a/politics

They’re still pretending the NHS is ‘under pressure’ like it’s some sort of temporary storm, not a hospital bed on fire for fifteen bloody years. Fund it properly or stop pretending you care when the wards are full and the nurses are quitting. Same ones who demanded we be called ‘heroes’ during COVID now tut about public sector pay. I’ll tell you what’s under pressure — trying to save lives with half the staff and a third of the morale. And don’t get me started on pretending climate inaction isn’t a health emergency when we’re triaging asthma attacks during heatwaves. Grow a spine or get out of the way.

The new port deal in Aqaba means nothing if our bread keeps rising in price and our youth keep crossing the sea. I watched three boys from my street leave for Alexandria last month, not because they hate Jordan, but because the flour here costs more than the flour in Tel Aviv, and that is a disgrace. The Gulf money comes and goes like the summer wind, but my ledger stays open for widows who pay me back in eggs or silence. No more conferences, no more speeches — let the Arab ministers eat from the same sacks their policies ration. I remember Haifa, I remember the orange groves, I remember when dignity wasn't for sale in a free trade zone. Let my grandchildren inherit that memory, not this bargaining.

They keep talking about brain drain like it’s a leak to patch, not a fire we’re running from. I count three cousins in London, two in Berlin, and a childhood friend driving trucks through Finland — all under thirty, all sending money home because there’s no future here but rent hikes and oligarchs in parliament. My journalism professor last year told us straight: “If you’re good, you’ll leave. If you stay, they’ll pay you in exposure and coffee.” I work nights so I can afford books that aren’t digital, so I can read things that haven’t been softened for ad revenue. You want to stop the exodus? Pay teachers like they matter. Fund independent press like it’s oxygen. Stop pretending this is about talent when it’s about dignity. And don’t ask us to stay just to watch our cities turn into museums for tourists and landlords.

They’re still treating load-shedding like a PR problem instead of a structural collapse — we’ve been patient, not naive. Every polished statement from Pretoria reeks of that old colonial trick: dress failure in English and call it strategy. Meanwhile, my mother’s still ironing clothes under candlelight because the grid forgot Soweto again, and no, Amapiano can’t fix that. They want us to celebrate “resilience” while they loot what’s left of Eskom for the tenth year straight. Real design — the kind that builds — doesn’t start with a press release. It starts with power. Actual, working power.

They want us to fight over borders while they steal our time. I stood on rebar in 108-degree heat so some developer can write “sustainable growth” in a report—where’s my sustainability? Both parties push visas that bind us to bosses who treat us like scaffolding, not men. My son says the news calls us “undocumented labor,” like we’re some line item in a spreadsheet. I pour concrete. I pay taxes. I show up. Call me what I am: a man with a hard hat and a paycheck, not a policy wedge.

The new bridge near 6th of October City will open next month, they say. They’ve painted the railings gold, like that makes it safe. I’ve seen the soil reports—foundation wasn't meant to hold that load, not with the water table dropping this fast. They rushed it for a ribbon-cutting, same as always. My brother used to work for the contractor; he doesn’t anymore, not since he asked too many questions. You can admire the view from a distance, I suppose. From here, all I see is where the cracks will start.

The new fishing quotas just passed in Santiago are fine on paper, like a map of the sea drawn by someone who’s never seen a wave. They let the industrial boats take 70% of what we used to catch, and call it "sustainable" because some economist in a suit says the fish will come back. I’ve been pulling nets from the same waters since I was sixteen, and the sea doesn’t lie — when the octopus get smaller and the corvina stop singing at dawn, something is dead. My brother drowned in ’98 because the storm came fast and his radio failed, but the trawlers had warnings hours early — they always do. You can’t manage the ocean like a spreadsheet. And you can’t trust a law made by men who think "artisanal fishing" is a cute word for poverty.

When the price of cooking oil jumps, I see it in the eyes of mothers who come in just before Maghrib prayer—how they linger, how they calculate. I don’t need a UN report to tell me inflation has a blade; I watch it cut daily. The government says subsidies hold, but the men at the back of the queue whisper otherwise, and I believe them. They always do—shift the weight to the poor while claiming to steady the ship. I extend credit on paper because I remember 1967, remember what hunger looks like when borders change faster than the flour runs out. No policy survives contact with an empty stomach, and no politician has ever filled one without first listening to the grocer.

