It’s time to serve an eviction notice, writes TONY EDEMENAHA
There is a joke that has survived three generations in my village. The landlord’s son never sleeps in the house his father built with mud, sweat, and palm wine debts. He lives abroad, collects rent in dollars through Western Union, and sends voice notes from London: “My people, please manage the leaking roof. Pour cement and hope. Maintain the spirit of the house.” When the walls finally crack and the rain enters the parlor, he books a flight, lands with contractors, sells the land to a foreign investor, and calls it “urban renewal.” The tenants who raised children in that house are told to relocate with “compensation” that cannot buy a wheelbarrow. That joke is no longer funny. That joke is Nigeria.
Our elite are not landlords. Landlords have responsibility. Landlords sweep the compound, fix the gate, and pray for tenants who pay on time. Our elite are tenants. Caretakers who sneaked into the master bedroom in 1999, changed the locks, printed new keys for their cousins, and began selling the house room by room while the owners—you and I, the bus driver, the nurse, the corper, the market woman—watch from the backyard. The house is Nigeria. The furniture is our commonwealth: the oil beneath our feet, the schools our parents built with communal labor, the hospitals named after heroes, the roads that were supposed to connect destinies, the very fragile idea of “we.” For decades, a small, insatiable clique has been auctioning it piece by piece, and they have perfect names for the crime: privatization, deregulation, commercialization, public-private partnership. The language is polished. The theft is not. They are tenants selling the house, and they are in a hurry because they know the lease is expiring.
