(NOTE: This post was already published on June 18, 2013, on http://www.yarfulaniaturai.blogspot.com the blog has moved here. Though I have made some edits from the original text in the blog, the subject matter is still the same)

June 18, 2013:

From God, we came and unto Him shall we all return. Whenever this is said; people know that things are not the same. I have a story to tell, I need ears to listen, so can you borrow me the gift of time so I can write while you read, and ask while you respond?

My name is ‘Yar Fulani a Turai’, and here is the story that I want to tell you:

I really can’t describe my feelings and have no words to describe it either. It’s a story of tears and sorrow and I believe at the end you will all agree with me when I said my feelings cannot be expressed.

A poet, a prose and a play writer as I am, playing with words is a game I enjoy doing, but the message here is a serious one and it is for you to decode, and please correct me if am wrong.

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I was sitting on a chair close to the window some years back, looking outside as my daughter who was 3 years old then, was playing next to me. Waters started tripping down my eyes, as I turned from looking out the window unto her. I watched her play, as she was putting all her seriousness into what she was doing. The more I looked at her the more the tears rushed down my cheeks like a flood in a narrow pathway, I cried so much that day.

I cried not because she was hurt, neither was I. I cried because I saw something bad coming. Coming not just her way alone, but the way of all children her age, above and beyond.

Do you know what I saw? I saw a blurred future through her eyes. The future was or still is, surrounded by so much recklessness and negligence of our kind.

It’s a peak of disaster! No not disaster …maybe calamity or far more than that. More than atrocity too…  Something worst; whose definition I can’t explain right now.

There’s that popular cliché that reads “The young are the leaders of tomorrow”. As much as I believe, I also find it difficult to believe because of all the horrible things that are happening in our great country; Nigeria. We have tons of recorded stories of corruption; of killings, massacres, butchering; crime, drug abuse you name it… and these make me sick.

Worse is how we all read, hear or see the stories; some in the media; some first-hand and after a while its forgotten as if it never happened and no one is doing anything to correct things. Sometimes I think we even pretend as if it never occurred, or worst; it has become just like a normal routine that we are so used to.

I seriously believe that something needs to be done. “But what precisely can be done?” That’s the question whose answer you need to help with.