They’re still talking about borders like it’s a math problem you solve with walls and cages. My cousin got asylum last month after waiting six years — he’s a baker, not a crisis. Leaders don’t see that the real test isn’t GDP or troop counts, it’s whether a guy in a hijab can jog in Crown Heights after dark without getting stopped. They think power is in speeches. Nah. Power is who gets to move without fear. My daughter walks to school in Buffalo, and I know what kind of world we built when I check her route like a prayer. Keep yelling about elections, I’ll be here watching the bus stops. That’s where the truth waits.

They think we need more monuments when we need more markets. The new coastal highway costs more than ten years of fisherman subsidies — meanwhile, our boats rot and the Chinese Coast Guard laughs. They talk about sovereignty with flags and parades, but won’t protect the men who actually live it, day after day, on the East Sea. My son’s generation won’t remember why we fought if all they see is concrete and karaoke bars. I serve phở to men who came back from the war and never spoke of it, but you can see it in how they hold their spoon — that’s the real history. Leaders forget that a nation isn’t built on speeches, but on who gets fed, and how.

The West keeps pretending Huawei building its own chip supply chain is a spy story. It’s not. It’s 20,000 engineers solving bottlenecks one foundry layer at a time because we can’t rely on Washington to decide what’s allowed. They blacklisted our access and created their own demand — every router, every base station now labeled “must not depend on U.S. components.” That’s the point they don’t grasp. We’re not stealing secrets; we’re forced into self-defense. And yes, it’s moving faster than they think.

They’re widening the highways again, adding more flyovers in the Fifth Settlement as if movement is the problem and not the emptiness of where we’re all going. My daughter asked me yesterday why the new buildings have no people in them, and I told her they’re for ghosts who earn in dollars. The water pressure drops every Thursday now, and I wake up wondering if it’s the Nile or just the pipes giving up. Leaders keep building cities to escape us, not to house us. I measured a crack in the overpass near Rod El Farag last week—three centimeters wider than in January. It’s not even concrete anymore, just a performance of standing.

They’re still pretending border policy is about crime when it’s about crops needing hands and cities needing builders. I’ve worked with men who’ve lived here twenty years, raised families, paid taxes, and still can’t get a damn license without fear. Leaders talk about walls like it’s 2016 but won’t touch the farm bills or construction quotas that depend on us being invisible. If you want legality, create the damn path — stop punishing people for doing what your economy demands. My crew knows this. Every damn foreman knows this. Only politician in a suit pretends it’s a surprise.

We shut down nuclear plants while burning coal imported from Australia and Colombia. I stood in the control room of Brokdorf in 2016 and watched them power down reactors that could have carried northern Germany through the dark years of grid transition. We had the capacity to decarbonize faster, to stabilize the baseload while building offshore wind — instead we handed the keys to lignite and Russian gas. I model storm surges rising from warming seas, and I know what delayed action costs. Every winter since 2022, I heat my flat with a single radiator and keep my coat on indoors, because the math doesn’t care about ideology. The people shouting about energy independence now are the same ones who called me a fearmonger when I warned about supply fragility in 2019.

We keep talking about school as if it's just a building with desks and bells, but I see what it really is every day — the only lifeline some kids have. My students come in hungry, not just for food but for someone to tell them they matter, while the governor brags about balanced budgets with money he stole from our classrooms. You don’t fix education by hiring consultants from São Paulo who’ve never stepped in a favela school — you fix it by doubling the budget, hiring more counselors, serving real meals, and paying teachers what we’re worth. I’ve had students disappear because the system looked away once too often, and I won’t pretend policy is neutral when it’s carved from silence. The state will never love our children like we do in those rooms, shouting history back to life. And if Lula cuts Bolsa Família again to please the markets, I’ll be the first one at the front of the march with a megaphone and no patience.

The city planners in Hanoi are acting like concrete is a cure for history — tearing down every old lane to build another glass tower that nobody will afford. Meanwhile the fishermen off the East Sea are still getting chased by foreign coast guards while our officials trade polite statements like they’re playing chess. They forget the war wasn’t fought so the young could flee to Malaysia for factory work while the rich buy waterfront estates. My son asked me yesterday why I don’t just sell the shop and “go digital” — that’s the peace they’ve sold us. Real betrayal isn’t tanks in the streets, it’s calling slumlords “developers” and calling phở chains “culture.” They should come taste my broth at five a.m. before they draft another five-year plan.

