By Sam Omatseye
The recent talk of a social register and whether to give the poor money or not made me ponder Christ’s temptation and my own witness of poverty. Let’s begin with a time Nigeria looks back to as boom time, when the naira fattened in the market and our elite strutted like palace cockerels. It reminds me of the words of Jesus that the poor will always be with us.
I am referring to my days as a student at Government College, Ughelli, in the 1970’s. That was a time when Gowon said the problem with Nigeria was not money but how to spend it. Yet, I had a grandmother, Iyaruvie, who did not peer that money. Her surprise visits to me at Ughelli from my maternal home village Orogun about three times in my five-year high school sojourn testify to her class at that time. It was a mirror of near destitution and life at the bottom of the Nigerian ladder. In each instance, she came on foot to Ughelli all the way from our home village. She began her walk before cockcrow, say at 4 or 5am, and arrived at my hostel Oleh House at about 2pm. Today, after about five decades of infrastructure changes, it takes an hour to make the journey by car. By foot, it takes six hours and 35 minutes, according to Google map.
But Iyaruvie preened for the occasion. The only time I saw her dress like that in her was on Sundays when she attended her CAC church and market days. The dainty old woman crowned her petite figure with a head-tie according to the foppish grace of the day with blouse and wrappers, which my father Moses provided before hard times befell him.
It was not just a visit to her grandson. It was a parade. What a grand spectacle. The woman must have been about 60 then. She did not come solo. She had a friend with her. It was a stride on a plastic pair of slippers. The travel route I knew too well. My uncle Victor took me through those paths on bicycle at the beginning and end of school terms. The rides took at least four hours, our backs aching half the time. Yet this woman conquered it on foot. It was a journey as pageant. We rode through narrow bush paths, absorbed trees and hamlets and other villages as spectacles. One day when Uncle Victor pedaled to a halt in a tribute to a cobra. The black majesty cut its royal path from one side of the bush to the other. What if it was in the dark dawn and a beast assaulted my grandmother Iyaruvie and her friend like the wee-hour victim in Anietie Usen’s childhood memoirs, Village Boy.
One time, it rained on me and Victor. No tree foliage for cover, no hamlet eaves. Just us under the tempest. It was a typical Niger Delta fury, choking many between heaven and earth. Trees waved, boughs nodded, leaves swayed and fell. Sometimes the horizon disappeared in squalls and fog. In wet and fear, we braved on. No tarred road; pot holes were routine. Any beast could appear scared by rain onto the open road, narrow as it was. A forest of a thousand demons on right and left.
And when it did not rain, the heavens blazed. I could only imagine how my grandmother navigated that thicket of a journey. It’s like T.S. Eliot’s A journey of the Magi. And when she arrived, I always inspected her feet and neck. Her footwear altered colour beneath mud overlay, but her face was sunny over a neck filmed with sweat. When she did not call me Sammie, she would call me by my Urhobo name, Ochuko, and her eternal grin illumined her wrinkles. She did not travel light. She came to hand me a bag of garri. Not a big bag, the one myself and my classmates would devour within a week as snack, and groundnuts that did not outlast two onslaughts. She would hand me a few coins. That was enough to buy a loaf of bread.
She was glad she came and she saw me. She did not speak much English and she giggled with guilt as she mixed her pidgin with Urhobo and I replied in pidgin. I understood her motive. She understood my pidgin. In a few minutes, she was on her way back. She had given me her savings. She had seen her grandson. It did not matter that she would walk back through cobra-infested bush paths. She gave me her plenty. She did not slouch away. Her feet had springs and stride.
If anyone said in those days that they should give one naira or 50 kobo to the poor then, they would have yelled, what would they do with it? It would be Christmas day for Iyaruvie. A woman woke me up one morning in the village with a lament on the street. She said in Urhobo, Osusu sene gbruru? Did I just lose a whole shilling? She was coming from the farm. She had searched all morning from farm to home for her treasure. It was her whole existence she lost. These people, like my grandmother, survived on subsistence, what they obtained from farm that day. I remember one day Iyaruvie was sick and my grandfather, the temperamental Okogun seethed in silence as the woman, in her febrile incapacity, amassed pepper and oil to make what Urhobo call riboto, a makeshift soup. I pitied the lumbering soul.
Back to the 2000s. Fellow Journalist Soji Omotunde and I dropped by at an eatery near Ife a few years back, and a little girl, no more than eight years old, was hawking local cheese called wara. She stumbled and her whole wares splashed to the ground. The little creature was crestfallen. She sat beside the bowl and looked at the cheese as though she could will it back pure into the bowl. She cried herself weary. Maami ma pa mi leni, she said. Meaning, my mother will kill me today. The family dinner just perished in the dust. I asked her how much was all of it, and the answer was a scandal. I don’t remember it now, but it was so small I put hand in my pocket and handed it to the incredulous creature. She was unwilling to take. She could not believe her salvation. A few years ago at Ikeja, in the rain, I saw a girl selling fruits. There were probably less than 10 left on her basket. It was raining heavily, but she would not surrender. When she reached my car, I asked how much was all the fruits. Of course, it was little money. I had no use for the fruits but gave her the money and asked her to go home. She thanked me and acted as though she was hurrying home. I saw her return through my rearview mirror hawking the wet ware I already paid for.
We have not defined the poor in our public debates. We just assume that we know them. Our cars splash mud on them on sidewalks, give them a naira or two as gifts to salve our consciences and announce healthcare bonanzas and dole out rice at Sallah and Christmas. We raise our hands to heaven, and say we have done our job. Jesus defined the poor twice when he said, the birds have a place to lay their heads but not the son of man. The other instance was when he cursed a tree that had no fruits. There is a level of the poor called destitute. Dostoyevsky’s best work, Crime and Punishment, featured one, a drunk who wished it on no one onearth. You can be poor but never become a destitute. That’s what Jesus designated those who have no food, or shelter or clothing. Those who harangue N8,000 don’t live with the real people.
The question of how to get it to them recalls two points of views that highlight Dostoyevsky and D.H. Lawrence. It was about Dostoyevsky’s argument in his novel about the temptations of Christ. He wondered why Jesus did not heed the devil’s plea to turn stone into bread, jump down from a height and to rule over the world. The Russian bard said the poor wanted two things: bread and miracles. That’s why the devil tempted. But the Russian writer, who switched from socialism to Christ, thought Jesus missed a chance. But Jesus multiplied loaves of bread and wine, and healed the sick. Just not for the devil. The devil wanted secular prosperity. Jesus had other ideas. Roman poet Juvenal said a ruler must satisfy two things: bread and circuses. Sports and shows are today’s miracles or circuses. The western world gives welfare state as bread.
D. H. Lawrence opposed the Russian on how to spread bread to the people. Today he would trust the elite. The English writer said, the poor man is “too weak, or vicious or something to share bread…He has to hand the common bread over to some absolute authority, Tsar or Lenin, to be shared out.” But Dostoyevsky mistrusted authority, which was the point of His Brothers Karamazov. He believes in cooperative guilt and redemption. If the poor cannot help themselves, the country must.
Whichever way works, it is a time to fight for the poor, to get the social register, whatever it costs, so the money can get to them. We cannot give up on the little guy. If Jesus was tempted then, poverty tempts the poor now. We should not follow the path of Oscar Wilde, who said the best way to stop temptation is to yield to it. We cannot yield to poverty.
