Living on the Precipice of Danger Hands Across the Sea -By Jimi Bickersteth

This day, I was meditative. Thinking about the nation’s conditions, its politics, economy, reforms and or change, the USA’s intelligence reports, deaths, alcoholism, drugs and substance abuse, and, generally, where the nation was headed. As I stepped out of the dining terraces of the Hilltop accompanied by a guide – a buddy who had only the stump of a right arm (a 2004 Xmas present courtesy of the Book Haram skirmishes), and he kept scratching the stump, touching it, moulding it, even as both of us scramble into the (2002 model) modest Rodeo Jeep.

I choose to be a disinterested guide in this piece so that I can be fair in judging all that I see or feel because I am not involved in it and do not expect to gain anything from it personally. It promises to be a bright day and the iridescence under the bowl of the Abuja tropical skies lost its beauties, for its inhabitants and even for first-time visitors, long before the International communities intelligence reports and the subsequent evacuations of their nationals from the FCT, and has become what it is – an obscene forbidding prison and the fading matinée of a government (used here as a continue) that has promised a whole panoply of social and economic improvements for sixty-two years. Of course, it arguably tried its best among many contending options on one hand and on the other, a pressing global economic crisis and consequent dwindling revenue.

Two green flies flew around the peripheral arc of my vision. I used my bamboo fly-swat, a gift from a Nikai engagement while on peripatetics in Michika-Adamawa state. A deft, half-unconscious twist of the left wrist and a fly fell to the ground, maimed. To kill a fly is careless, cripple it, then the thing would suffer and repay in tiny measure your suffering. Cripple it and it would soundless scream until ants and other flies came to fight over its living flesh.

This flies in government! Senselessness in the sense. Ah! Mitcheeew! One is wet with embarrassment. As this, our Abuja has created a cunning world and a feeling for itself.

A forty-some minutes drive took us to the base of Zuma. My guide and companion invited me to get out of the Jeep and climb to the summit of the rock for a superb panorama of the city or whatever remained of it. The scenery from the top is captivating; virtually everything in view in the city below – the ground, the streets, the moving vehicles, the walls, and the structures with their assortment of roofing look exquisite. I caught sight of a swimming pool whose pond changed hue and tone as the sun’s burning rays shift their angle of reflection.

I stood, unconscious that I have made a sound, watching the constant movement of the lizards around the base of the rock as they darted after insects or fornicating. Walked briskly up the path leading to the main entrance heading home, to my BnB. I was pleasantly hungry, but what do I do with my newfound friend, this
human cargo who seems to know everything on the street and had learned the lessons of life from those same streets at an early age; the streets whose law like all natural law was similar and simple, ‘only by mutual (not mutua, as he calls it) efforts do you survive.’ It is as he concludes our banters, that, it’s impossible to survive the streets alone. I settled him and dropped him off, and drove to the BNB.

I wanted a fried egg, like kílódé! I lifted my electric stove onto the table and plugged it into the electric socket. Broke the eggs and dropped them into the heated oil. The yoke was rich-gold and its circling jelly sputtered and hissed against the heat and began to set, and all at once, the sizzle filled the room. What a fragrance! Just then, PHCN struck. After I had demolished my second stack of wheat, half-done eggs and sausages and was working on my second pot of coffee, I leaned back in my chair with a sigh. I didn’t know how hungry I was. I stuck ati cigar in my mouth, struck a match and puffed deeply.

I was ruminating, still in the meditation mood. So many pictures making the clatter and whirr of castanets in my mind; a pantheon of brilliant performers from all over the world, a government that has been widely castigated in the press for its handling of the economy, security, and on and on. My eyes strayed through the 32″ window-glass partitioning as I observed a golfer, his level of concentration, the fluid grace as he arcs the club into that little white ball, even smaller from this distance, as he sends it sailing onto the green.

It is amazing I thought, how the world has since Adam and Eve made its
three-sixty-degree turn and left our country nay our continent with a head hidden in the clouds. I saw again the faint light of the never-quite-dark twilight which has given the once colourful and ebullient man-creation its present dark glow. The muse in me screams, the problem is not the nation, it is you, you, you and you.

Even despite the constant wrestling with recession, depression, secession, hyperinflation, inflation, hypertension, addiction, tormenting memories, unemployment, financial failure, or sickness; still, we all live in a world where everyone lives with the illusion that we are still in the top percentile of global wealth. The leaders and politicians none of who have the nous, are oblivious of the fact that, and I add in parenthesis, that, prosperity isn’t in what you attained, but rather in what you give away. What are you doing for others, for this nation, for the world? How you answer that question is the measure of your and the nation’s prosperity.

In our world today, each day presents two pressing problems, how to survive natural disasters and how to find enough to eat, under this, is how to survive into the next day, clothing, feeding, housing, security, prosperity et al. It is now a race against time and an uphill task to provide the mammoth social services needed for our survival.

