THIS MAN AND THIS OTHER MAN

He is an honest Man:
This Other Man who stood in front of you;
looked you squarely in the eye
with a steam of hatred sternly knotted on his brow
and says:
‘You, I will kill you!’
And then he digs a dagger into your heart!

He
is Man of his words: This Other Man!

But This Man!

This Man came like an angel
smiling even under the blast of the foulest of farts!
as if he was crystalized out of all the stains in our fibre.

He knew very well we did not accept the killers.

So he came in a different way;
collected our frustrations and fears and tears;
caressed them into a sensational wrap of hope
and he performed it like spoken-word poetry
to our wails and cheers
like the great griots of his half-ancestry.

And we hailed him with such hailing;
such complete abandon
we did not care he used a tele-prompter!
And Christo! Christo! You’d have looked on with envy from your heaven!

So we made him president.

But This Man!
After we gave him power;
after we decided he should be the one to carry our hope up Afajato and
up and up!
He waited for nightfall;
lurked in the dark;
went behind us
and stabbed us in the back!