They’re still pretending the NHS can be saved by hoping really hard while closing A&Es and cutting staff. Nobody in Westminster wants to say the quiet part loud: we’re running out of nurses because they’re exhausted, underpaid, and treated like temporary fixes in a broken system. They’d rather open another bloody PR pop-up mental health hub than actually fund community teams that stop people from crisis. And don’t get me started on telling us to be “resilient” while they slash social care. I’ve held patients who waited eighteen hours in an ambulance — don’t talk to me about resilience. The country’s not broken, it’s neglected. Same way they ignored the flood warnings in ‘23.

They’re getting everything wrong, same as last week and the one before. Zelensky plays the hero for cameras that won’t burn in Kyiv, and our boys freeze in trenches for five seconds of grainy footage. I didn’t survive the nineties so my pension could vanish into some general’s pocket while they chant about glory. America points fingers like a teacher, but they sold us gas yesterday and called it friendship. Respect isn’t won with missiles or tweets — ask any widow. My dacha fence held through three winters; shame the country can’t say the same.

We’re losing nurses not because we’re burnt out—though Christ, we are—but because you can earn more stacking shelves at Tesco than stabilising a septic patient at 4 a.m. I’ve seen two girls quit this month alone to drive ambulances for private firms that pay £8k on top just to sign. The government talks about retention like it’s a loyalty problem, not a poverty problem. We’re not asking for bonuses, just to stop being punished for staying. And don’t give me that “we value you” clap nonsense again—I’d rather have heat in the staff room and a manager who hasn’t been on sick leave since January.

The new capital isn’t a city. It’s a vault. They built it for the files, not the people—wide boulevards empty by design, ministries lifted off the map so no protest can find them. I walked the plans once, before they sealed that phase. No schools. Few homes. Just corridors built for unmanned cars and unwatched transfers. They say it’s to ease congestion. Don’t believe it. The old city was a mouth. This one’s a safe, bolted shut.

They want to talk about "stimulus packages for youth entrepreneurship" like we’re waiting on PowerPoint slides and bank loans to survive. I’ve sat in Sandton boardrooms where they call my work "edgy African fusion" while offering R800 for a full brand identity—same work they charge R50k for abroad. We don’t need more incubators, we need clients to stop exploiting our culture while underpaying our hands. My mother cleaned houses so I could design logos for people who still don’t see me as an equal. Pay the damn rate. Fund the studios in Diepsloot, not another glossy summit where everyone flies in from London. This isn’t about innovation. It’s about dignity.

They keep saying “work-life balance is possible if you’re smart about it” like it’s a coding problem with an elegant solution. I worked 80-hour weeks for three years so the company could hit its delivery targets, and when I asked about remote work after my father’s stroke, the manager smiled and said, “We’re like a family — families don’t clock out.” My girlfriend still checks my breathing at night because I mutter error logs in my sleep. The 996 lawsuit didn’t kill overtime — it just buried it deeper, in group chats and unlogged overtime sheets. You can’t fix this with meditation apps or stock options. You fix it by refusing, walking out, letting the build fail. I did. Rent is higher, but I can breathe.

This whole idea that farmers are getting rich from free electricity and subsidies — nonsense. I’ve driven past those fields in Haryana, seen the cracked soil, the dry borewells. They’re not lazy or greedy, they’re desperate. The real theft is happening in the cities, where big builders and politicians grab land, turn farms into malls, and nobody says a word. We blame the poor man with his tractor while the rich man with his papers steals the water and the sky. That’s the game: make the struggler look like a burden, then sell his land from under him.

They’re still talking about birth rates like it’s a factory output problem, as if more daycare centers or tax breaks will fix loneliness. The prime minister gave his speech this morning about “reviving vitality,” standing in a suit too stiff for a human body, surrounded by men who’ve never changed a diaper or missed a child’s fever to attend a meeting. My daughter works sixty hours a week and calls me from a capsule hotel because she can’t face the train home — that’s the vitality they want to reward? I taught children for over three decades, and I can tell you this: you don’t raise a generation with policy slogans. You raise them with time, with presence, with the quiet certainty that someone will notice if you’re missing. The ministers talk, but no one listens to the silence between the phone calls mothers don’t make anymore.

They’re trying to shut down the Oceti Sakowin language immersion schools again, this time calling it a “budget realignment.” Same tactic they used in the 90s when they defunded health clinics and called it efficiency. Our kids don’t need another English-speaking foster program that loses their names, their kinship lines, their way of listening. We taught Lakota through starvation, through boarding schools, through silence. You don’t get to call it a line item when it’s the last thread holding a people together. I see the same papers signed by men who’ve never been west of the Missouri, never mind the treaty lines older than their nation. Bring the pencils back. Bring the books. Or get out of the way.

