Thursday 16 October 2014

My dream of a Clean Nigeria

So it is a cool evening and I hear the whispers of the wind, wincing through the blinds of the curtain as i lull on the brown tiles of the room. I observe the roughly painted wall that has this ancient sized clock hanging at the extreme right as though it could fall at any point and beneath it is a calendar of two years ago. I stop to wonder why it has not been changed but my tired spirit is not motivated to continue the thought so I ease out of it as gently as I can, slow, steady and out. Then the walls get dimmer and darker, till all I can see is darkness and maybe just something else I really can not figure out. But it is something that looks dark. I try to stare at it but it does not seem like anything I can get from my vast vocabulary of nouns and nomenclatures. Since I couldn't see anything meaningful I decided to dream, like it was an exercise, or a function of will. But that's what I wanted and I knew I would get it. Just then, I saw myself sitting on a slab along a busy road somewhere around the town.
Of course, everyone knows Lagos is a big and bustling city that never sleeps. Yes that was were I was because I could see the green hanging board from the tunnel that wrote "Egbeda, Ikotun, Exit 200M only". the roads were clean, the street light shone into my eyes that I felt like I should wake up. There were hidden street cameras and cars moving to and fro fast. Some were turning right and others left, without blasting the horns and no hawkers by the street to sell pure-water nor 'gala'. Just at every 100 meters there was a neatly kept trash can and the tarred roads were so tyre friendly you could hear the feel of the friction between the cars and the roads as they took their conductors to their destinations.
I am passionate about having a clean nation. I stopped trashing wastes anywhere I could since this passion gripped me and I talk about it with everyone I "catch" trying to trash even just a pure-water sachet. Cleanliness they say is next to godliness and so to exhibit that in all our seeming religiousness we need to start the change from us. The next time you have gala or La Casera please keep it in your bag if you don't find a waste basket till you see one. Try as much as possible not to urinate or excrete on the road. No matter how bad it is, walk into an eatery, bank or public service office closest to you and ask to use the rest room, in the case there is no public toilet in view.
As I came down from the slab, there was this red Peugeot 206 dented by the rear left that had swayed off the other side of the road and came face-to-face with me. The flash light was all in my face and I could not help but open my eyes. I stretched only to feel the waste basket by me. I finally stood up, threw the paper i had just shredded before my "dream" into the basket and walked into the room to get a good sleep after three long days of work with barely three hours of sleep.
Keep your environment clean...

No comments:

Post a Comment