VOX POPULI Lá VEXING – Merry Christmas?

See my dear friends, in this my life, I always try my best not to make foolish decisions, but, yesterday ehn, e be like say I danced to the tilt with folly.

You see, in the months leading to the April 2015 elections, I worked with the Akinwunmi Ambode campaign organisation as a content Writer, and at a time in February, I was given this customised Ankara opa mefa >>>>perk. I took it home in Ibadan, gave it to my Tailor alongside some other Ankaras for sewing. My wife collected the finished pieces on my behalf and that was it. February till now, I didn’t even remember.

But you know, sometimes, the devil sha go wan try hinself. Yesterday morning, me and the cloth just jam ourselves one way sha as wifey did end-of-the-year reshuffling; na so we start to dey feel each other. The cloth was doing its eye like “wear me wear me”; ‘okay, no problem, I said.

That was how I stepped out in an APC-customised buba in Ibadan daylight, 7 months post-Sai Baba…innocently, just innocently.

From the moment I got into my street in Agbowo UI, through Mokola to Agbeni Dugbe, and a dash at Bodija, I received hisses, hawk-like gawks, and bold confrontations. My quiet was literally lynched by a catacomb of queryform remarks.

It was bad.

“A dibo fun yin tan, ko s’owo nlu, e n wo aso eeriibu kiii, e bila o jee!”, an Okada rider ranted from my rear.

“Egbon ! Egbon! Egbon APC, e duro, eyin la sha npe. Awa dibo fun yin oh, sugbon Odun lo de tan yi ke, ko s’owo, ko s’epo, igboro ko rerin rara. Nkan te so fun wa, taa fi dibo fun yin ko leleyi oh ….e soro na! Egbon! !”, said a *mob-leader at Mokola where at every turn, the cloth made me a cynosure of talking eyes.

“Booda egbe onigbale, e duro na. Ki lo n wu yin lori te e fi ko si aso egbe yin na. So’o po ri bi igboro ti gbe ni? Pelu bi a se dibo fun yin to, ijoba yin koi ti ni ifeeti kan to gbadun, i’nse mi bi ki n ya aso hun mo’o lorun ni…radaada”, she hissed off angrily at Bodija oja.

I’ll just state these three examples. But you know it’s Ibadan na, where ‘talk can’t finish’, and I got a vehement load of it, as some even got curst in their rant. All of these simply because my jeje self innocently wore Ankara opa mefa.

I was mute, No, muted, for most of the time because I definitely understood their rage at the lack of palpable impact in a new government they voted out the former for; I also understood their bemusement at my “unintentional audacity” by donning an APC regalia when fuel is available at an average of 150 naira per litre. How ‘nice’ of me!

At some point, I was tempted to play the “impatient” card in defense of my funny attire, but, commonsense told me: “Sayo, shut up! They are not impatient, the are patriots left incommunicado despite pressing ills. They are compatriots still waiting to be governed some 310 days since they trusted CHANGE. Do they deserve a crashing currency? Do they deserve unfulfilled cum later edited campaign promises? Do they deserve unpaid salaries? Do they deserve all the ‘underservables’ as citizens of a country? So, Sayo, they are not impatient.. STFU! “, sense told me.

A lot of us will agree, that it’s either an absurdly expensive holiday or a very dry one somewhere in Nigeria right now, and true to bits, the APC government have managed a bad time seemingly unprepared, hence, this perceptible vexation in the polity.

I don’t really know why a large portion of the social media lauded Buhari’s Budget presentation speech. I really don’t. When are we gonna learn??? Any Jonathan could have presented a speech that elementary! When are we gonna learn?? Isn’t it high time we got tired of hearing and clapping for a speech of ‘WHATs’ and delve into tasking our leaders to give speeches of ‘HOWs’ and ‘HOW TOs’ well-researched blueprints?

In this midst of our usual but needless social media hurrah at speeches like that of Buhari’s, I got a bit happy when I jammed a Facebook thread where Olugbenga Adebola and Musa Muhammad Gombe exchanged practical comments about ‘HOW TO’ get education better in Nigeria by tackling a personnel-quality challenge instead of Buhari’s budgetary promise of ’employing 500 thousand teachers’ without telling us HOW!

Gbenga and Muhammad from that thread decided to develop a blueprint to tackle that real challenge and that’s what I can clap for and happily contribute to its fruition. Not whatnots.

Well, in Ibadan, where even the closest they’ve actually had to at least a Fashola was way back in Awo or during Ige, I, Sayo Aluko, wore this APC uniform in a financially arid holiday, 7 months of more Adesina tweets and Omoboriowo photos than actual governance from the APC…Chai, I was foolish ….wasn’t I?