“Wow! It smells like Christmas.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that this season reminds me of Christmas.”

“But it is Christmas.”

“Really?”

“Yea man, there’s Christmas in the air, that’s what you are smelling.”

“I see.”

“You are smelling the dry weather and dusty roads. You know what I always say about this season?”

“What’s that?”

“‘O what fun it is to throw banger on a dusty harmattan night’.”

“Well…”

“Well what? Be merry man, be merry. This is December for crying out loud.”

“Oh, stop that your ‘crying out loud’ nonsense.”

“What’s eating you bro?”

“‘Crying out loud, crying out loud’, some people have been crying out loud for about 260 days now and nobody gives a damn about their cries.”

“Who? For wia be dat?”

“Please, please, please get serious man. Everywhere across the land. And have you never heard of Chibok Girls?”

“Oh, that? I never knew you were part of the Bring Back Our…”

“Oh shut up man! That’s usually the problem with some of you in this country. Bring Back Our Girls is not an association or club, it’s a movement. And I don’t have to be from Chibok to identify with the girls.”

“I know bro. Just that sometimes we are too preoccupied with so many different issues in this country that we tend to forget about the Chibok girls.”

“Truly I don’t know what this country is doing to rescue the girls, assuming they are all still alive and safe at all.”

“I pray they are. God will not let any harm come upon them.”

“So typical…you just mentioned God now, right? God has endowed us with common sense to act.”

“I guess we are trying.”

“‘Trying’? That’s what we ever do and nothing but try.”

“What would you rather we did then?”

“Results…that’s all we want. The world is not interested in excuses but in results.”

“Hmm…”

“Truly I don’t know how our government officials sleep soundly every night since the girls were abducted. It must be either their conscience is in slumber or outright dead.”

“I think I get your point there.”

“I wonder what Chibok is like this very moment.”

“I can’t imagine it myself.”

“There would be dust in the air no doubt, maybe cold nights too but the setting must be eerie and funereal. For them, the smell in the air would not evoke Christmas or love. It would be the continued reminder of the forced absence of their sources of joy, the very girls who last year sang carols in the town are still unaccounted for. So how would they know it’s Christmas?”

“Sad, very sad bro. It’s a shame!”

“And it’s not only the Chibok community. This Christmas-lessness affects many others who suffered preventable losses during the year. All the people bombed to death across the country through acts of insurgence yet nobody is made to account. And what about the scores of young people killed in the Immigration Service job recruitment scam?”

“I almost forgot that too. And the minister and other officials in that ministry are going to celebrate elaborately this Christmas.”

“I can bet you; hampers, rice, chicken etc have been exchanged severally by all these inept officials to celebrate their year of grand failure. And they do so because they don’t give a damn.”

“And they know that we the citizens perpetually suffer from amnesia.”

“You can say that again.”

“As if that is not enough, many workers are owed salaries for some months, yet governments are not scaling down on their elaborate festivities. I saw some state governors donate huge sums to their political parties for the next election.”

“And we are talking about austerity? Shouldn’t that affect public spending?”

“Good question.”