45 DAYS LATER...

Sometimes you never know what forms your next prayer point. You pray for the basics; a roof over your head, food on your table, good health and if you live in a country like Nigeria maybe power supply and security.

You tell yourself that as you have known the beginning of your child, you'd never know their end. You've told them to plan a celebration of life when you die at a ripe old age. So the day you send Ali off to school in the morning after giving him his breakfast of bread and tea and packing his lunch box with Indomie, nothing tells you that this day will be different.

Nothing tells you that, unlike every other day, your son will not come home.

He will not return drenched in sweat after a long afternoon of football, forcing you to wonder whether he went to school to learn or to play. He won't ask what's for dinner. He will not tell you stories about his classmates.

Unlike other days, your son who turns five next week, doesn't come back at all.

Instead, you see his face on the seven o'clock news.

A reporter says he has been taken by "unknown gunmen," "bandits," or whatever label they are called this week. The state government assures the publics that it is doing its "BEST" to find him the forty-two other children and teachers who disappeared with him.

Then it dawns on you, 

Nigeria  happened to you. 

You ask yourself if you should have listened to him when he said he didn't want to go to school that morning. But the 7pm news isn't done yet, so it interrupts your thought and the screen cuts to another tragedy.

A woman, perhaps in her seventies, throws herself against a concrete slab and screams as though she is trying to follow her son into death. Chukwuemeka. The son she spent her pension putting through university. The son who survived four years of lectures, exams and strikes only to be killed by armed robbers a day after his convocation. For a moment, you feel sorry for her. Then your mind drifts back to Ali. To the cardigan he forgot to take that morning.

You don't want to think the worst but you know the kidnap cycle all too well.  Someone is taken. The news stations talk about it for days. Politicians make statements. Hashtags trend on social media. Then everyone moves on.

Well, except you because Nigeria happened to you.

Nigeria has a way of introducing itself into your life like that.

One day insecurity is a headline scrolling across the bottom of your television screen. The next day it is your reality. Corruption is something politicians argue about until the hospital has no oxygen for your father. Bad roads are statistics until your sister doesn't survive the journey home. Unemployment is a number in a report until your graduate son sits at home year after year waiting for a future that never seems to arrive.

For a while, these stories belong to other people. We shake our heads, offer our sympathies and move on. Then one day the distance disappears. The headline learns your name. The tragedy learns your address.

It's the morning of final semester exams but it's also 45 days after children and their teachers were carted away from a school in Oyo state, Nigeria to a forest and like always the rest of us have slowly returned to our routines. But for some like Ali's mother, , time stopped forty-five days ago. People who were once part of their daily routine lay helpless in a forest but the First Lady of Nigeria is asking us to fry akara and kuli kuli so that the country gets better.

At the end of the day, after praying for shelter, food, good health, power supply and security, I know what my next prayer point is; that Nigeria does not happen to me, that it does not happen to you.

And that one day, it stops happening to all of us.

Till next time, Remember I love you and you should love you too,

Lots of love,

IMAX💕