If hypocrisy were an exportable commodity...

Dear Mbella,

You have always been centuries wiser than your contemporaries. Your outing was the sum total of a brutal truth that stings the ear and jerks up the adrenalin level in “hiltonians”. But where will that take us to, Mbella? We live in a country where fiction is truer than reality, where truth is a lie, in so far as it is not coming from above; where a sweet lie sounds as pleasant in the ears of the king as the truth. Here, falsehood is the norm wherein glittering externalities subvert the core of genuine probing.

If hypocrisy were an exportable commodity, this triangle would have been the richest country on the globe. We would not have been waiting for 2035 to start emerging. In such a situation, our Gross Domestic Product, GDP, would have hit an unprecedented 100 percent. What a wonderful virtue to be hypocritical? The one that casually converted his best friend into food for the worms would weep and wail the loudest and deliver the most solemn, nay, articulate eulogy at the funeral.

I wish crocodile tears were useful; you will only need to attend one funeral to have many tankers full of such tears. The high and the obscenely mighty behave as if death is only for others.

Gainako is one of them; I mean he, of CAMLELE. He is a dangerous combination the north/south block that sees himself as a “god”, a tin god. The power of “kusa” has made a way into his naughty head. Otherwise, on what premise would he have mustered the courage to give the board a total dressing down.

It was the theatre of the absurd as the power-drunk subordinate euphemisically announced how much was paid as bride price for each of their mothers. Mola, it did not surprise me because the kadiye is enjoying an overdose of impunity. Will I be the one to tell you that a crime not punished is an incentive for other criminals to do an encore? You see, the hammer will fall in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Hope you heard that three frog pen-pushers were invited to the khaki kangaroo the other day. The issue that came to the front burner of discussions the other day is a damning ignominy. It is a pall of darkness hurled on the so called freedom. It is a manifestation of a fierce battle; a battle between people’s right to know and Government’s might to hide and suppress information. There has been a clash of wills and a battle of visions as to where the dictates of national security should begin and end.

Elsewhere, there is no semantic quarrel with expression. But here, national security is the subject of a semantic amorphous; it is a tool of oppression in the political lexicon of the sit-tight “soap-boxers”. Otherwise, how could people insist that reporting on the high level corruption in the khaki circles is an attack on national security? There was embezzlement in Kassiba and there is embezzlement now in the gainakoland. Is it doing any good to the national security?

You see Mbella, no one should see this mail so that I can avoid the witch-hunting at the “Centre Forward Committee”. We can’t give the leeway to oafs to take the country back to medieval barbarism just because the citizenry is a gullible lot. Let me tell you in very unequivocal terms that no country can ever progress where citizens engage in the perennial ritual of wound-hiking and trading of scars.

Mola, the reign of the cowardice of citizens must end because the reign of terror from the oppressors is only waxing strong. I am ready to stoke the flames of a belligerent blow-out between the people and their oppressors. In the words of the English poet, Thomas Gray, we must not be gullible simpletons in the hands of people who “waded through slaughter to the throne and shut the doors on mercy on mankind”.

The voluminous freak of the town office must not be allowed to continue to witch-hunt his successor who quit the place on relatively a clean slate. I know that party discipline will not allow me to say all of these things. But the pretence that has been “elevated” to a virtue in the national party rattles me.

I hope we will meet again in Bikom where Bochong will be dispatched through mother earth to his Maker.

My regards to Enanga and the kids

Yours sincerely,

Ngwa