Our Markets Now Like Court Yards of Psychiatry Hospitals, By Amaechi

For these past two months, I have had to somehow accompany my wife to the market a few times. On each occasion I made a couple of tragic observations.

Meanwhile, when we first relocated to Enugu from Port Harcourt, when we shopped, any market was as good as the other as we found the Coal City generally more purchaser friendly than the Garden City.

However, a little over a year into our relocation, we have joined our neighbors to scour the town in search of where to get reprieve from the spiralling prices of commodities that are tumbling well beyond the grasp of everyone in the country today.

My wife now goes to the farther New (Aria) Market, for her purchases. I remember when she had psychedelically strutted along the paved Ogbete Market like a tourist with superior airs induced by superior purse.

Now, as she plods through the muds and wades the floods of New Market, she continues to think of checking out the Orie Ugwogo, hoping this far out of town Nike market could make a pinch of difference.

What is chasing my wife around the whole market of Enugu is the same monster driving almost every Nigerians crazy, everywhere they are in Nigeria today. From Sokoto to Port Harcourt and Lagos to Maidugiri.

You leave your house with a thousand Naira, by the time you get to the market, it has dropped half in value! I hope this government will just try and arrest the Naira slide to the Dollar at N419. Nothing could be a more befitting benchmark!

Meanwhile, everywhere I went with her in the market people quarreled, cursed and lamented. They shed tears of regret. They lampooned the band of deceivers who had brought in a poverty afflicter; a bigoted sectionalist trapped in the past with little to offer more than how to divert the national patrimony to his people he see as worthy alone for anything meaningful from the government. Curses. Curses and more curses flowing in profuse frustration from every mouth that still had the strength to say anything!

And so shopping is no longer a pleasure. It is now searing pain. It is such that each time we went to the market, we trade the little stable mind we have with hypertension. Our BP rises with the ever rising prices of food stocks and essential commodities that are also disappearing increasingly from shop racks. The prospects of the looming famine as prophesized by TB Joshua is freaking our people out.

My wife ails for many days after every time she shops. She hovers at the brink. How can the 1.5kg custard can she bought last week at N450 now sell at N900? Okay. She had to buy corn and millet to prepare akamu paste herself. I had to borrow an empty plot nearby for a grow all Garden.  This is the time one appreciates a well brought up woman her mother had involved in her own domestic activities. This is the time it pays to have been a village survivor like I am.

But then the corn she bought also tripled cost. Same as beans, rice, agbugbu, okpa, rice and everything in the market. Last time we bought half a bag of rice at N8000. When I priced it, I was told to pay N11000! When I got home, I transfered the remainder of the bag into my bedroom wardrobe!

From now onwards, I dispense it directly to the pot to avoid any accidental padding. I may have to also measure and cut the yam with ruler. Akubuzo, the miserly headmaster, is full of sense after all!

And if Nigerians like, let us learn from this history repeating itself. History is important in the affairs of man. The first consequence of our abolishing history from what our children learn in school is this Buhari tragedy playing out on us like the famed Lost TV serial.

Our statecraft has crashed in the middle of the jungle and we are everywhere and nowhere; in the present and in the past and the future, all morphing in a terrifying nightmare. Otherwise, the mass of the under 40 years Nigerians that recklessly voted in this government would have known how scorching and the unforgettable squeeze Buhari's first outing had been.

Anyway, my children now know the only two times Nigeria has ever been in recession in its history is under the same Buhari. They learnt it the hard way. One as a coup staging soldier that dismantled democracy and one as a civilian that has enthroned hunger and blistering hardship. However, I never knew I would ever have to desperately run around to feed my children as my father had done in 1984.

And to add to the injury, Buhari takes no responsibility. After all, Aisha would always have enough tuwo da mia to cook for him. So, as he blames Jonathan, don't blame me if I also blame my father who died 18 years ago for my inability to feed my family today. As we say "Sai Baba poverty!" I cannot wait for the day Tinubu and co would mount the campaign podium again, that is, if we survive. It will surely be interesting, to see how far or near they are from the madding crowd.