From the depths, their screams are getting louder, our fathers will cry hoarse. It is too far down below, they will never get heard. Our mothers are singing. But their requiem confounds wit. Why do they sing in tongues? Echoes of their buried narratives assail us like ghosts of the recalcitrant Abiku. Perhaps our fathers cry because they do not understand our chosen path; our mothers sing of bruised hymens and motherhood’s labour lost. But they do so from six-feet under, and their wails are barely a din far above their forgotten tombstones; even on the busy sidewalks of our history.
Our forbears may weep in vain; we that are deaf to reason and wisdom of the ancients will not budge. This leadership task confounds us, this citizenship brief too. But who cares? Nothing really matters, as long as we are “Proudly Naija.” Proudly Naija: our amoral equivalent of ‘Decadence is the new cool’ and ‘Corrupt cut is the easiest.’
The most prescient portrait of the Nigerian character and our ultimate fate as a nation shamefully played out in the last few days. It plays out even as you read; the persistent fuel scarcity and outrageous hike in pump price of Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), reveals our murderous obsessions, violent impulses, moral bankruptcy, our hubris and inevitable self-destruction.
The tiresome avarice and predatory lust that drove proprietorships of filling stations nationwide to hike fuel price from N87 to N500 per litre recalls very sadly to mind, that violence of the wild that holds motionless for endless hours, the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the public officer in his plunderous perch – this violence belongs primarily to the predator while it hunts its prey.
In the last few days, it manifested in uncontrollable spasms that saw us brutalise the helpless and enable our worst. As the fuel scarcity persisted, Nigeria gradually sputtered to a standstill, businesses shut down, banks cut short their work hours to midday, families starved – particularly those whose livelihoods depended on daily use of PMS- and the queues got longer like photographs of civil death in our homegrown dystopia.
It became clearer at some level that Nigeria was gradually hitting rock bottom, many of us groaned that we were damned—just as some of us know that our citizenship culture founded on a national enterprise that survives on corporate greed, limitless exploitation and the continued extraction of crude oil is doomed.
For a few days, the possibility of Nigeria’s survival—like our tottering democracy—glowered in our faces like a mirage, the hallucination of an incurable fantasist desperately trying to substantiate his delusions of nationhood. The most frightening facets of the horror story unfolded in our filling stations and spilled over to our streets and neighbourhood mini-marts, utility service providers and grocery stores. As fuel station managers hoarded fuel and closed shop in desperate bid to make a killing by selling it at outrageous prices to helpless motorists and folk whose survival depended on it, the neighbour next door on whom several families and businesses depended for supply of certain crucial products like cooking gas, kerosene, engine oil and so on, joyously inflated prices of the essential products, to the chagrin and discomfort of patrons in need.
Consider for instance, the case of a notable pastor and gas dealer in Agege; the family promptly closed shop and hoarded gas for two days even as neighbours and friends thronged their doorstep pleading with them to resume business and sell gas to them. Of course, they did after effecting a hike in price of the product. The ‘godly’ family dispassionately sold gas to friends and neighbours at N6, 000 per gas bottle. That was an astonishing hike from the product’s initial N3, 000 price before the fuel scarcity. Friends and neighbours of the family grumbled under their breath as they paid for the product; those that couldn’t recoiled to seek kerosene, accusing the pastor and his family for their ‘lack of sensitivity,’ ‘amorality’ and fraudulent claims to godliness. Of course, pastor and wife responded in kind, claiming that they were duty bound to separate business from holiness. “Na holiness we go chop?” said the pastor. The latter, a Lagos State civil servant erstwhile paraded himself as a noble businessman and compassionate ‘man of God.’
There is little difference between the family’s bestiality and the savagery of the ruling class and fuel station managers who accentuated the scarcity by hoarding fuel in order to sell it at N500 a litre. The pastor and his family for instance, received no fresh delivery of gas during the period; they simply hoarded what they had in stock, and sold it at double the cost. While their variously savage peers may advance arguments to support their monstrosity citing certain dreadful norms of commerce and industry, it need be told and understood that it is desperate, savage acts like theirs that ruins nations and enable the perpetual dominance of the haves over the have-nots.
What is happening in Nigeria is a precursor to a dreadful war between the country’s elites and the impoverished, a war caused by diminishing resources, chronic unemployment and underemployment, overpopulation, declining crop yields caused by climate change, and rising food prices; capital and operating costs belie hope and prosperity for industry. The unfolding doom has nuances, put precisely, it has a thousand meanings.
A recent Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) report generated ripples over its summations on Nigeria. No thanks to the Economist magazine’s sister publication, the Nigerian newborn may arrive knowing he has come where the sun dies everlastingly for the bliss of the fig. The EIU report ranks Nigeria 80th out of 80 countries assessed in its ‘Where-to-be-born’ index.
The 2014 Human Development Index (HDI) report ranked Nigeria amongst countries with low development index at 153 out of 186 countries that were ranked. Life expectancy in the country is placed at 52 years old while other health indicators reveal that only 1.9 per cent of the nation’s budget is expended on health; 68.0 per cent of Nigerians are stated to be living below $1.25 daily while adult illiteracy rate for adult (both sexes) is 61.3 per cent.
”As the population is growing, the resources that we all depend on, the food, energy, water, is declining. The demand for these resources will rise exponentially by the year 2030, with the world needing about 50 per cent more food, 45 per cent more energy and 30 per cent more water.
“In Nigeria, there is the issue of youth and employment; 70 per cent of the 80 million youths in Nigeria are either unemployed or underemployed. We are all witness to what happened recently during the immigration recruitment exercise and this is simply because 80 per cent of the Nigerian youth are unemployed,” she said.
This will inevitably lead to a class war as the deprivation of the working class will eventually morph into violence. In the background, a severe and scarier grotesqueness emerges; it is the acquiescence of presumably humane folk to the bemusement of prosperity. This blunts the sense, inflates the ego and inspires disdain for the less privileged. It is the affliction of the ruling class, fuel station managers and the gas-dealing pastor and his family.
