Random rigmarole
HOW are you? Yes sir, I am talking to you. Sorry, if I gave you a start, but I am not a finicky foreigner, or a wonky World Banker. Neither am I an elf from the IMF. I am sir, one of your very own, your fellow countryman, another victim who suffers with you. Don't get me wrong. I am not curious to find if your misfortune surpasses mine. I know you suffer no less than I do.
Are you asking me, how? God be my witness, you have forced me to open my mouth. You drink discoloured stinky water, don't you sir? You also take shower and perform ablution with the same yucky stuff, am I right? I do the same thing, nothing to hide.
You smother in blistering heat when load shedding is as assuredly regular as bodily functions. Same for me, never mind. You eat adulterated food that fills your tummy with more wind than blows in a squall. And then you breathe pollution sir, your lungs choking on dust and fumes. I bet you have to tell me the same sad story that I have to tell you.
Have you been to a hospital lately? How did it go? Feel free to tell me, sir. If victims hide from each other, their silence only perpetuates their condition. Honestly, what kind of treatment did you get? Did the doctors give you hard time? Did those white coats stonewall you every time you asked what was wrong with your patient? Did you find the doctor flirting with the nurse or both talking on mobile phones while the patient screamed for attention?
I tell you sir, police station is a spooky place; stay out if you can. It's a place where man and money play hide and seek in the forest of law. They don't take your case if you aren't connected. If you are connected, they hesitate to take money from you. Here is the ultimate catch. No money, no honey. Your wife or daughter may go missing without a trace, but short of incentive the enforcers of law will sit on their hands.
Government offices are equally bleak. Go to any desk, you have to pay before you greet. If you don't, feel free to run around until mother's milk leaks out of your bones. You can go to his boss, boss's boss and notches above them. The brotherhood of crooks work in cahoots, hyenas waiting for their shares of the lion's kill.
Have you heard this gut-churning news? There is a mishap in the underground; broken sewerage pipes are contaminating the water coming to our homes. It's like a circle that doesn't close. What goes out comes back. The pure is confluent with the impure. That means we clean with unclean, wash with dirty. Ugh thoo!
It's the same story also on the ground. In our abject adulteration, we are using squalor to scrape off scum. We are honestly dishonest, unpretentiously pretentious, scrupulously unscrupulous, and worldly out of this world. Do you feel the same way, sir? We need to have an agreement on this. Good is good and evil is evil. A nation can't last long on the unwholesome diet of contradictions.
Contradictions are contagious like a disease, which destroy the immune system of reasoning. It creates ambivalence, as filters of logic are rendered invalid. Faculties wobble, minds grow feeble, while hypocrisy predates upon perspicacity. There is a terrible leak at our subconscious level where the subliminal instincts spew filth into the running streams of conscience. Did you just sweep the air with your hand? I know what that means. Yes, yes, what I said went over your head.
You see sir we suffer in difference and differ in suffering. Neither is logical because we can resolve them in unity. We don't need foreigners, the World Bank or the IMF. We only need to talk amongst ourselves, one to one, one to many. Why not start with the two of us. Tell me, sir, are you ready?
That's correct, you and I need to talk. The country should come before us, and we should come before the party. You know what I mean. We are nothing without the country; the party is nothing without us. Yet our politics, with or without foreign interference, thrives on the contrary, party before people, people before country.
Partisanship divides us; we divide the country. Believe me sir there are two different countries inside two of us. A hospital is ME country for the doctors, YOU country for the rest of us. The same thing is true for police in police stations, lawyers in courts, teachers in schools and the government servants at their desks.
This country is in a state of war between YOU and ME. WE must talk.
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