I am very very sad. I am gravely unhappy, I am very worried. I feel like banging my head against the wall! And my sadness has nothing to do with the ghastly accident which completely and irredeemably wrecked my Jeep two weeks ago at Ipetumodu in Osun state.

When our celebrated Uncle Sam Amuka Pemu was writing his unforgettable satirical masterpiece SAD SAM column in the late ’60s through the ’70s little did he imagine that the havoc which provoked his pen to pour out the venom in the series would be a child’s play compared with the complete mess which has now completely enveloped his country. Cerebral political genius, the Honourable Adegoke Adelabu, had not seen any mess when Penkelemesi became his signature tune.

Nigeria is now completely submerged in unprecedented mess. From Ministers emitting the foul noise of lies, bare faced lies to fellow Nigerians and ridiculing our dear country in the eyes of the international community, to massive plundering of our resources by sacred-cow, untouchable, honey-oiled, round-bottomed Ministers and CEOs of government Agencies, to National Assembly members chewing currency notes and to the complete break-down of law and order, Nigeria has never had it so bad.

You wake up in the morning hale and hearty and bid your wife or husband goodbye as you head to the bus stop or motor park towards your office and within minutes you become a permanent residence in a coffin! What a hell! Or you board a bus or taxi and within hours your body has been sliced up into spare parts on a ritualist’s slaughter slab! What a country? What a people? And what a Government?

Boko Haram is a different story: a baffling wicked phenomenon which the Federal Government has continued to misunderstand and thus, has continued to apply the ‘wrongest’ of medicines for its cure. If I am given an audience by Mr President, Boko Haram plague which is totally a psychological war, will be ended in less than six weeks without shooting even an arrow! But that is a subject for another day. Right now, my mind has been consumed by sadness.

I feel sorry for this country. I am saddened by its gory plight. I am saddened by the plight of innocent parents whose innocent children were butchered in the prime of their lives. I am saddened by the pervasive poverty, deliberate impoverishment and deprivations. I am saddened by glaring injustices here and there. I am more saddened by the unrewarded prayers and supplications of our Pastors and Imams.

I am sorry for many couples whose marriages have collapsed because of the harsh economic climate they live in. I am equally sorry and saddened by the unpalatable plight of hundreds of thousands of our young adults in the age bracket 35 to 40 who are forced to remain single duly mainly to the same unfavourable economic climate.

How can any person with social conscience be happy when confronted with the misfortune of over 35 million unemployed youths who are graduates of tertiary institutions? By the time most of my contemporaries turned 35, they were already proud landlords. In fact, only a negligible fraction of university graduates of the late ’60s did not own houses five years after graduation. Nowadays, you have graduates with First Class Honours degrees who are yet to secure appropriate employment seven years after graduating!

We have grumbled. We have complained. We have proffered solutions. And we have even rained torrents of curses on the heads of all those involved in the degradation of our collective worth as a people. All to no avail.

I am not happy that hundreds of thousands of our educated young ladies have turned to prostitution of varying degrees to make a living. Several housewives have also taken to prostitution, also of varying degrees, to provide for their jobless husbands and pay for their children’s education.

And yet there are heartless National Assembly members, the greedy lot, asking for 45 million naira each as their share of the national loot!

And yet there are Ministers under whose thighs billions of US Dollars disappeared!

And yet there is a President keeping a fleet of aircraft five times the size of the US President’s!

And yet Nigeria wastes over 85 % of its income on less than 5% of the total population!

I am sad because almost every Nigerian knows the problems plaguing the country. I am unhappy because an equal number of Nigerians know the solutions to our multifarious problems. Ask a taxi driver, he will tell you in graphic details how much has been stolen at the NNPC. Ask my wife’s hairdresser, she will tell you who controls the lever of power in this country, whether it is Goodluck or Patience.

I have left my beard uncut. I am likely to leave it until it exceeds the length and spread of the Ayatollah’s own. So, don’t be surprised when next you meet the Tola Adeniyi you used to know and can no longer recognise him.

I really do not know what will restore my natural jocund nature to me. I don’t know what will pull me out of this depression. I know there is likely to be a national election next year which hopefully will make the devastating dragon called Poverty and Perversion Development Party become history. But quite frankly, I am not persuaded that elections, the bogus ritual imposed on mankind by the most despicable and most corrupt of human races, the so-called Euro-Americans, will be the answer to our national malaise.

What we need more than anything else is the immediate restructuring of this mad formless place called Nigeria, and a surgical operation! If this country is ever to survive and remain one entity, in a Confederation, the very forces that turned this country upside down, the forces that jettisoned our Regional structure and Parliamentary system, the forces that carved up our land space into glorious unviable local governments called states, the forces that brutally ended our fiscal federalism, the forces that ruined our cherished values and made Money king, should swagger in and clear the mess they unwittingly created.

•Chief Tola Adeniyi (shown in photo) is a former Managing Director of Daily Times of Nigeria. He can be reached via chiefadetolaadeniyi@yahoo.ca

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