I sat back and look around me today and I felt left out. I feel like an outsider, an alien among everyone and it is quiet amusing.
I see people around me trying to live “the Nigerian dream” for a guy. Grow up, be a player while in school and a bachelor, have countless girls, get a job with a bank, oil company or multinational, get a 3 bedroom flat and a Honda saloon car and then get married. Have 4 kids and a dutiful wife who will treat you like a spoilt brat, attend church every Sunday and weekday services oo. Pay your children’s school fees and be the bread winner at home while assuming responsibility for your siblings and help with your wife’s family too.
Grow up like that and keep that same life. Attend family events with your wife even though you slept with that colleague once a while apart from that university girl you keep just for fun and call it normal. Buy native clothes cos they make you look comfortable and keep at that until you grow old and retire.
Send your kids to a private school and a federal university and they keep depending on you until they get out and you help them secure a job in your friend’s firm and then they start the cycle.
Your kids marry and move out to live their life and you get to the end of yours with your wife and when you grow old, move to your village and die.
That is the Nigerian dream unfortunately, I want more. I wanna join the Salvation army, be a part of doctors without borders, be the among the first people who help others in disasters. Have a wife on the road who is also a social worker and you get married in a little tent in the camp of the African Union peace keeping force in Mali.
Spend your honeymoon attending to the wonded. Help starving kids in Somalia and hand relief materials to people displaced due to flood in Bayelsa. Not see old friends for years and months cos you are looking after people in Sierra Leone and there is no internet or phone lines. Die with a smile on my face cos of those whose life I touched with not more that $100 dollars in my savings account
That is my dream. Maybe I have been in the sun too long or I am going insane. Just maybe
