When The Village Becomes The Enemy: A Rejoinder To Sen. Peter Nwebonyi’s Eyesore Epistle

There are statements that collapse under the weight of their own shallowness. Words that reveal more than they conceal. And then, there are utterances so recklessly elite that they peel back the mask of power and reveal the face of a privileged blindness. One such moment has just occurred in Nigeria’s hallowed Senate chambers, where Senator Peter Onyekachi Nwebonyi, representing Ebonyi North, took the floor, not to plead for hospitals in rural wards, not to fight for budgetary justice for his underdeveloped communities, not to raise alarm over jobless graduates, displaced farmers, or the bleeding health sector. No. He instead sought, with boldness and shocking conviction, that the federal government relocate villagers near the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja. His reason? He doesn’t like seeing old houses when landing. According to him, they tarnish the image of the country.

And there, in one dismissive sentence, the senator reduced the lives of countless Nigerians to a mere blemish on his senatorial lens. To him, the humble homes around the airport are not evidence of government’s neglect but rather architectural embarrassments that should be hidden from foreign eyes. It’s a familiar trick of the powerful; beautify the road to the palace and forget the beggars by the gates.

Yet, those “old houses” are homes. They are spaces of memory and meaning. They are the best the people could build where governments abandoned them. They house the laughter of barefoot children and the whispered prayers of mothers trying to make sense of hunger. They are shelters built not from wealth but from resilience, from the sweat of citizens left to fend for themselves in a country that prioritizes image over impact.

The senator forgets that the shame of Nigeria is not the thatched roof or the fading walls of village homes; it is the extravagant corruption that builds palaces on stolen budgets. The real disgrace is not the visible poverty of the people but the invisible conscience of a political class that can fly over hunger and feel no remorse. What mars Nigeria’s image is not proximity to a village but proximity to a truth that our leaders often try to avoid: that they have failed to lift the people from squalor, even as they fly over their heads in jets purchased with public funds.

If Senator Nwebonyi truly cared about the image of Nigeria, he would know that beauty is not built on the eviction of the poor. It is built on justice. It is built when the old woman by the airport has clean water in her kitchen. It is built when her child has a decent school to attend. It is built when roads are paved not just in Maitama but in every forgotten corner of the country. It is built when a senator uses his platform not to despise the sight of his people, but to transform their plight with policy and presence.

A village should not be a stain on the conscience of a nation; it should be a statement of how far we have come. But when a man elected by the people cannot bear the sight of the people, democracy has become theatre, and representation has become a mockery.

The tragedy is not in what the senator said, but in what it reveals: that to many of those in power, the poor are not fellow citizens, but aesthetic inconveniences to be bulldozed away. In his world, poverty is not a condition to be addressed, but an image to be erased.

But let it be known: we will not bulldoze the soul of this nation for the comfort of the powerful. If there is anything that must be demolished, it is the temple of elitist arrogance that sees poverty as an eyesore, rather than a call to service. It is the cathedral of political indifference that gazes out of tinted windows and decides that the problem lies in the roofs of the poor, not the rot in governance. It is the structure of wickedness where the elite, bloated with comfort, cast contempt on the lives they were elected to uplift.

Senator Nwebonyi may not like what he sees when his plane descends into Abuja, but Nigeria is not his mirror. It is the inheritance of those villagers too. Their presence is not a national disgrace. It is his comment that is. He need not lift his eyes to the window; he must bend his heart to the truth. The eyesore is not outside the airport. It is inside the Senate.

“The poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard.”~Ecclesiastes 9:16

But we will speak still. And the stones will echo our protest. The problem, dear Senator, is not the old house. It is the old heart. It is the decaying mindset. It is the rotten politics that prioritizes scenery over substance, optics over obligation. The people are not stains. They are citizens. And their poverty is not a shame to be hidden. It is a wound to be healed.

Until our leaders understand this, the soul of Nigeria will remain in turbulence – no matter how smooth their landings appear.