When we become Ants…

(Word) – Ant:  /ᴂnt/.

-n.

(Synonym) – An average Nigerian:  /ən ᴂvərɪdʒ naɪdʒɪəriən/

-phrase.

Okay, please pardon my ‘use’ of English. “Thank you”.

So now let’s start. Apart from being small crawling insects that live in large groups, what comes to your mind when you hear or see the word “Ant”? Let me guess, “Hardworking”? “Industrious”? Yeah! , Even the bible advises lazy ones to learn from them. [See Proverbs 6:6]. But have you ever wondered how insignificantly they are destroyed? You don’t even have to struggle to kill them like you would kill a cockroach or a bee, all you need to do is crush them softly with your slip-ons- no stress at all, or just dust them off. Shikena! No energy wasted.

And when they try to be industrious and gather food for the ‘rainy days’, like when they try to lift a grain of cooked rice from your crumbs on the floor, they get sprayed with some insecticide that reads: “I kill ten times faster”, and are destroyed with their gatherings.

Then the lucky living ones try to ‘hustle’ and manoeuvre their way around, then, “Oops!” someone just stepped on them without even knowing…

But if you ask me, I would say- why won’t they get stepped on? They are obviously too little to be recognised or seen, their opinions don’t obviously count, they are ever silent. Even roaches make some sound when they move, and they don’t have to be many or clustered, one is enough to get your attention. Not ants.

Now that the grounds have become danger zones for them, they resort to climbing. Smart creatures! You see them climb the walls in your room so diligently that you can almost imagine them singing their victory song! Then watching them gets boring so you lightly blow them off. You don’t even have to “huff and puff” before they are back to ‘Ground Zero’ (if they live).

How they are killed so effortlessly! You kill hundreds of them today and forget you did the next day. To even kill a fly would be some success- Funny how you end up doing some bits of yoga and stunts to kill just one fly!

Enough of the cool ant story, right? Sorry for boring you. But all I ask of you now is to go over once more and for every “ant” you see, replace with the ‘supposed’ synonym according to this write-up- “the average Nigerian”.

Hmmm…..

[Straight face] No matter how we try to sugar-coat the situation of the average Nigerian and say so many positive things, the truth is things are this bad – even worse.

We have gotten to the stage where our lives seem so worthless. Where citizens have been forced to relocate (if they are still alive) because of the unrest’…Where the country has lost count on deaths…

Where explosives, shootings and other such terms are to the average Nigerian as tacos are to the Mexican…Where some sect can wake one morning and kill ‘about’ 215 Nigerians in the second largest city in the country – Kano (I used ‘about’ because the government is not even sure of the number of people that were killed). According to the Guardian, on Tuesday, 24^th January, 186 people were killed on that day [20^th January, 2012].  And as at now, within the space of two years since the advent of this extremists movement, about a thousand Nigerians have been killed!

And even when the ‘living’ try to honour the ‘dead’, they end up being ‘dead’ or near dead- like the recent attempt by some activists on Saturday, 18^th February, to hold a procession in remembrance of those that lost their lives during the ‘fuel subsidy removal’ national strike, which was truncated as sixteen of them were arrested and brutalized by the Nigerian Police.

If someone is not even killing ‘the average Nigerian’, something is. ‘Something’ like the basic infrastructures that are meant to serve us, remember?!(Doubt if Nigerians know the meaning of that anymore). Basic infrastructures like power supply, good roads, water supply, etc.

I just read a story by Emman Ovuakporie from the online publication of The Vanguard Newspaper, March 14, with the headline “Ihedioha laments death of 18 corps members”, this time it’s not any sect that is ‘butchering’ them, it’s the Nigerian Road! –they died in an auto crash while travelling from Imo State to Taraba State for their orientation exercise. And that is just one out of a ‘bi-zillion other instances…God rest the souls of the ‘Average and gone’ Nigerian.

With these kinds of news on auto crashes, ‘the average Nigerian’ doesn’t want to die and then decides to travel by air but on getting to the Nnamdi Azikwe International Airport, Abuja, then “down NEPA!”- The Power Holdings Company of Nigeria (PHCN) ‘shows itself’ in the way ‘the average Nigerian’ know it. I should probably quote my source- the Vanguard Newspaper again (no advertisement intended)-

There was complete shutdown of operations at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja last night, following a power surge which damaged the air field lighting, including taxi and runway lights.

Consequently, all in-bound flights into the airport were reportedly diverted to other airports, while flights schedule for takeoff were cancelled.

Vanguard gathered last night that the incident, which occurred at about 7:00pm, led also to the cancellation of a Delta Airlines flight to Atlanta, U.S.

Also, all other international flights out of the airport were cancelled as a result, as most passengers were said to have returned home, while transit passengers were checked into hotels in accordance with international civil aviation regulations.

It was learnt that airport engineers had assumed that what happened was merely an outage by the Power Holdings Company of Nigeria, but got the shocker when the airfield lighting failed to come after the generating sets at the airport were switched on.

The consequence is that there may be no night operations at the airport for days, as it would take quite some time to get the equipment fixed.

Only last weekend, power outage at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, crippled operations in some sections of the terminal building. [Story by Kenneth Ehigiator]

Yeah…quite funny but not. Now, ‘the average Nigerian’ is stranded. Transportation by road and air is problematic. [Sighs] …and oh! There are other options- the rail system and the waterway! But I advise that you at least ‘Google’ the situation of the options before you use them, and so on and so forth

Just the typical life of an ant if you ask me… but I might be wrong

…maybe things are not really this bad, maybe I am just magnifying the situations…maybe my view is myopic and my write-up is one-sided.  But that’s the story from the way I see it… the life of ‘the average Nigerian’ is not better (treated) than the Ant’s.

MAY GOD KEEP THE AVERAGE NIGERIAN