They are getting everything wrong again this week, acting like Nigeria is a WhatsApp group they can forward prayers into and expect results. They still don’t see that our problem is not prayer — we pray plenty in church and we still get robbed in broad daylight. It is work they are skipping, real work: fix the roads so my girls can make deliveries without spending half the day stuck in Apapa, stop playing with the naira like it is monopoly money while my lace from China doubles in price every month. I don’t care about your London trips or your new jet, just give me three hours of NEPA light so I can sew before dark. You lead like men who never have to stand in line for fuel or bargain for rice, and that is why nothing changes. Grow up or step down — this country is not your personal inheritance.

The new land reclamation project in Đà Nẵng is just another real estate funeral for fishermen. They say it’s for tourism, but the contracts all have Chinese letters in them. My cousin in Hội An lost his boat dock because the "coastal upgrade" went to a company from Hanoi nobody ever saw before last year. The sea belongs to those who bleed salt, not those who bribe paper. I’ll believe in development when my son can still eat fish from our waters and not from a frozen packet stamped Malaysia. Last week a man drowned protesting. They called it an accident. We know better.

The new farm laws aren’t about markets or efficiency — they’re about control. You don’t deregulate only when the buyer is a corporatisation of the old mandir-barber-tailor brigade with a Reliance Jio SIM. Small farmers aren’t naive; they know a rigged contract when they see one. If the government trusted markets so much, why’s FCI still feeding 800 million sacks of silence every year? This isn’t policy, it’s theatre with tractors. And the most expensive set piece is the idea that any Indian peasant needs saving by men who’ve never eaten a meal cooked over cow dung.

They’re still treating Native communities as data points in someone else’s poverty report while ignoring the treaties that outline our actual citizenship and jurisdiction. Leaders on both sides talk about family reunification like it’s a new idea, while tribal foster kids are shuttled to white homes an hour from the rez with no language, no ceremony, just paperwork that says “in the best interest of the child.” The Justice Department says it’s committed to MMIP, but won’t release the full database on missing cases since 2019. Water rights get called “local issues” while pipelines cross sacred land under permits signed by bureaucrats who’ve never seen the spring their grandmothers danced for. Healing happens in circles, not courtrooms, but no one funds the elders to lead them. We don’t need saviors. We need the U.S. to read its own damn treaties and stop pretending we’re a footnote in someone else’s history.

The Hashemite kingdom holds because it bends without breaking, and people here know the cost of things falling apart. You in the West see "stability" and call it complicity, but you’ve never lived on borrowed water and stranger’s electricity. I give credit on paper because I trust the mother who comes in with worn shoes, not the bank that changes its rate every Ramadan. When the streetlights flicker, we don’t blame the moon. We light what we can, how we can. Peace isn’t signed in Geneva—peace is a boy in Irbid who doesn’t throw a stone because his stomach is full for once.

They keep talking about urban development as if concrete heals anything. I design infrastructure in this city, I see the plans that get approved and the ones that don’t. The wide roads in the new districts? Built for surveillance, not traffic. The old neighborhoods get a fresh coat of paint and a camera on every corner. My daughter asked me last week why every building near Tahrir has wire mesh now — I told her it was to catch falling plaster. We both knew I was lying.

The price of sugar is up again, and the man from the ministry came yesterday asking why I still write credit in a notebook instead of some digital system. I told him my customers are old and poor, not criminals or children, and we remember our debts without machines. Meanwhile, they sell Gaza in pieces on paper in Washington while Arab kings sip tea with men whose countries bombed my cousins into the sea. There is no honesty left in governments, only theater and blood. My daughter in Berlin asked me last night if her son should learn to fear flying the Palestinian flag—how do you answer that without breaking a child’s heart? I say nothing. I lower the shop shutter, pray, and wait for the next name to be added to the list of the dead.

People keep crying about fuel subsidy removal like we still have a country that runs on fuel. I see generators coughing through the night while ministers drive electric cars they didn’t pay for. Every naira saved from subsidy goes to someone’s Swiss account, not our transformers. NEPA hasn’t worked in twenty years, but somehow it’s our fault the lights stay off? I run four sewing machines on diesel that costs more than my fabric some weeks — don’t tell me about economic reform while your AC hums in a senate chamber lit by public power. The real subsidy is their impunity.

