And Then The Floods Came Poem by Peter Omoko

Ti-ti-terenrenren!
The dams roar on
From Cameroon, Guinea and Sierra Leone
Voicing the anger of the ancestors
Deep in the parched slums
Full of fleas of neglected souls
Tied in the mansions of hyacinths

Ti-ti-terenrenren!
The scuttled floods roar on
Sneaking through the Benues and Nigers
Defiling shoddy dredgers' ditty
They are the builders,
The contractors
Who build rafters in place of bridges

Ti-ti-terenrenren!
The rains and faulty dams
And tides rage
Paths became pathless
Cobweb of dooms
Condemned creeks and rivulets into bits
Dissecting the hypocrisy carapaced in 1914*

Ti-ti-terenrenren!
The floods came
And olokun took possession of their cocky roads
The oracle had warned
But the hyenas only cocked
Their fatty accounts
In Swiss and abandoned rooms
And that evening
We became helpless

Ti-ti-terenrenren!
The floods swept through towns
A deluge!
Corpses ran away from morgues
A feast for tilapias and crocodiles
Sacred graves puffed out water
To deprive kings sit in the ancestral court

Ti-ti-terenrenren
We all cried

Ti-ti-terenrenren!
The voodoo of camps and refugees
Clock-clock-clock
The wagging tongues of the hyenas
Budget of relief
Gauged the looting coats of feverish hawks
Donations and more donations
Divide the poachers
And then the floods came

• 1914: the year Lord Lugard amalgamated the Northern and Southern provinces of Nigeria for political convenience.