A LETTER TO MY PRESIDENT, ASSUMING NIPOST STILL WORKS

1, Somewhere Street,
Lagos State.
09/02/2012

Dear Sir,
The President,
Federal Republic of Nigeria,
Aso-Rock Villa,
Asokoro District,
Abuja, FCT.
Nigeria.
A LOYAL NIGERIAN’S SUPPORT FOR HIS PRESIDENT
I, Akpe Roland Nduka, very human, twenty-something years old, graduate of the University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, son of Mr and Mrs Akpe, of the Umu-Ngbor clan, of the Ukwuani ethnic group, from Utagba-Ogbe, Kwale, Ndokwa West LGA of Delta State, Nigeria, am here to show my solidarity, unalloyed, to you, Commander-In-Chief of the armed forces, President Goodluck Jonathan.
May I call you Jona, sir? You are silent. I guess that signals assent. I shall, Jona sir, try to point out the great improvements you have made to our flailing and failing infrastructures. I, sincerely, hope that the obvious testimonies I shall enlist shall put paid to claims constantly being spread across the twittosphere by self-acclaimed saints and know-it-alls like Ogunlesi, Onuoha, el-Rufai, Omojuwa and their likes.
Contrary to popular belief, I believe you are doing a great job, Jona sir. It has taken, I am sure, a great deal more than your ‘very’ English last and first names to have introduced a word like CABAL into common use. As a connoisseur of words, myself, the improvement of our falling spoken English standard, by you, is thoroughly appreciated. I feel you should know that my eyes are smarting as I write this. It is not that I am overcome by emotion at the wonders you have performed in converting our Meggido to an Eden. No, not exactly.
It is 2.42a.m and I am writing by the flickering, smoky flame of a lantern. No, don’t feel bad, sir. There has been great improvement in power output from something-something thousand megawatts to something-hundred-and-something-thousand megawatts according to the newspapers and news reels. I read the exact same thing five months ago and, well, it is not your fault that the slice of my budget eaten by candles increased appropriately with an increase in power output.
Forgive the pun, I will exercise patience. Nigerians hardly ever exercise patience. No wonder they cross the Sahara on foot for greener pastures than wait, eight years at the US embassy corridors to be covered in dust and the insult of low-level embassy employees, for visitor’s visa.
Good Sir Jona, I shall not bring up the Boko Haram issue. A nation is just like a man. Harmful micro-organisms live in and on man. Had a lot of your detractors stayed in school, and not hop on home on labour strikes, they would have been taught first year pathology which would have endowed them with better brains to understand that Boko Haram is our cross to bear. Like Staphlococcus aureus is the human skin’s to bear. What is a few hundred dead souls to the rest of us living, sturdy one hundred and forty nine million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, five hundred and ninety two point two three four two inhabitants of this colonially carved country? Between both of us, statistics shows the insignificance of their lives. Jona sir, we shall bear this cross, with you, with fortitude as long your villa does not go up in smithereens.
I have a lot to give you kudos for, sir. But time is in short, treacherous supply and my laptop’s battery annoyingly low. I, sir, will not for any reason forget to congratulate you on a job well done in finally removing import waivers that have helped ‘Professor-Pella’ the Alhaji’s net worth into double what it was. Even your detractors cannot deny the fact that our own very kinsman, from the ancient city of depleted groundnuts, is the undisputed baba olowo of the whole Africa, even if he imports and repacks his products as made in Nigeria.
I hope this letter gets to you, assuming NIPOST functions as efficiently as parastatals like National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency and the now ‘defunct (?)’ Power Holding Corporation of Nigeria so obviously do. My mother prays for you and the country. I forget to, most times. But I never forget to pray the generators do not go on strike.
Yours Nigerian,
Rolands Ndu Akpe
P.S- I hope you did not mind that I could not come up with any obvious infrastructural upgrade while I wrote the above? I tried, believe me, sir. Nothing jumped at me while I wrote in the dark. I will patiently wait for the dividends of the funds accrued from the partial removal of subsidy. I am very patient, just like my parents were, during Niger-man Babangida’s IMF-induced policy implementations.