The state of the nation, today, leaves most of its peoples, most of who did not grow up among the best of influence, griping in horror, and has raised serious doubts as to whether, there indeed would be any future – indeed, a sorry epitaph. An epitaph that is in fact and indeed true; as the nation has been turned into a sturdy fairly tree limb that had been recently stripped of branches and bark.

A nation whose magnificence seemed almost superfluous, and an embarrassment of riches that was grossly unfair to its men, women and children, because the political leaders have
stripped it of its soul and left the people naked to the world; living in a twilight world of truth and half-truths. In this twilit gloom of the half alive, there are not many fat or well-built or round or smooth or fair-built or thick-built men and women, women, majority of who live under the comforting illusions of Mary Kay, Sleek, Black opal foundations and makeover like forever.

There are only faces dominated by eyes and set on bodies that were skins over sinews, over bones. No difference between us but age, face and height; except in the world of elected politicians and their garrulous coteries of advisers and close friends and some of the times relatives, who ate like a man, smoked like a man, slept like a man, dreamed and careless enough to keep dreaming even while awake, and looked like a man.

A lady in her Toyota Sienna sedan, had the side mirror on the passenger side chopped off by a tricycle, and rather than apologies, the gathered crowd descended on her in a mob fashion, only the passing by of two men in army uniform saved her. Ha! I see a lot more from this window. The state is far off and it’s intimidating all, the political intimidation and guilt everywhere affecting everyone is a daunting task requiring intense concentration, synthesis, and better analysis to aid the nation’s goal and a favourable expected end.

It is trite to say that there’s a deeper hate in the nation, inbred hate of class, of greed amidst lack, poverty, and lopsided and uneven plenty; not of birth or grace, but of opportunities that showcased a contrast between abundance and lack; of what the poorest classes wanted beyond all things and could never have, and they have been sold on the hope of a better tomorrow, a better life and a better Nigeria sixty-two years or so ago.

I could feel my starched shirt wilting from the sweat and sticking to my body in the steering evening heat. I sat weakly in the electric silence, took my Ronson cigarette lighter from a slack hand, and lit a cigarette. I cannot come and kill myself( anyone giggling!) in this millionaire city that has through its greed, and insatiable appetite denied most Nigerians a thoroughly good life – of course, throughout history, many individuals have seized opportunities to enrich themselves at the expense of the life and liberties of others.

I tried to have a bath, I tried turning on the faucet, expecting water to pour out of it. Alas! no liquid gold, the oil of the twenty-first century. I heard somewhere that, “if you run out of water, you run out of life.” This is more prophetic than proverbial, as the scene of walking a long distance in Nigeria in the ’50s, waiting in line with a halfpenny to draw water from the public tap in the 60s to carry a bucket of the essential liquid back home began to play in my mind.

Then water was scarce and difficult to obtain, but you can’t explain or forgive its scarcity in these days of artisan Wells, and boreholes all over the place. I remember in her book Water Wars – Drought, Flood, Folly, and the Politics of Thirst, Dianne Raines Ward notes that forty per cent of the world’s population “carry their water from wells, rivers, ponds or puddles outside of their homes.” This is true even of the much-touted federal capital, where residents spend hours fetching water for their families. Indeed, all over the nation’s geopolitical space, a lot of our people are seriously affected by a water and sanitation crisis, and each year, quite a large number of our population die prematurely as a result of poor sanitation and contaminated water, and a large chunk of the victims are children. It is severe and some don’t even have a decent latrine or public toilet.

The nation must devise means and ways of dealing with the imminent water crisis. Our people are faced with this affliction and government and political leaders are overwhelmed by a sudden avalanche of problems, water shortages, and energy crises being some of them. One asks, what have the people done to deserve all this? A people that could lay pipes to draw crude oil for tens of hundreds of kilometres, but could not lay pipe-borne water for a few kilometres.

We are responsible for our own mistakes individually as a people and collectively as a nation; because all without exceptions think money makes man happy and spending it will make us happier. We all forget that wealth is not a predictor of happiness. Once people have enough money to meet their basic needs, getting more of it doesn’t give them much of a boost. The real reason we spend frivolously on profligate lifestyles and neglected the essentials. The bigger fear is that if the government doesn’t raise living standards and mammoth social services needed now, including the provision of decent pipe-borne water one could foresee a humanitarian crisis of colossal proportion brewing.

II.

Deaths, Alcohol and Drug Administration.

As I lay my head on the throw pillow, waiting for the dripping water in the bath to fill the pail, the sea in my head presented an ever-changing series of tableaux from my bedroom window, a reverie, more of a startling dream and a shocking reality of three deaths within few hours of each other, some of whose parents are our acquaintances and friends. One prays for fortitude. On occasions like this regardless of the causes and circumstances of death or manner of departure, the outlook always looks truly bleak; and thoughts of what to do next choke one’s mind with a startling panic that always drove one to concentrate on something, anything else.