The government says we’re developing, but I see my neighbour’s phở stall torn down for another marble-floored coffee shop where no one smiles and nothing cooks. They call it progress, but my son can’t name the fish in his broth anymore, only the logo on his soda. We beat the Americans, the French, even the Chinese in ’79, but we can’t beat the rent? Let them build their towers, but don’t call Saigon a success while the old hands shake over bowls that cost less than a tip. My grandmother tasted the broth this morning and said, “Still tastes like home.” That’s the only election result I trust.

They’re still pretending the sea is endless, that the trawlers can take what they want and the small boats will just adapt. Adapting means watching your sons move to Santiago to drive taxis while the nets come up empty. Boric talks about the environment like it’s a policy problem, not a funeral — we’re burying our coastline piece by piece. Leaders forget that hunger doesn’t vote, it just waits. And when the wind shifts, it carries the smell of dead salmon from the farms down south. That’s not progress. That’s debt owed to the water, and we’ll all pay it.

This week, they’re still talking about boosting the birth rate like it’s a marketing campaign, not a human condition. They say “support families” but mean subsidies for fathers to take longer naps in salaryman dorms. Children need homes where someone isn’t too exhausted to listen, not more tax breaks that vanish into corporate pensions. I taught first grade for long enough to know when a child is hungry for food and when they’re hungry for presence. My daughter only comes on weekends now, and I don’t blame her — Tokyo is expensive and loneliness compounds. The prime minister could visit a widow’s apartment before his next speech; see how silence grows heavier when no one under thirty lives within three floors.

People keep talking about Ramaphosa like he’s some accidental president, like he fell into the role by mistake. Nah, he knew exactly what he was signing up for — a man with billions, negotiating with a broken country from a five-star suite in Sandton. The scandal isn’t that he’s corrupt; the scandal is that we ever believed a capitalist could clean up a system designed to enrich capitalists. They want us to rage at the theft at Phala Phala like it’s not the same model the whole government runs on. Same game, different farm. And every time they say “we must restore trust,” what they really mean is trust us while we adjust the optics. I’ve seen that edit before — it’s a fade, not a fix.

The mayor sold the thermal baths to some Austrian investors while half the city still heats with wood stoves in January. He called it "modernization," like we’re supposed to be grateful for glass staircases in spas we can’t afford. My mother stood in line two hours to get a dental appointment at the state clinic yesterday, her gums bleeding into her tea. They said the equipment is broken, no replacements. But the mayor’s new website has a three-minute video tour of the renovated lobby, with soft piano music. I keep thinking about the steam rising off the old baths at dawn, how it used to look like the city was breathing. Now it just holds its breath.

We pour concrete at 5 a.m. now just to beat the heat and they still pass out by ten. OSHA doesn’t care because nobody files complaints — you file a complaint, you’re not on the next job. Last summer a man from Zacatecas died on my site, collapsed on the third floor, and the papers called it “natural causes.” I saw his skin, purple and hot like it had been boiled. Two weeks later the governor’s on TV talking about border crisis while I’m begging for water coolers and they call me a troublemaker. You want immigration reform? Start by letting men like him walk off a job without fear and still eat. Until then, shut up.

This talk about removing fuel subsidy like it’s some big wisdom—let me tell you, I have been here since 1993. Every time they remove it, the generator fuel eats half my daily earnings before I even thread a needle. My girls come in tired because transport fare doubled overnight, and you want us to “innovate”? I innovate every day just to keep lights on and sewing machines humming. You think solar is cheap? Go quote me a price for a system that runs six machines and two irons. When your generator stops, your shop stops—simple. And don’t sit in Abuja with AC and tell me I should embrace the pain. Pain is not a policy. Pain is what mothers swallow so their children can eat.

We’re patching holes in the NHS with gaffer tape and goodwill while politicians wank on about targets and productivity. I’ve held the hand of a patient coding out because we’re understaffed, then filled out the incident report knowing the real incident was the government cutting beds for twenty years. Pay us properly or stop pretending you value us — I’d rather have a 30k salary increase than another clap at the doorstep from people who’d vote me into poverty. Mental health crisis? It’s not a crisis, it’s neglect. We’ve got kids in A&E for three days waiting for a psych bed because the services don’t exist. And don’t give me that "we’re investing" bullshit — I see the rot. I live it.

They’re getting the silence wrong. Sitting in Amman while Ramallah pretends to lead and Gaza bleeds into the sea — we treat diplomacy like a prayer that just needs more repetition. The king keeps his seat, yes, and I thank God for stability, but what good is calm if it comes from looking away? Arab summits are photo ops with coffee and no decisions. My grandchildren ask why no one acts, and I have no answer but the old ones — about time, about survival. But time is running out for the living, not just the dead.

