This is the worst time to live in Nigeria. This is the worst time to be a Nigerian. This is the worst time to be a human being in Nigeria your country, my country, our country. This is the very worst of times to remain here and to die here.

These four sentences are sentences of truth that cannot be concealed, that cannot be hidden, that no one, that none, can conceal and hide and toss here and there. But what is truth? And what is the nature that is the real nature of truth? I will not here enter the domain of its philosophy.

Because the openness of truth or of the philosophy of truth is also the un-openness of truth or of the un-openness of the philosophy of truth I will not dwell on its impulse as you may want me to do.

My concern is to make intelligible as far as I can the nature of truth relating to the Nigerian condition, the current Nigerian condition that no lie of the current ruling polifoolicians with their primal conflict of promises of un-truths can conceal and hide any longer.

Citizens Nigeria are wiser, far wiser now. No columnist or commentator anywhere here or outside our clime can indoctrinate or persuade them otherwise.

Now let me state it openly that I am taking possession – or that I have taken possession – of the present topic on account of a tiny but a pregnant personal experience that descended from the realm of nowhere to my existential being-ness. Before then, let me dwell on some occurrences in the land. I crave your understanding to so do.

It is no more news that residents of Minna in Niger State hit the streets barely a week ago in protest essentially against those who have been tormenting them in their land of lands. The pain and pain of living or of pretending to live or to exist in Nigeria that is no more their Nigeria are becoming the un-becoming or have become the un-becoming. Everything that should or ought to make them human beings who are human beings in their God-given abode is no more within their reach and grip. Nothing is or can be no more commonplace than their property-less state that underscores their commonplace status of pains they can bear nomore.

The protesters are gradually, steadily, un-arguably and un-questionably so, disappearing in their respective states of un-usefulness to themselves. High costs of living, of existence, of food, for instance, have become so conspicuous to the extent that their existence and existences have become inconspicuous to their luminous colours of the uniqueness of their once positive reality of their well-being – the well-being of their existence collectively and un-collectively.

Not long ago specifically on December 22, 2023, I worked here on the subject of ‘The place of food in Nigerian politics”’ – which in fact was a recollection or a reproduction of my 2013 In & Out column in the Nigerian Tribune. Because we have now men and women in political positions and offices who are not ready patriotically to engage themselves in matters relating to the production of equipment that will influence directly the effecting of the happening of truth, none of them, none of the ones of the moment gave thought to what I said which was the creation of truth. If the decisioners of our political affairs, especially at the federal level, had given the simplest of thoughts to what I tendered, what we are witnessing today in the area of food denial to Nigerians via deliberate hoarding of food or through un-reasonable costs beyond their reach, for instance, would not have happened or would not be happening.

They were too confident of their lies to the people to move heaven and earth to stop what we are witnessing now. The hunger in the land today rightly frames the un-serviceability of the food equipment our political gladiators on the saddle of power, authority and government pretended to have created.

Of course, we have known hunger in the country right from the times of the regimes before the current one, but we certainly did not experience anything as we are now facing and which we can bear no more. Let the truth be told: President Tinubu’s government is the government of the distinguished creator of Nigeria’s un-serviceable promises that will never see the light of today.

Prominent among our distinguished president’s equipment, with which he embellishes his political and economic promises, is the hammer of inconsequential equipmentality. So far he has not formed or forged any food equipment that will save Nigerian citizens and compatriots from the poverty arising from deceptive modes of food or agricultural and of commercial or economic production to sustain our people.

Food that will sustain and medically prevent certain diseases from attacking Citizens Nigeria are too, too exorbitant currently. Our president does not really consider his people as he promised in the remote or recent past. His anti-citizens’ policies so far enable us to say so. This will bec

More and more promises and instructions and directives will reverberate from his lips and those of his cohorts and allies. And the promises and instructions and directives will remain what they are and what they will always be: unique promises and directives and instructions of un-unique facts of production whose uniqueness is the uniqueness of their un-uniqueness of extraordinary awesomeness of untruths. And Minna will be replicated everywhere and everywhere that is everywhere: They will disbelieve me. But let them do so to the mortification of their own peculiar reality.

Let me here illustrate my argument in line with what I am truthfully up to with my food experience which the reality of our current existence recently opened my eyes to. I am moving house. We laboured from morning till late evening. We never thought of food. At the time we concluded the first phase of our exercise biting hunger of devilish proportion and mode invaded our stomachs and communicated with our gastric juices our president and his cronies may want to know a little something about. We were five in number at the material time. We dashed to a petrol station restaurant. We requested for five plastic plates of jollof rice. Each plate went for N1,700.

The protein in each plate was a tiny piece of beef. It was so lean and slight and certainly was not worth what I coughed out for it. In time past, at least before Rider Tinubu mounted his Abuja horse I would not have coughed out above two hundred naira from a mama-put joint and above five hundred naira from a superior food joint per the damn plate. But really devilishly and wickedly damn hungry we were: We ate what we ate without a note of satisfaction from our respective bellies – two adults and three kids. A whole Tony Afejuku and the poetic creations from his loins! And Minna unusually entered my consciousness.

The greatest resistance to our worst time to live in Nigeria is coming and echoing and soaring nigh. You better believe me. No. You better believe us. No. You better believe them – the Supreme Spiritual Masters of Merit (SS MM). But I should like to end on the following quotation from Jack Kerouac(which a revolutionary reader St. Louis – from the Niger Delta – sent me): “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

President Tinubu and his philosophers should give serious thought to what is here. Perhaps it will make more sense to them than the picture and picture of my yearnings on behalf of suffering Nigerians from everywhere to everywhere.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.