By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
Chinua Achebe has stolen my thunder by stating that the trouble with Nigeria is leadership.
In my own book, the trouble with Nigeria is a house.
Yes, the source of the plenteous troubles of Nigeria is a house that is deadlier than a bush-doctor’s juju rock.
It never ceases to amuse me when all makes of characters fight to the death in the struggle to live in that house of death.
In the Bible, at Matthew 16:18, Jesus said: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church…”
In Nigeria, an evil genius made an imitative claim, to wit, “Upon this rock I will build the villa of my evil empire”.
And thus Nigeria was bequeathed with a fatal house, a villa haunted day and night by very vile and evil spirits.
The trouble with the house started from the very beginning because Evil Genius did not pack into the place under normal circumstances.
Everybody knows that it is not with ordinary eyes that harassed mortals run into the embrace of the born-again “Jehovah Sharp-Sharp” churches.
Evil Genius fled to this house of horror following the hot pursuit of a firing squad of hardened plotters who smoked him out of his barracks bedroom in Lagos.
It suffices to say that ever since Evil Genius made this Abuja house the abode of power the country has known no progress whatsoever.
The visibly shaken self-advertised “Master of Violence” that ran for his dear life from Lagos all the way to Abuja saw the clear and present need to fortify the house against all spiritual attacks, metaphysical onslaughts and terrestrial diabolism.
I have it on good authority that hoary marabouts and voodoo grandmasters were put to diabolic service from all corners of the globe to root forever the life tenancy of Evil Genius and his family deep inside the house on the rock.
It is against this cabalistic background that any wannabe so-called occupant of the house is doomed to occult failure.
This way, the civilian buddy of Evil Genius who sought to take over the house instantly saw the dastardly annulment of his popular charge.
Even when so much heat was put on Evil Genius to quit the house it’s remarkable that he told anybody willing to listen that he was merely “stepping aside”.
The Interim Man who was put in the house could not get a hang on the spiritual and underworld underpinnings of the place until he was shabbily kicked out.
The Goggled One who kicked out the Interim Man had to stay holed up in Lagos for quite some time for the haunted Abuja house to be metaphysically detoxified for human occupation.
The tough Goggled One did not want to dash in where angels feared to tread.
Once the Goggled One got into the house he upped the ante in making the ornate palace his permanent home.
He reportedly ferried in a million blind mice from around the Sahara Desert into the house to keep all Nigerians eternally blind to his antics at self-perpetuation.
Even so, the Goggled One did not reckon with the short-time service charge of Indian apples of kaput.
And thus the Goggled One expired, giving place to a soldier of fortune who just took as plenteous money as he could in nine fast months and simply ran away from the grigri of the haunted house.
By special arrangement a traditionally medicated old soldier who had the singular distinction of championing an earlier cause of defeating apartheid in South Africa via juju was catapulted into the dangerous house in Abuja.
The old soldier enjoyed two rounds of this animal called man in the house and then somehow manufactured to enjoy a third term.
Everything around the old soldier cried foul and told him pointedly: “Fear God!”
It then became incumbent on the old soldier to hire a former chemistry teacher to take over his place in the house of death.
“Umoru, are you dead?” the old soldier asked the sinewy former teacher of chemistry.
Of course it is only death wish that would make any man agree to occupy a house reluctantly vacated by that rustically medicated man who propounded the immortal theory that apartheid in South Africa could only be defeated by juju.
Umoru may have taught chemistry earlier in life but the type of chemical substances assailing him in the house were definitely not the normal chemical compounds that he was used to in the Bunsen burner of the chemistry laboratory.
He was grossly unprotected against the relentless onslaught of supernatural Scud missiles and preternatural Molotov cocktails directed acutely at his pericarditic heart!
Umoru floated between life and death from the house to the airport and back again until the so-called doctrine of necessity entailed putting the Clueless One in the house.
The Clueless One had to perforce be chased out of the house, but I have to stop writing now because the mad cow disease coming from the troublesome house has kidnapped me and everybody here.