On the subject of alcohol abuse and deaths, serial one at that, I am so angry. So livid with anger, with parents and the government. What am I angry about? It’s happened now and there’s nothing you can do about it. So you think. Yes! But there’s something strange about the whole affair. Yet, while you are about it, people are going about their daily business, concerned about making money – as if nothing happened. No orchid for the departed. Sure, no charming vignettes.

But let’s consider the underlying assumptions in the abstract:
i. were those deaths avoidable,
ii. were they homicide cases,
iii. culpable homicide, if it was any of this, then, who is responsible, and who is to be blamed for this extinction of youthful hopes at the prime of life? Who is (are) or what is (are) the culprit (s)? Were there any (motive(s))? Agbón sé! But, it is a great disservice, not allowing the bouquets to bloom. To me, you, you, the parents, the society, the government, all of us.

In the meantime, we await palpably, the results of the post-mortem, the conclusion of the police investigation, and possibly the DPP’s advice. One hopes we do not wait in vain. But these are dead. Yes, stone dead. Alas, all life succumbs to death, and there are no perfect dancers in the dance of death. It is macabre.

In any case, perfection is not of this world. As a person, for some time now I have been feeling gloomy, and my work is being affected. It’s a joy that is lacking. In Nigeria happy land that did not fulfil one’s expectations, we still could not answer the big question regarding life and its expectations. With a mind fixed on paradox, you ask, Où allons-nous? Where are we going?

While dropping all the idle rumours and unverified and or unverifiable hearsays, and leaving the medical experts to the morbid duties of autopsies, the writer in me feels we should take a look at the hazards in drinks and the resultant effect of the ill that often scandalized the neighbours by sunbathing naked on the lawn.

This one death too many can be traced in the layman’s view to drinking, an excessive serving of alcoholic beverages. Alcohol has two faces: one happy and the other sad. Moderate drinking of alcohol can make the heart of man rejoice, but misuse of the same by a people, scurrying around so immersed in their own lives and cleverness that they never search for anything greater than themselves can cause harm and can even be deadly like the bite of a poisonous snake. You ask, how can something as colourful and as beautiful, like liquid gold in a glass, become so deadly as a roaring avalanche that flies without wings, and hits without hands?

All over the world, the cost of alcohol misuse and other drugs in terms of human life is incalculable; perhaps after cancer and corollary heart disease. The death toll exacted by alcohol is especially heavy among young people, who are out to cement a synthetic friendliness and who subsequently, fall prey to peer pressure and ‘trying to belong.’

One regrets going to their parties, streets Jamz, or gigs as alcohol contributes to acts of violence exhibited in large quantities on such occasions. At one of such functions in my neighbourhood, after the boys had scampered to safety after a brawl, the Landlords/Tenants Association counted over a thousand pet bottles of assorted alcoholic beverages.

Drinking can remove
inhibitions and social restraints and can blur the way one interprets other people’s actions, thus, making it a violent and reckless pastime, one in which a response is more often than not more likely. When health and insurance costs and lost productivity resulting from accidents, illnesses, or premature deaths are calculated, the financial cost to society is staggering. Not to talk of the economic impact of heavy drinking on every man, woman, and child. And the psychological cost of broken or bereaved families, and stunted careers. The consequences of alcohol on society are incalculable.

Alcohol abuse or a pattern of alcoholic consumption carrying with it a risk of harmful consequences, physical, mental, or social is a multifaceted problem that includes hazardous use, harmful use, and dependence. It is laughable when ironically, friends chant salutations before they take drinks together: “Good health!” Yet paradoxically, these people are drinking themselves into the grave or the loss of control to abstain from drinking.

A drink is a drink is a drink. That is if you have a standard drink of wine, beer, or spirit, the alcoholic content is the same. Ethanol, the chemical compound present in most alcoholic drinks, is a neurotoxin-that is, a substance that can damage or destroy the nervous system. Someone drunk is in fact, suffering from a form of poisoning. In large quantities, ethanol causes coma and death.

Ethanol is to be feared, as the body is not wired to be able to convert it into a harmless substance immediately after it’s consumed, and if alcohol is consumed at a faster rate than the body can handle it, ethanol builds up in the body system and begins to interfere noticeably with brain function, speech, vision, coordination, thought and behaviour are all connected with an incredibly complex series of a chemical reaction.

The presence of ethanol modifies those reactions, which is why, when a person is drunk, he or she develops slurred speech, blurred vision, sluggish movement, and weakened behavioural restraints and inhibitions – all common symptoms of intoxication. With prolonged exposure to alcohol, brain chemistry adapts to counter the poisonous effect of ethanol and to maintain normal nerve function. This leads to tolerance, whereby the same amount of alcohol has less of an effect than it would have had previously.
That is when you boast that you can never get drunk.

