Abia: A Feast for Carrion
Beneath a sun bloated and jaundiced, Abia’s carcass lay rotting—a grotesque banquet for the damned. Flies blackened the air, their drone a ceaseless hymn to decay, as they crawled over the state’s necrotic flesh. Roads split like rancid fruit, oozing sewage into stagnant pools where mosquitoes bred like whispers of plague. Schools, their roofs peeled back like skullcaps, hosted colonies of bats and fungi. In the markets, the stench of death clung to wilted produce and rusted stalls, while vultures circled above Umuahia’s government house, their shadows stitching a shroud over the land.
Here, corruption was not metaphor but biology: maggots seethed in the state’s coffers, fattened on ₦150 billion in debt. Flies—contractors with false invoices, politicians with greased palms—sucked at phantom projects, their bellies distended with stolen billions. The people, skeletal and scabbed, scavenged through the waste, their children’s bellies swollen with hunger, eyes hollow as the promises of dead regimes. Even the vultures grew sluggish, glutted on the carcass of a state left to putrefy.
Otti’s Crucible: Scrubbing the Sepsis
Then came the interloper—Otti, gloved in resolve, mask clamped over nose and mouth—to carve rot from the corpse. His tools: forensic audits sharp as bone saws, reforms that burned like lye. Bulldozers bit into mountains of refuse, unearthing decades of festering plastic, rot, and the stink of betrayal. Flies scattered, their drone drowned by the growl of machinery; vultures wheeled higher, denied their feast.
Yet the carcass resisted. In Osisioma’s industrial graveyard, where 3,000 factories moldered into toxic soil, maggot-men clung to rusted gates, demanding tribute. Bureaucratic larvae squirmed in the dark, spooling red tape to stall progress. Debt, though reduced, still reeked—a gangrenous limb Otti could not yet amputate. Each reform birthed new resistance: the old swarm hissed, “This carcass is ours.”
A Hymn for the Rotting
Behold the feast—
Flies thick as curse-words,
Vultures stitching the sky,
Maggots drunk on stolen gold.
O Abia, who carved you open?
Who salted your fields with lies?
Now comes the surgeon,
Digging graves for rot,
Scraping pus from your wounds—
But oh, the stench lingers.
Dawn’s light, thin and tentative,
Trembles over the slaughterhouse.
The Relentless Calculus
Progress, here, is measured in flies dispelled and stench diluted: ₦30 billion tarmac smothering Port Harcourt Road’s festering sores; 10,000 ghost workers flushed from the system, their names now ash in the wind. Hospitals, once chambers of despair, blink awake—17 reborn with IV drips and hope. IGR climbs 132%, a trickle of lifeblood returning to veins long drained.
But resurrection is a fickle god. In Aba’s skeletal markets, butchers still hack meat under clouds of flies; mothers still swat mosquitoes from babies’ brows. Otti’s war is fought street by street, corpse by corpse, as the old order—vultures with human faces—plots its return.
The carcass twitches. Flies regroup. The surgeon sweats. Abia’s rebirth is not a miracle but a grisly excavation—a land clawing free from the belly of the grave, one maggot at a time.
Dr Chukwuemeka Ifegwu Eke writes from Yakubu Gowon University Nigeria
