Your Excellency,
Yesterday, you turned sixty. Six decades sitting tightly under your belt. I wonder how that feels; do you feel like you have lived? Are you overwhelmed that you are still here, and in a position of power? Or are you like me, consumed by the thoughts of tomorrow, bursting with potential, possibility. Do you still sit and try to decipher all you have to do? Are you eager to see the next twenty years, and at the same time sacred shirtless at the thought? I’d like to think that that is the mind of only twenty-year-olds. I’d like to think that by sixty, life would be somewhat tranquil and frugal, less cumbersome. But this is my life, I have only just concluded my second decade, and my days are filled with vigour, bursting with savvy ideas sandwiched with a few witless ones, a sense of work-to-do, a sense of strength-to-do-it. Yet Sir, you stand so surely in my way. You seem determined to drain me all of my youthful strength and determination, to disarm me of all of my hope.
Let’s talk about this, us two. Why have I been denied the right to an education? I have done all required of me to be in the university, to learn, evolve. Kindergarten, primary school, secondary school, junior NECO, WAEC, JAMB, post JAMB. I have kept my end of the deal, yet on a Thursday afternoon I am on a bed, in my father’s house. The fan beating the air restlessly above me, the walls watching me blankly. This is not my place. And I cannot but wonder if you even realize that we are real people. Flesh and blood. That our time is not something we will ever get back, yet you are stealing it from us in broad daylight. I know that the nation’s economy is suffering, and I know that our president is sickly and absent. But you are here, celebrating 60, can you not ignite the humanitarian in you, to direct (even if you don’t have any cash of your own) our way all the funds you got to celebrate this glamorous 60th birthday. Pay your staff so that we can all go back to building a future we will all be proud of. Can we go back to the drawing board and see that this is my life in your hands? This is my time in your hands. I have paid my dues, it’s time for you to pay yours.
As you read this, you will begin to think that you are not the only one involved. That you are not to blame. It is not your fault. But can you really say that? Have you done your best? Have you been faithful? Have you held your end of the deal?
Must I be punished for choosing to love my country? Must I suffer for not choosing luxury? Why can’t the luxury be my motherland? Must I be mocked for attending a “public” school? Is it too much to trust the government with what they are meant to be trusted with? I think I speak for all when I say, we are fine with bad roads. We can live one more day without flyovers, bridges, three lanes, statues, or even more trees and parks. We’ve done it for so long after all. Our tyres have made steady compromises to keep us alive. Our lungs have long gotten adjusted to a marginal percentage of oxygen in our atmosphere. But sir, we are not fine with this aimlessness, this idleness that haunts us by the hour. You are breaking our spirits, you are crushing our souls. You are telling us boldly that there is no reason to try. There is no reason to want a better tomorrow, because even when you give your all, the world can hand you something you do not recognize in return. Unjust, does not even begin to connote the message this sends across. The value of a leader is not in how well you can apologize, not how well you can articulate the problem, but how fast and wittingly you can solve it. Sell all your cars if you have to. Get us back in school! Do something!! Write on the sands of time, that we might remember you, look on you with favour, keep your legacy ablaze. The things that I see you do, roads, modern markets and estates, the things that tourists will see and marvel at wide-eyed will all fade away and not too long from now they will fall, one by one. Someone else will have to rebuild and remake them. But give me an education and I will save your life, the life of your children and grandchildren. I will serve my country when she calls. I will be the future. It is your loss if you deny me a chance at this—a chance at becoming, a chance at being—because I will not let you destroy me. I will rise, I will weave my dreams someplace esle and you will watch me go. You will watch me shine far beyond your reach and wish you had done better, much better. You can now. Do better now.
I know somewhere within your soul, you see that the people you owe money have families too. Have mouths to feed, loved ones to keep alive, bodies to clothe. Don’t let yourself forget their faces, their voices. Be our governor. Invest in our future. Reopen LAUTECH. And while we are earnestly at that, can we make sure these things never happen again? Can we please, think critically on a system that works, and stay uninterrupted?
Happy 60th Birthday.
A Medical Student,
LTH.
PS: Anyone with ideas, please leave a comment on what you think the government can do, because if we are really going to move past this for good, we need real solutions, not just open letters.
SurviveUni 