To the Citizen I Left Behind

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They think the shadow begins at the top. They write their academic papers and policy briefs on “bad governance” as if it were a sudden storm, a freak weather pattern that settled over the continent from some distant sky. They talk about embezzled billions, rigged voting booths, and crumbling roads like they are numbers on a ledger.

They do not know that the shadow is a living thing. They do not know it starts in the dark, quiet corners of a child’s room.

Let me tell you a story about the man you call your oppressor.

Long before power and corruption became his lovers, tangling themselves so deeply into his sheets that there was no space left in his humanity for compassion or understanding, there was just a boy.

He lived in an unforgiving society. You know the one. The world where the unfortunate are discarded like plastic wrappers on the red dirt roads of the capital. The world where a mother’s cry for medicine is met with the cold shrug of a clinic clerk who hasn’t been paid in six months.

As a child, he watched the machinery of neglect grind the good people down to dust. He learned early that to be vulnerable was to be invisible. He looked out at a sea of faces, a world full of strangers that remained entirely unknown, entirely indifferent to his survival.

The corruption of his soul started right there. It wasn’t a grand betrayal; it was a slow, agonizing adaptation. He realized that in a land where resources are treated like a finite carcass, you either become the vulture or you remain the meat.

When he finally climbed the steps of the ministry, he didn’t do it to destroy his country. He did it to ensure he would never have to beg a stranger for his life again.

But power is an insatiable partner. It demands your absolute attention.

The first thing to go was his memory of the dust.

The second was the sound of the vernacular spoken by the women in the market, replaced by the crisp, sterile hum of high-end air conditioning.

The final piece was his capacity to see you as human.

Over time, the hunger mutated. The money stopped being a shield and became the point of the game. Every contract signed with an inflated markup, every public fund diverted into a foreign account, was just another new reason to foster hate, hate for the system that made him this way, and hate for the citizens whose suffering reminded him too much of the boy he killed to get here.

He looks out the tinted window of his armored SUV today, watching you navigate the potholes, dodging the bribes demanded by police officers who are just smaller versions of himself. He sees you, but he does not know you. You are just a statistic in his empire of survival.

Here is the bitter truth, the one that twists the knife in the gut of this republic:

You buy into the lie that he is a monster from a different species. You march, you protest, you curse his name in the quiet of your homes, praying for a savior to topple his regime.

But look closer at the ripples of his bad governance. Look at how it deforms the everyday African life.

When the state fails, the citizen mimics the state.

When you pay a bribe to skip the line at the passport office, is that not his shadow? When a headmaster demands a “favor” to admit a bright, poor child into a school, is that not his touch? When we look at the beggar on the street corner and harden our hearts, walking past because we are too tired, too broke, too broken to care, we are speaking his language.

The tragedy of his corruption is not just that he stole your future. It is that he successfully taught you how to survive without a soul. He recreated the very unforgiving society that birthed him, ensuring that the next generation of broken children will grow up to fight for his seat.

He is not your ruler. He is your mirror.

And until we break the glass, the shadow will only grow longer.

With a heavy heart,

The Ghost of What We Could Have Been

Written by

DMT

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