Forget Independence Day. Forget Founders’ Day. Forget Greater Works. Forget Crossover Night.
Our most faithfully observed national event is the Annual Festival of Floodwaters, Floating Plastics and Official Sympathies—-a spectacular production that has enjoyed uninterrupted annual performances since the 1950s.
It has survived military regimes, civilian governments, constitutional amendments, economic reforms, development plans, donor conferences, and countless election manifestos. Nothing has managed to cancel it.
Its programme never changes.
The heavens faithfully open.
The drains predictably remain choked.
The city performs its annual imitation of Venice—only without the romance, the gondolas, the architecture, or the tourists.
Then comes the Grand Floating Exhibition.
Like every great art festival, this one transforms the entire capital into an open-air water gallery. Homes become temporary aquariums. Offices become islands.
Streets become rivers. Gutters become museums of our collective habits, and eventually the whole exhibition drifts majestically, like the ninth wonder of the world, towards the sea, where bewildered fish are compelled to admire humanity’s latest installation in plastic art.
On display are priceless collections of sachet-water wrappers, mountains of unanswered prayers, floating goats with existential questions, bewildered cows searching for dry land, anointing-oil bottles, plastic chairs, broken refrigerators, mattresses that have finally learnt to swim, church pews and pulpits seeking lifts to higher ground, abandoned tyres, coconuts, discarded campaign posters, and every imaginable object except the one exhibit the nation has searched for without success for over seventy years—- accountability.
Right on cue, the television cameras arrive.
Engineers solemnly explain why drains blocked by decades of neglect have become… blocked by decades of neglect. Architects produce colourful diagrams.
Town planners dust off master plans older than some Cabinet ministers. Environmental experts recommend demolishing structures built in waterways—the very same recommendation they made last year, the year before, and several governments ago.
Meanwhile, another beautifully printed report quietly begins its peaceful retirement on a government shelf, where it remains perfectly protected from rain, sunshine, public scrutiny, and the dangerous possibility of implementation.
Then come the politicians. They enter the festival waters from both sides in the same way they talk from both sides of their mouth. Television cameras faithfully record them rolling up expensive trousers and wading through knee-deep floodwater, ensuring the nation knows they too are in the situation we all find ourselves.
With admirable consistency, they express profound shock at an event that has occurred every rainy season for generations.
Sympathies pour more freely than the rain.
Promises flow faster than the floodwaters.
Committees are formed.
Task forces are inaugurated.
Investigations are announced into causes already known by schoolchildren, taxi drivers, market women and everyone except, apparently, those announcing the investigations.
Even those who promised to dredge lagoons and other water bodies in the city and turn them into tourist attraction sites but did anything also feature, bemoaning the situation.
Once again, we are assured that this unfortunate incident “will never happen again”—a statement that deserves its own lifetime achievement award for outstanding annual performance.
And because no national festival is complete without a closing ceremony, we gather for a state-led Prayer and Thanksgiving Service.
Our Republic appears convinced that God is both the Chief Drainage Engineer and the Minister responsible for Urban Planning.
One is therefore tempted to ask:
Thanksgiving for what?
For surviving?
For floating?
For discovering once again that water still obeys gravity?
Or for the comforting certainty that next year’s festival has already been scheduled, funded by neglect, sponsored by indifference, and guaranteed by institutional amnesia?
God faithfully sends the rain.
Nature faithfully obeys its laws.
The floods faithfully expose ours.
Once again, the water accomplishes the annual citywide clean-up that our institutions have promised for over seven decades.
The rains keep every appointment.
The floods never miss a deadline.
Only the solutions remain permanently… somewhere in the politician’s pipeline or in the pastor’s thanksgiving prayer.
By Amarkine Amarteifio
Artist.
Email— [email protected]
