four years and cheer when the bells toll for another Hunger Games. Again we will send our country's children into the arena, to die for a country and leaders who will not remember their names or what they died for.

We will sit & hope that someday we will learn to vote without spilling blood and hate and our senses.
The only thing we have in abundance here is hope. Not even the mad priests, looting politicians &the river of blood we shed can steal that from us.
Return to your senses. Return.