THE ELITE ARE TENANTS SELLING THE HOUSE

It’s time to serve an eviction notice, writes TONY EDEMENAHA There is a joke that has survived three generations in my village. The landlord’s son never sleeps in the house his father built with mud, sweat, and palm wine debts. He lives abroad, collects rent in dollars through Western Union, and sends voice notes from London: “My people, please manage the leaking roof. Pour cement and hope. Maintain the spirit of the house.” When the walls finally crack and the rain enters the parlor, he books a flight, lands with contractors, sells the land to a foreign investor, and calls it “urban renewal.” The tenants who raised children in that house are told to relocate with “compensation” that cannot buy a wheelbarrow. That joke is no longer funny. That joke is Nigeria. Our elite are not landlords. Landlords have responsibility. Landlords sweep the compound, fix the gate, and pray for tenants who pay on time. Our elite are tenants. Caretakers who sneaked into the master bedroom in 1999, changed the locks, printed new keys for their cousins, and began selling the house room by room while the owners—you and I, the bus driver, the nurse, the corper, the market woman—watch from the backyard. The house is Nigeria. The furniture is our commonwealth: the oil beneath our feet, the schools our parents built with communal labor, the hospitals named after heroes, the roads that were supposed to connect destinies, the very fragile idea of “we.” For decades, a small, insatiable clique has been auctioning it piece by piece, and they have perfect names for the crime: privatization, deregulation, commercialization, public-private partnership. The language is polished. The theft is not. They are tenants selling the house, and they are in a hurry because they know the lease is expiring. I remember when NEPA was the national joke. At least NEPA was our joke. Then NEPA became PHCN, and PHCN became eleven Discos with names that sound like energy drinks and no electricity to show for it. Overnight, darkness was “privatized.” We were promised competition, efficiency, and light that would not apologize. What arrived was estimated billing, a mathematical miracle where you pay for kilowatts you never consumed, like paying rent for a room you never entered. The tenant took what belonged to all—refineries built with petro-naira and national pride—ran them aground through decades of deliberate “mismanagement” and turnaround maintenance that never turned anything around. He has not sold them yet, but he keeps them rusting on the veranda while we import fuel at midnight prices and call it policy. It is the ancient art of borrowing your neighbor’s car, draining the fuel, scratching the paint with a key, then parking it to rot while he tells you to buy your own car. The tenant burns the house to justify selling the ashes, then charges you for the smoke. Walk into many public primary schools across the country today and you will see classrooms without desks, blackboards that have not been painted in years, and children learning in overcrowded rooms. Meanwhile, the same government that cannot fund basic school infrastructure budgets billions for the upkeep of presidential jets. That is what it means to push a nation to the precipice of disintegration: when the future learns in neglect while the present flies first class and calls it sacrifice. Corruption in Nigeria no longer hides behind curtains. It has graduated. It wears agbada, speaks in bullet points, and gives interviews on Arise TV. It calls itself policy reform. Subsidy is removed, but no safety net is woven. The naira is floated, but only the tenant knows where the tide will land. Hospitals are commissioned three times with the same ribbon, yet the minister flies to London for a headache. Roads are re-commissioned every election cycle, but your car suspension dies before your salary lands. Greed has dressed up as governance, and governance has become a WhatsApp status update. The metaphor is cruel and simple: they are eating the seed yam and then organizing press conferences to lament famine. They vandalize public healthcare through neglect, then build private hospitals in their village and charge you in dollars. They collapse the naira through round-tripping, then convert their allowances and estacodes to greenbacks before landing at Heathrow. They preach patriotism on Monday and move their families abroad on Tuesday. The tenant sets the house on fire, stands outside with a gold-plated fire extinguisher, and sends you an invoice for the water. If you want wit, here it is, sharp and bitter: In Nigeria, you do not become a billionaire by inventing anything. You do not need a lab or a startup pitch. You only need proximity to the man who allocates the commonwealth. If you want to become a saint, try surviving on minimum wage while watching that same man explain on Channels TV that “sacrifice is necessary for national rebirth.” Sacrifice, like soup, is always for the diners. The chef never tastes the pepper. But the cruelest cut is not the stealing. It is the insensitivity. While we queue for fuel that costs a day’s wage, they queue for chieftaincy titles that cost a nation’s conscience. While we bury children whose education was paused by strikes, they bury their shame under layers of PR and philanthropy that is just recycled loot. While mothers sell sachet water in Lagos traffic under the sun, their wives buy handbags in Paris that could fund a maternity ward in Jigawa. A nation is not just GDP, debt-to-GDP ratio, and investor confidence. A nation is the look in a corper’s eyes when she receives her allawee and knows it cannot rent a room. It is the nurse who treats accident victims by candlelight because the generator drank the diesel. It is the graduate with First Class honors riding Okada because the job market was privatized too. When the elite privatize hope, they do not just sell assets. They sell humanity in bulk, discounted, no warranty. We are not poor because God forgot our coordinates. We are poor because a few tenants decided the house was theirs to strip. And to keep the stripping quiet, they push us to disintegration. Ethnic tension here, religious outrage there, Twitter wars over trivia. Divide and loot. It is the oldest trick in the tenant’s handbook. If the tenants in the parlor are fighting over tribe, they will not notice the man in the master bedroom removing the roof. If we are busy shouting “my people versus your people,” we will not ask, “Where is our money?” But houses have owners. And tenants, however powerful, however many security aides they travel with, can be evicted. The law of houses is older than the law of men. The eviction notice will not arrive on embossed letterhead with a government seal. It will arrive quietly, in millions. It will arrive as PVCs pulled from drawers and dusted off. It will arrive as citizens who refuse to clap for mediocrity because the man danced at a rally. It will arrive as market women who stop accepting excuses and start asking for accounts. It will arrive as students who demand lecturers, not loans. It will arrive as a generation that finally understands: a country is not a company to be liquidated for shareholder profit. A country is a home. You do not burn down your home because the caretaker is wicked. You change the caretaker. You stop renting your future to people who treat it like a short-let apartment on Airbnb. To the elite reading this: the music is fading. You cannot privatize the air we breathe forever. You cannot sell the foundation and expect the roof to hold through the next rainy season. You cannot auction the water and then complain when the well runs dry. The house is creaking, yes, but it still stands because millions of ordinary Nigerians—okada riders, tailors, teachers, cleaners, farmers—hold it up daily with their battered humanity. Their resilience is not permission for your greed. It is proof that the house is worth saving, even from you. So here is the notice, served hot and without sugar: Pack your rapacity. Return the keys. Stop selling the windows. Stop auctioning the gates. The owners are awake, and the owners are home. And to the rest of us: stop admiring the tenant’s new agbada while your children sleep on bare floor. Stop clapping for the man who is auctioning your inheritance and calling it reform. Stop confusing noise for leadership. The house is ours. The land is ours. The future is ours. It is time we acted like it, spoke like it, voted like it, and demanded like it. The eviction starts now. One ballot at a time. One question at a town hall at a time. One refusal to accept “that is how it has always been” at a time. Tenants who sell the house must learn that houses have owners. And owners, when pushed to the precipice, remember that they have hands, voices, and votes. The house will stand. But only after the tenants leave. Edemenaha, poet and social commentator, writes from Asaba