Shithole with happiness. HoL 162

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Humans of Lagos

"Everything in Nigeria will kill you!

Ever since I was young, I have seen living in Nigeria as a traphole that will someday close up and swallow one. Imagine waking up feeling like a zombie ghost in your own country.

Just recently, I traveled all the way from my state down to Lagos to fulfill the one year mandatory youth service after completing my first degree. A risky trip that I survived given the deplorable state of the road among other unmentionable calamities.

While in Lagos, the corps members were summoned to be ad-hoc staff members to the electoral commission. I obeyed the clarion call in elation.

On the eve of the election, this commission only lodged us in an open space with no security nor standard shelter that is befitting of any human. Don't let us even contemplate food!

And when information from above reached the state electoral officials that the election had been postponed, they collected the materials in our possession and then abandoned us to the cold hands of the night.

We couldn't leave because we couldn't find transportation. We were stuck in an open field till dawn.

The commission will not apologize or compensate us for the inconvenience they put us through. That will be un-Nigerian.

We will make joke out of the whole issue, we will laugh and try subduing our pains accepting that is the way the cookie of our social fabric crumbles.


Nigerians may be smiling, but deep down we are suffering from deep-seated sadness. You know, it's mostly those who make you laugh that are deprived of happiness."

© FERT, 2019

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