You wake up to the sound of a generator humming outside your back window. It is not yours. Your own generator stopped working last week, and the electrician you called has been “on his way” ever since. When you decide to check at his workshop, you find out he is gone. He is truly gone because a boy you meet tells you Mr Electrician had left for his village due to the lack of money to renew his shop and house rents. And in the village, he had been killed by herders in a farmers-herders clash. He is really gone. Yes! But he is free from Nigeria’s prison. Then, farmers had no issues; they farmed freely and slept peacefully. Today’s case is sordid. Absurd. Barbaric. Drunken cows raid farms and eat the crops like Indomie noodles. And when the farmers fuss, their throats are slit and homes are given the baptism of fire by marauding herdsmen.
You check your phone. The battery power is red. But there is no electricity. No fuel. No hope. There was a time the situation was similarly bad but better. You are thinking of going to recharge in your neighbour’s room. But then, his tired generator coughs and dies like the economy of the nation. Phew!
Outside, the street is awake, but no one seems truly alive. A mother drags her son towards a school that may or may not have teachers today. Last week, the teachers had demonstrated against the drought of salaries. The kiosk woman by the junction arranges loaves of bread with the same tired hands she uses to fan herself through the night’s heat. A few yards away from her, the town’s marquee Mai Shai, a white kufi on his head, is complaining about the cost of eggs to one of his Muslim brothers. “. . .dis used to be seven pipti. Now it is tiri tauzen,” he is saying. His English amuses you, but you know he is not lying. Things have changed, drastically.
A yellow danfo screeches past, a conductor hanging from the door, shouting the names of places that sound like promises but mean nothing to you.
You step out proper, joining the slow procession of the indifferent. A beggar taps your elbow at the junction, rubs his belly, and takes his hand to his mouth; you ignore him. You are not wicked, just exhausted and helpless. As a matter of fact, you are as broke as the beggar.
You cross the road, dodging okadas and potholes like a game you never wanted to play. Someone is arguing with a policeman at the checkpoint ahead. The officer slaps him. The man protests. But you don’t stop. You have seen this scene too many times. Then, you used to get angry when you saw injustice. You will argue, protest, and even post your outrage online. You had believed it mattered. Does it matter now? You have been a victim. Your case had even been pathetic. The policeman had stopped you and asked you to bring your phone for a search. Why? You were a yahoo boy. No. You looked like a yahoo boy. When you protested, he slapped you across the face. The slap had stayed with you for weeks.
You turn into the street leading to Hub House. Even from such a distance, you can see the neon sign of your workplace shining in the dull light of the misty morning. The name of the street is Freedom Way. (But ten innocent protesters were shot dead on this street a month ago. Their only offence was coming out to protest against police brutality and other governmental failures.) By the side of the street—not too deep into it!—stands a colourful, high-vis campaign banner of a politician. His political moniker is Mr Project and his four fingers on each hand are up in the air. On the banner, there are words like honesty, accountability, and transparency. “Old story,” you say to yourself and begin to fold the legs of your trousers up to your shins to save them from the kisses of mud. There are craters of puddles here and there. You heave a sigh of capitulation and begin to sidestep puddles.
At work, the internet is slower than before, the boss is absent, and your salary remains a rumour. You scroll through the news—a senator just bought a mansion in Dubai. A governor has taken his dog to Germany for medical checkup. Another factory has shut down. There are plans to build the biggest church in the world to replace the dead factory. ASUU and doctors are threatening to embark on an indefinite strike. Herders have killed twenty people in a suburban close to the town you are resident. You drop your phone to give time to the wall television. Someone in government is speaking of hope, but even the TV screen looks unconvinced.
Evening comes. You use the tip a customer had given you to take a bus home, squeezed between bodies that smell of frustration. Lagos traffic reminds you that time is not yours. A man beside you is talking about leaving the country, but you actually know he won’t. He thinks the man in power is a taxman, eating fat from the sweat of an impoverished populace.
“It is better to die than remain in this country,” Mr I-Want-To-Leave-The-Country says in response to a fellow passenger who prefers death to living in an economically and politically deformed nation.
“Do not say that,” a woman in the back row says. “Once there is life, there is hope.”
“You are right,” he agrees with her for the sake of peace.
The driver negotiates a bend in the road that the bus almost skids, and passengers are tossed in their seats, hitting their heads on the roof and sides of the bus. There are religious voices in the air. Each passenger is covering the bus and the road with the blood of whatever they worship and believe in. The moment the bus settles, the passengers snap out of their prayerful trance and burst into fierce rage. Is the driver trying to kill them?
“Did anybody give you money to kill us?” someone asks.
“I tink sey to die better pass,” the driver jokes.
The streets are dark when you arrive, but no one is afraid. Fear is for those who have options.
You enter your room, light a candle, and stare at the inert, dusty ceiling fan. Outside, the nation breathes, unfazed, unmoved. Indifferent, just like you.
Ornguze Nashima Nathaniel, also known as ONN, is a Nigerian writer from Benue State. He writes in his self-coined literary style called Acheyinka, which is a style that centres on the dynamic use of language, combining the clarity and accessibility of Chinua Achebe’s prose with the poetic richness, strangeness, and symbolic depth that characterise Wole Soyinka’s writing. His short story “Emerencia” won the 2024 Author Zigo Prize. He was the runner-up in the 2023 ANA Short Story Prize for Children’s Literature, and was shortlisted and longlisted for the DKA Short Story Prize and the Quramo Writers’ Prize, all in 2024, respectively. He also won the Publisher’s Choice Award in the 2025 July leg of the Publish’d Afrika Short Story Competition. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lọ́unlọ́un Journal, Pawners Paper Magazine, Afrocritik, Writers Space Africa, Asemana Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of “Profiles: The People I Crossed,” a compelling memoir-in-profiles published in 2025. When he is not writing, he watches great films and listens to good music.
