Baskadia

"What are the colours of the Nigerian flag" I asked Akin, my boy of eight, he loved to believe that the green on the Nigerian flag stood out, meant a lot, held a meaning. He smiled at me and whispered, 'growth and fertility', in his childish playful way.It was true; or maybe a lie we believed to be true.

Here's a fact I grew up to accept, that my country was green or still is. But one question pops up in my mind, if my country was truly green it should have ripened for a fruitful harvest.But is the harvest that we all waited for not too far from the reach of the citizens. Our heroes past all laboured. Shouldn't a good man leave an inheritance for his children's children? I bet they sure did and their labour yeilded a long time ago, a good harvest.But the children have been deprived of the pleasure of the right to our inheritance because of the 'greedy, power-drunk few'.

So, here I am, contemplating, "Is my homeland truly qualified to be called greenland anymore?" Maybe it should be called red, like the danger warning signal in traffic or black, a state that radiates the gloom of the children, of me, when I was a child then and now; or even colorless, as with a fruit that is on the verge of rotteness; or, even my boy Akin who may consider running to a greener land when he is a man, and never dream to come home to naija again...