THE ROADMAP

I drove to my favorite drive-in coffee shop and stopped at the window to collect my standard order of “Banana bread with nuts, warmed, and a small cup of coffee, black.”

She was waiting for me. She smiled broadly. Her name tag read Jazmine.

“You always have your coffee black,” Jazmine observed. “I like mine with some cream and sugar.”

“Your shirt is cool, Jazmine,” I said. I stretched out my hand from the window of the car as she leaned out from the window of the coffee house to hand me my order.

She wore a cheap Walmart tie-dyed grey t-shirt with muted cloud patterns. Her green overall sported a Santa decorative badge at a perfect spot on her chest.

About a week ago I told her I was from Yoruba, “a country somewhere in West Africa.”

“I googled the name Yoruba,” Jazmine said, “and it’s not a country. It’s a tribe in Nigeria.”

“No, Jazmine,” I corrected her. “It’s not a tribe. It’s a country of some fifty million people. It’s nearly the population of Great Britain.”

“That’s not what Google says,” Jazmine reported.

“Google is not God,” I said. “Google is not always right. First, it’s inaccurate to describe people with such a large population as just a tribe. Second, It’s the Europeans who came up with the word Nigeria, and not the Yoruba people. Many of us Yoruba people are not happy being Nigerians because we are oppressed inside that enclave and we seek liberty from its tyrannies.”

“I saw that on CNN last night,” Jazmine responded. “They said soldiers were killing you guys in Lagos.”

She pronounced Lay-gos as Lah-gos. I corrected the pronunciation.

“It’s a just few stinking-rich and greedy Yoruba rulers who are enabling the army of Nigeria to occupy and kill us on our own land,” I instructed her. “These greedy Yoruba rulers are old thieves who have perfected the devilish tactics of manipulating elections to rule perpetually.”

“I heard they are having elections in 2023 over there,” Jazmine said, with a frown. “Maybe things will be better in 2023.”

“I doubt it, Jazmine,” I said, taking my breakfast from her.

“Take care, Mo,” she said. “Come back tomorrow.”

I drove off, sad and reflective.

The #EndSARS protest of October and what happened after it provide a glimpse of the violence and mayhem that will occur come 2023 when the politicians start printing banners, hiring praise singers and bribing hungry people to vote for them.

There will be no 2023 elections in Yoruba country in which they just want the poor to remain scavengers while they and their family continue to live in luxury.

They steal the money meant to build schools and send their children abroad for a good education.

They steal the money meant to build hospitals and travel abroad for treatment when they are sick.

They steal the money meant to build infrastructure and travel abroad to shop, holiday and have a good time.

All these old names that have been blocking our development can no longer be producing banners and false promises claiming they are practicing some bogus democratic Nigeria.

There is no such thing even remotely as a democratic Nigeria.

It is a dictatorship in which an army general hoodwinked himself into the position of power under false promises that he has failed to deliver.

If the sophisticated cellphone-revolutionaries of the #EndSARS movement fail to get them by 2023, there is no doubt that The Hoodlums will pour into the streets to resist them by all things creative as these treasury-looters try to deceive the people again.

Meanwhile, the Yoruba elders are fighting amongst themselves as the invaders from the north continue to penetrate their country, and their greedy leaders continue the sellout.

Orunmila says the Yoruba journey out of Nigeria that was scheduled to take just two seconds will now take two hours because the Yoruba elders have dipped their heads inside the pot of soup and cannot see the roadmap.

Come and chop rice jare.

Sorry, there is no beef.

I boycotted beef because I cannot be patronizing the same Fulani herdsmen who kidnap and kill our people and destroy our farmlands in the name of One Nigeria.

Besides, beef is not healthy anyway.

It is not good for your heart, in the literal and figurative sense of it.