BY REV FR GERALD NWAFOR
I mean literally, that the rainy season is coming. We need to get ready for the next seven months. You can also take it as an axiom since our people said that the wiseman doesn’t allow the rain, once they’ve seen it’s black cloud, to drench them (Onye ma ife adaekwe ka miri luluelu maa ya). So, no matter how you interpret the caption, you are on track. Literally, if you want to eat corn in the next three months, this is the perfect time. Clearing and planting season is now. If you are living in a lowland, be watchful and know when to move upland. Do not take anything for granted. If you are planning on reroofing your house, this is not the best time; please skip it. Do not trust the fortune tellers or diviners who say they have sent the rain packing. Rainwater doesn’t obey those shaman men.
My uncle Akanze still holds grudges against the rainmaker and the fortune teller who told him to remove the roof of his house 20 years ago. The rainmaker said he had pushed the water away from our village, and the fortune teller said he did not see any rain coming down in the next two weeks. The contractor was instructed to make sure that everything would happen within two weeks. The contractor was one of the finest our village could produce at that time. He got his equipment ready and removed all the roof in one day. That night it rained cats and dogs. Four hours of rain came down, his house was completely flooded, and his documents were swimming like ducks in his bedrooms and living rooms. To date, he is looking for the rainmaker and the fortune teller. The two have since relocated to another town and continue to deceive people.
It’s the rainy season; be careful and smart about what you do these seven months. If you have a place to go and you are not sure what the weather will be like at night, please stay home or make sure you get back home when you can still see the light of the day. The drainage system around our state is not in the best condition. (An aside: Let me use this opportunity to advise my brothers and sisters who throw their garbage into the drainage system whenever it’s raining. They should just stop. People should find a proper way to dispose of their garbage, not dump it into the drainage system. Back to real business.) If you are walking home when it’s raining, be careful; the roads are flooded, and local pickpockets have a field day.
If you choose to go the second route to see the rain as an idiom, maxim, or axiom, it’s perfect. It’s politics time, and the government just said it’s a direct primary. It means if you want to have a say on who will be the next president of our beloved country, you have to register with a party and vote for who will be the presidential candidate of your party. All the parties are registering now, so you have the opportunity to go and register. Do not allow the known rain to drench you. If Anambra can pull one million registered voters, I think we should be taken seriously on the political terrain of Nigeria. The current 200,000 voters don’t seem to move the needle at all. APC may not need your registration anymore since they have had their convention already and selected their candidates and party personnel; they are out of the equation. But those of us who are rooting for ADC and other small parties should go and register to be prepared for the rain coming in January 2027.
Another sidebar that we should pay attention to is the date of the election. January 16th, 2027. Americans would say “What the heck?” I have never seen a national election held in January. The Igbo people who will go home for Christmas cannot vote, especially in Lagos. This is a big rain coming to disenfranchise the Igbo people in the big cities in Nigeria. How can we go home for Christmas and rush back in the middle of January just to cast a vote? Let me advise brothers and sisters from the southeast. The celebration of Christmas of 2026 and the New Year of 2027 have been postponed until after the election. If we are serious about presenting a candidate, we should be ready to sacrifice anything. Christmas comes every year, but elections come in only one in four years. In four years, a good person can change the trajectory of Nigeria. The rain is coming, and it is coming with showers, lightning, and thunder in the political scene of Nigeria today. The southeast needs to get prepared, and the whole of Northern Nigeria should be worried, too. If you get it right this time, we thank God; if not, another four years of pain and misery.
Finally, do not allow this rainy season to pass by without achieving anything. When the world was mostly agricultural, that’s when the rich made their projection on how much wealth they would harvest because everything depended on how much land they were able to cultivate. Today, agriculture does not dominate our economy as it had, but that doesn’t mean we will neglect the rain coming. The man who left twenty tons of sharp sand for construction by the roadside was surprised when he woke up the following day without seeing a grain of sand on the spot, simply because it had rained a day before and the sand had been dropped on the flood pathway. Without any permission from the landlord, the flood swept away everything.
Do not stand in the way of the flood; it can be catastrophic. Be wise and obedient during this time. The elders have warned long ago that firewood fetched during the dry season is the one to be used during the rainy season (Nku onye kpalu na okochi ka oga anya na udu miri). It is the beginning of a new season, and we should be ready to adapt and re-adapt to the season. It is time for political horse trading, alignment, realignment, and conventions. The southeast should open its eyes and stop sleeping. Politics is not for the faint-hearted. I do not support the political philosophy of the president of Nigeria (Bola Tinubu), but I can not disagree with him when he said that power is not served à la carte. On the other hand, I disagree that it will be snatched, grabbed, and run away with. It’s politics: we can agree to disagree. There must be civility and open contest because it’s a game. The best team doesn’t win all the time. The rain is coming, be ready, Southeast, be ready, Nigerians.
