Which Men?
Go on. Say it again.
“Happy international Men’s Day”
Let the words hang in the air, thick with the smoke from Eruku.
Let them echo in the silent classrooms of Kebbi, where a principal’s chalk-dust courage was met not with applause, but with a final, brutal period.
What is happy?
Is it the headline that greets the dawn?
A General, fallen. Not to a foreign foe, but to the cancer within.
Is it the scripture verse, interrupted by a burst of hellfire on a pulpit?
The holy text now stained, a testament to a faith that wasn’t enough shield.
You ask who we celebrate
And the gallery you paint is a portrait of our purgatory.
The betrayers, in suits finer than any royal robe.
The politicians, our modern Neros, fiddling with algorithms while the nation burns.
The judges, who sell the gavel to the highest bidder, making a mockery of the scales.
The extortioners in uniform, trading our dignity for a few soiled notes.
The slave traders, who package our future in shipping containers and false promises.
These are the men who hold the microphones.
These are the faces that glare from the screens.
So you ask, and the question is a gut-punch:
Which men are we celebrating?
Are we to raise a glass to the vultures?
To toast the architects of our collective tomb?
NO.
Perhaps… perhaps we are not here to celebrate the men on the pedestals.
But to mourn the men in the trenches.
The man who was a principal, who became a shield, whose last act was a lesson in sacrifice.
The men in the pews, whose prayers were cut short, whose faith was their final fortress.
The unnamed men, breaking their backs in fields and factories, for a pittance that can’t buy peace.
The fathers who cannot look their children in the eye, because the future they promised has been stolen and sold.
We are not celebrating the kings.
We are whispering the names of the fallen.
We are screaming for the silenced.
So this day…this “Happy” day…
Let it not be a celebration.
Let it be a reckoning.
A mirror held up to the rot and the ruin.
A day to ask, in a voice raw with pain:
What kind of men have we become?
And what kind of men will we choose to be?
The celebration is not for what is.
But for what must be.
For the men who, against this tidal wave of agony, still choose to be shields.
Still choose to be builders.
Still choose to be good.
Until that day dawns, do not wish me a Happy ‘Men’s’ day
Wish me strength.
Wish me a voice.
Wish me the courage to be one of the good ones, in a world that rewards the worst of us.
This day is not a feast.
It is a funeral for a conscience we have yet to bury.
And a battle cry for a humanity we are desperate to reclaim.
©TheVillageBoy.
(The figure man who loves Alphabets)
