What do corpses taste like, Alhaji!

How many, Alhaji?
Tell me,
How many broken necks,
How many skulls split like coconuts
before you unclench your jaw
And answer?

Dangote trucks

Yes, your name painted bold on their bellies,
your shadow stretching across the highways,
They do not carry cement alone.
They carry coffins.
They drag futures by the spine.
They grind generations into paste.

A mother and her twins,
flattened like a ripe mango
beneath a soldier’s boot.
Her husband came to the scene
and gathered what was left of them
with a nylon bag.
Do you know what it means, Alhaji?
to pick your family like scraps of meat
from a butcher’s table?

Children on their way to school,
their lunchboxes burst open,
rice and beans scattered
and mixed with their small intestines.
Their shoes are still shiny,
But the feet inside… gone.

Young men waiting for work,
dreams folded in envelopes,
letters of application in their pockets,
one minute standing,
The next minute, ribbons of flesh
dangling from iron fenders.

We bury,
and bury,
and bury again,
while Earth groans in constipation,
too many young bones jammed
in her bowels.

Our hands stink of formalin.

Nigeria has become a nation
of professional mourners.

So I ask you again, Alhaji:
What does it taste like?
The breast milk drying
in a mother’s body
because her infant was crushed
on the roadside?
The groans of a father
Who digs the grave of his last son?
The air, fouled with the stink of blood
and roasted flesh,
After your machines eat
another family whole?

Does wealth, Alhaji, sweeten
When stirred with blood?
Does cement harden quicker
When mixed with sorrow?
Does your bread soften
when kneaded with grief?
Does your empire rise taller
when mortared with bones?

How many bodies, Alhaji,
must be counted in the tally
of your fortune?
A hundred? A thousand?
Or will you keep counting until
Every family in this country
lights a candle in your name;
not for long life,
But for the death you deliver daily?

How many more?
How many before your factories pause?
Before you stand in front of the nation
and confess:
“Yes, my trucks have killed,
and killed, and killed again.
I know the taste of corpses now.”

Alhaji,
We are no fools.
We see you.
We know you know.
We are watching.
The roads know your name.
The graves know it louder.

And one day,
no matter how tall your towers,
no matter how wide your fortune,
your empire won’t escape the question:

What do corpses taste like, Alhaji?
What do corpses taste like, Alhaji?

Majekodunmi 0. Ebhohon is a poet, media practitioner, and playwright. Author of the Black revolutionary play ‘The Great Delusion’, he writes from Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria