Somehow, the feeling that it is approaching some end-time is irresistible these days. A fin de siècle is in the air. It is the last sigh of the marabou. You sometimes wake up in panic and then you wonder why you are panicking.

You know something will definitely go wrong. But you don’t know what or when. There is an apocalyptic foreboding abroad. To add to the surreal absurdist turn of events, it has been given out that the master of the house has taken to lecturing on security abroad while security at home has given up the ghost. This is the ultimate severance of sense from emotive sensors.

To add to the sense of eerie drama, you sometimes find yourself in the thick of a crowd running helter-skelter without really knowing what is pursuing them and to where. On an early morning stroll a few days earlier, yours sincerely suddenly found himself amidst a disorderly group of commuters, screaming and jumping about. In fright and panic, one was forced to join them.

“So why are you running?”, snooper asked the fellow in front of him, a stout youth with agrarian features.

“And why are you running, too?” the youth demanded without looking at his interlocutor.

“They say Boko Haram is here!” yours sincerely noted rather helplessly.

“Ah, Boko Haram is everywhere”, a voice boomed as if it was a supersonic loudspeaker.

“So, why are you asking me nonsense question? Run your own and I run my own”, the youth snapped’ startling one out of his wits.

“It appears rudeness has also become part of the national culture”, a humiliated snooper observed with a superior grimace. Meanwhile, the crowd appeared to have had a sudden change of mind and direction and was now running towards one.

There was something eerily discomfiting about a crowd you have been running with now suddenly running at you. One of them, a bearish-looking man with the features of a crazed cyclop, took a sudden lunge at one. This had the effect of jolting one back to reality. Nightmare stalks everywhere and night itself is pregnant mare.

The Nation