4 years I have carried water in a basket for a country that drinks from a poisoned well and calls the poison heritage. Since 2022 I have bled gigs, gambled the roof over my children’s heads, and stood like a lone tree in a burning field while my own people spat into the only spring that was not already sewage. You do not teach a goat the value of yam by letting it finish the barn. Tribalism has blinded them so completely they would rather perish with their own than live under a man who counts the store. I have never emptied my veins into who sits in Aso Rock the way I emptied them into Peter Obi. He is no messiah. He is the only hand in that pit that has not already sold the rope. The steam is ash. The bones are hollow. This is the last dance, and a lame horse does not get a second race. Detoun crossed the water, landed in UK and suddenly the leopard’s spots looked like silk. If you cannot beat them, you crawl into their kennel and bark. A dog that has tasted the master’s meat forgets the chain. APC will turn the ocean inside out, drag the sky down by its hair, and piss on the graves of the poor to keep the throne warm. These are principalities with passports. And the ones still choking in the smoke sit on their oars, praying the storm will apologise. You cannot wake a man who pretends to sleep while the house burns. 2027 is not a ballot. It is the knife at the throat of the carcass. We cut the rot out, or the rot finishes the cutting. No more half-steps. No more borrowed breath. Last blood on the floor, or we perish like fools who chose tribe over air and called the coffin a throne. "Tí a bá sunkún, à má ríran" - as we dey cry, we go still dey see road © @BlazeRegent #GoodMorning #Nigeria #PeterObi

It's 10 days since her birthday and I can't stop thinking, all she asked for was gelato and shawarma. Not a hall. Not a cake with her name on it. Just the real thing, the kind that does not come in a plastic tub from a shelf. She had not tasted gelato in years. In Ibadan, that name used to answer itself. Paris Bakery, Ring Road. The children still say it the way people say a place that once kept a promise. You chose your own flavours. You watched them fold together. The floor shone. The air smelled of sugar and cold metal, not of surrender. The last time we stood there was 2022. The owner was already flying: a phone shop, one of the better shawarma spots, a hotel, a second bakery opposite Palms Mall. A man planting trees because the soil still answered. We went back carrying a small joy, the way you carry water you are sure the well still holds. The well had gone dry and nobody had bothered to cover the mouth. What met us was not a shop. It was the ghost of a shop still wearing the old sign. The chillers that once displayed the colours stood dead. We asked for gelato and a hand went into a freezer and came out with half-empty pans, the way a tired woman brings out frozen pepper for a pot that will not feed the house. No display. No choice. No aura. The place looked like a room after the owners had already left in their minds. We stood there bewildered, then we left. A birthday wish, smaller than a fist, and even that the city could not keep. A tree does not die the day it stops fruiting. It dies the season the roots are salted and everyone pretends the leaves are only resting. Four years is a long season. Fuel that eats the margin before the customer arrives. Power that fails in the hour the freezer must hold. Naira that thins between the invoice and the supplier. Rent that does not hear excuses. One by one the small lights go out, and the street learns a new silence. Paris Bakery did not fall alone. It fell the way so many others have fallen: not with a notice on the door, but with the slow emptying of what used to be full. Hotels that became shells. Spots that became memories. Men who were planting in 2022 now sweeping the floor of what remains. When the river is poisoned at the source, it is the farms downstream that wither first. The big houses can import their cold. The small shop cannot. There is no law-abiding owner of a freezer, a kiln, a sewing machine, or a single delivery bike who looks at these four years and asks for the same weather again. Only the man who eats from the public pot, and does not bake, can pray for the continuation of a drought he does not feel. The country is not dying in a speech. It is dying in the pan that comes out half empty, and in the child who will one day stop saying the name of a place that used to be sweet. #TinubuMustGo #PETEROBI2027