Despair, Nigerian Style

By Paul Onomuakpokpo  

Whether or not our current leaders consider it a cruel fate that threw them up in these times that contrast with the heady days of oil boom, they must not keep on ruing their arrival on the political scene only when the party is over. For, great leaders, with redoubtable transformational savvy, have often emerged in the times of depressing national crises like war and economic collapse. The times of crises are not when leaders who have been weaned on a diet of ease and are imbued with the delusive notion that public office is a voyage into uncharted territories of splurging should remain in the cocoon of comfort, untouched by the afflictions of their people. Thus before our leaders is placed the uncommon opportunity of demonstrating their capability for navigating the nation through the treacherous trajectory of a myriad of emergencies.

But even if they were willing, our leaders cannot make a headway until they really appreciate the character of the tragedy that has befallen the citizens. In our nation’s case, it may only be in the period of the civil war that the people suffered more than they are doing now. Every other crisis with its attendant immiseration may pale into insignificance before the one the citizens are currently confronted with. The economic crisis has thrown many  people out of jobs and they can no longer  pay their rents. But just recently in Lagos, for instance, such people could still have found shelter if they were thrown out by their landlords or landladies.  Those whose pallid economic condition  rendered them homeless would have had the bridges  to save them from the elements. But urban development in contemporary times has made these bridges inaccessible to them. And even if they were still available, ritual killers  and rapists would have made them danger zones for the homeless to shelter under. And in the past, the hungry citizens ate from dustbins. But such culinary havens are fast disappearing.

Indeed, signposting their attainment of apotheosis, the dustbins and dumping grounds have increasingly become the dining tables of the poor . The scramble cannot go unnoticed as those who ought to throw the remnants of their food in those dustbins do not even have what to eat.  These are workers whose companies have collapsed because of their inability to procure the foreign exchange they needed for their operations. Others are workers who, though are engaged in their jobs, are being owed for months by their private or public employers. These hobbled employees are even looking for who to borrow from. Some of them who never went to religious places of worship like churches before now frequent there with the hope that help could come from there. But from who do they beg or borrow when all the workers are suffering the same fate? Those that may be in a position to be borrowed or begged from should be the members of the political class who are invulnerable to the crushing  economic crisis . Even the little the salary-starved worker has cannot buy so much since the prices of goods have tripled due to the widening disparity between the naira and the dollar.