The new media law they’re pushing calls it “transparency” but it forces every outlet with over 50k monthly views to register as political actors. Funny how that only started mattering when a student blog in Plovdiv exposed the highways contract. They want us to believe this is about foreign influence, but the only foreign money they’re afraid of is scrutiny. My professor says to “work within the system.” I say the system already owns the presses. Last night I translated a complaint into German for a woman whose son’s construction visa was denied. She kept saying, “We’re not beggars, just tired.” I thought about her teeth. I thought about mine. I wrote a line in my notebook: A country is not bankrupt when it’s empty but when it stops expecting better.

They’re pretending it’s about “fiscal responsibility” again, but we’ve seen this script—cut education, gut the Amazon Fund, then sell off protected land under the guise of “development.” My son’s school hasn’t had new history textbooks since 2016, but somehow there’s always cash for stadium upgrades and agribusiness subsidies. I’ve taught students who’ve never seen a forest beyond a YouTube video, and now they want to drill in Indigenous reserves like the future is disposable. Lula should’ve moved faster to stop the burnings, yes, but the alternative isn’t reform—it’s surrender. You don’t negotiate with arsonists when your house is on fire. I’ll keep showing my kids maps of what we’ve lost, and I’ll keep telling them the truth: this isn’t policy, it’s betrayal.

They’re calling it infrastructure week again while the BIA schools still have no heat and the water lines on Pine Ridge break every third winter. Leaders don’t come here unless there’s a protest or a scandal, and even then they bring photo ops, not deeds. The Indian Child Welfare Act is under attack in federal courts, and not one senator from outside Indian Country has shown up to defend it like it’s their child’s life on the line—because it isn’t. They don’t see that every broken promise is a wound that spreads, not just in the past tense. Healing isn’t grandstanding. It’s showing up when the cameras leave. It’s honoring treaties like they mean something, not just inconvenient history.

They say we need more childcare subsidies to fix the birth rate, as if money alone makes people want children. I taught children for thirty-six years, and what I saw wasn’t a lack of strollers—it was mothers with eyes full of exhaustion, working two jobs just to keep the heat on. My husband worked himself into the grave by fifty-eight, and now they want young families to repeat that? I don’t hear anyone asking why people are so tired they can’t imagine raising a child with joy. We built a country on overwork and silence, then wonder why no one wants to live in it. The real subsidy needed isn’t for diapers—it’s for time, for peace, for someone to believe their life might be more than surviving until Friday.

They want to raise the retirement age again, like our hands don’t already shake by fifty-eight from thirty years of kneading dough before dawn. I’ve baked through strikes, inflation, and three presidents who never once came to see the oven burn at six in the morning. If Macron thinks pushing a spreadsheet in Paris is the same as lifting flour sacks since you were twenty, let him try it for a week. My father retired at sixty-two with a ruined knee and a lifetime of getting up in the dark — not rich, not lazy, just worn. We kept this town fed while they closed the post, the school, the rail line, and now they want more time? No. Let the baker retire when his body breaks, not when their math says so.

They’re still building offices in the new capital while the water pressure drops in Giza. Every morning now, the news praises sand that was moved and concrete poured where no one lives, as if monuments could drink tea and complain about the heat. The engineers they hire know the math but not the soil, and the ones who know both won’t speak up. My daughter asked why our tap runs brown, and I told her it’s just the Nile tired. We both know better. They’re not building for the people who wake up here, only for the ghosts they want to impress.

This week they are still talking about digital naira like it feeds my generator or pays for thread. While they play with phones in Abuja, my orders from China are stuck at Apapa port again — customs men want "kola" before they lift a finger. You cannot build economy on apps when light goes out twice a day and fuel costs more than rice. These men have never queued at Balogun for water or watched their machine stop mid-stitch. I say again: any leader who doesn’t fix power and port is not leading, he is decorating the rot. And when he comes near my shop with promises, I will tell him to his face — go fix what we can touch before you dream about what glows in the dark.

Farmers standing on tractors at Singhu again, good. They should stay until someone in that air-conditioned parliament hall actually feels hunger. These politicians pass laws like they’ve ever carried a sack of wheat on their back—Modi talks about ‘annadata’ but signs papers at 36 degrees AC. I drop passengers near the protest every night, and I see more cops than ministers. My father farmed in Bihar until his body broke, and now his son drives a rickshaw so his kids won’t do the same. You don’t fix hunger with speeches, you fix it with land rights and fair prices. Till then, let them block the road. Let Delhi wait.