October 1, 1960.
A flag rose.
A name was spoken.
Someone called it independence.

Sixty-six years later
the same roads still break
under the same rains.
The same hospitals still ask patients
to buy their own gloves,
their own light,
their own chance at staying alive.

Poverty is not an accident here.
It is maintained.
Unemployment sits in living rooms
like an unpaid relative
who never leaves.
Insecurity walks the streets
with more confidence
than the police.

We say we are free
while the chains
have only changed their color.
Some of the hands that tighten them
once shouted for liberty
with the rest of us.
Now they dine with the old masters
and call it strategy.

Brilliant minds pack their certificates
and leave.
The ones who stay
watch their degrees
collect dust
in jobs that have nothing to do
with what they studied.
Less than one per cent
work with what they trained for.
The rest learn to survive
on the gap between knowledge
and need.

Nothing moves in this kind of poverty—
not money,
not thought,
not the will to imagine
something else.
A country drained of its best minds
cannot pretend to have motion.
It only has the appearance of standing still
while everything valuable
quietly exits.

The worst part
is that many who rule
came from the same lack
they now protect.
They know the weight of empty pockets
and still choose
to keep the scale tipped.
Some want the chair forever.
Poverty is useful
when the goal is permanence.

We claim a nation.
We inherit captivity
with better branding.

The question is no longer
when the flag went up.
The question is older now,
heavier,
and still unanswered:

Where do we go from here
when the door we were told was open
has been locked again
from the inside?

 

 

 

 

Photo by Muhammad-Taha Ibrahim on Unsplash