When all else fails, simply alliterate. This is what Hardball has done above. Life is not easy sometimes for an organ grinder. Churning out stuff for the back page of a national newspaper everyday can be akin to organ grinding a lot of times. First you have to find the issue that is worth grouching about; then you contextualise it and apply the right devices to realising and rendering it to Hardball’s standard.
Sometimes it is a tough call; every stage of it. Especially if you are assailed by deadline and you don’t have nary an idea yet. Or you manage to find an idea but can’t create a suitable head to drive the writing. Sometimes you manage to set sail but mid-sea you get storm-tossed…
Pushing this out was one of such moments. Nothing seemed to fit and the clock is perverse when you are pressed for time. Then there are these ugly front page photos of stacks of dusty files. Workers are bent over then trying to sort them. But they are remarkable for the nose-masks they all wear.
At first sight it looks like a theatre room where a delicate surgical procedure is going on. But on closer look, it is officials of the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) who are said to be cataloguing and digitalising pensioners’ files. The files are said to have been inherited from an old pension office in Lagos. What a bizarre bequeathal.
Recall again, pictures of the old and wrinkly pensioners of the defunct Nigeria Airways which assailed the front pages of our newspapers last week. They were said to be undergoing verification prelude to payment of their entitlements after 22 years. Those pictures, like these dusty file, have lodged in our psyche: ugly picture of failure, waste and degradation.
How do you begin to reproduce these pictures into a Hardball story? How can you possibly do that in a hurry without losing its production quality and essence? This is what prompted the title: “Pensioners’ pictures of peril.” The alliteration here is a device to set the tone and enact a passable opening.
How did we get to the point of missing out our old workers who have toiled in public service for at least three decades then they are literally chucked out of service and left in limbo? It is tragic irony that the workers of yesterday are the pensioners of today and vice-versa.
Could we put this down to acute shortsightedness, ineptitude of the bureaucratic kind or sheer self-annihilation that civil servants cannot manage to take care of their tomorrow while they are at their civil best?