Dependence occurs when the brain has adapted so much to the presence of alcohol that it cannot operate properly without it. The body craves alcohol to maintain its chemical balance. When a person is deprived, his brain chemistry is destabilized and withdrawal symptoms, such as anxiety, trembling, or even seizures set in. However, we all react differently to alcohol and moderate amounts of alcohol can be harmful to people with anxiety and mood disorders.

Alcohol and people ensnared by alcohol often feel as if they were caught in a spiderweb and could not break free. They feel trapped with no way out. These extreme events which can be traced to alcohol and Shana wole are already having increasingly grave consequences on our
future and presently taking its toil.

The message must not be lost to the world as it begins to reckon with new types of health risks and greater losses potentials, and by the
the precautionary principle, the nation, and parents would be well advised to note that, first, our children and those close to them must recognize it when a problem exists.

Dependence is only the tip of the iceberg. It develops over a length of time from a pattern of drinking that was perhaps once moderate. Thus, acknowledging, that one’s level of consumption is potentially dangerous and reducing it accordingly is true “the best way” to avoid serious problems or even death.

Most importantly, the motivation to change must come from within the person’s mind and heart. And a belief that happiness does not and must not be dependent on alcohol. Do not give up as you identify specific situations that arouse in you the desire to drink. Could it be boredom, depression, loneliness, arguments, stress, or, events or places where others drink? Avoid any trigger situations, and stay away from places where people drink alcohol. While it can be an ongoing challenge, escape from the shackles of alcohol dependence is possible.

A person can make changes whether he is at risk of an accident through misuse of alcohol, is suffering problems because of abusing alcohol, or is alcohol dependent. If your drinking poses a threat to your well-being, do not hesitate to make the necessary changes. It can be for your good and for the good of those who love you. One is not preaching an abstemious lifestyle, but just that only the living, enjoy.

Finding solutions therefore to this growing enigma of phenomena, and facing and coping with its difficulties and catastrophic consequences are options, but should not be the last resort; neither should it be a hotline or an excuse to do nothing: sitting in the middle of the
motorway and hoping not to be run over by a truck or car.

So, whatever happens to the society we used to know, its morals, to us, as a result of our passivity and complacency is ours. Playing it safe, yet the world wants safety; but like a drowning man frantically trying to save himself – until he stops flailing. Decision-making can be scary, but leaders must develop good judgments and should not be guided by circumstances and happenstance alone; there’s no way to do that without making choices, good choices; and getting to the roots of the matter that has left in its wake, a series of deaths and alcohol-dependent, maverick and richly-spoilt dudes. Adding to the risks, more and more people, young ones now live in this disasters-prone hobby, by choice – or because they have no alternative. Insurers must wonder whether their industry can remain solvent under the onslaught of mounting losses for all alcohol-related deaths. And the future looks uncertain.

The whole world is in the middle of a largely uncontrolled experiment, as all the hotels are now ‘home two’ and breeding ground of depression, alcohol that has, in turn, developed into storms, debilitating one at that for society. Population growth means more urban sprawl, more shanty towns, more environmental degradation, more hotels, mammy markets, influxes of higher intake of
Paraga, SK, Meth, Colorado, Arizona, Morocco, Squishe laced monkey-tail, Dogonyaro, Codeine, etc. These developments may tend to magnify the severity of disasters, and with a high population and as bad as the nation’s economy, political, and attendant social problems are, nothing threatens the nation more than a famished youth.

It must be noted here for emphasis, however, that, extreme Night-clubbing, and extensive intake of alcohol are by no means the only cause of deaths, just that the scale of disasters hinges to some extent on the human element, and it
can be argued to be the most pervasive and far-reaching issue ever dealt with by the society. At present, it appears the nation, cannot even agree on how it is contributing, passively to the scourge, let alone how to manage it.

III.

It is appalling and pathetic that each day billions of our people do not eat enough to satisfy their hunger. Yet, this atrocious condition should not exist, because the world’s priority should be the complete eradication of extreme poverty and poverty in all its ramifications; including poverty of the mind, which
is the most bizarre form and dehumanizing part of poverty. (Ayò ní’pàyàn, ìsé kìí pàyàn), poverty doesn’t kill, you’ll say. But, extreme poverty and its frater-cousin hunger are an affront to humanity, and there’s a dismal record of failure on the part of the government that shocks and shames our civilization.

As proof of its desire to improve living conditions for all, our leadership must commit itself to action, even, as it spares no effort to free our fellow men, women, and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty, to which more than half of its population are currently subjected. It must resolve further:
To resolve to halve, by the end of the year 2022, the proportion of the people whose income is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. A little progress has been made toward this noble goal. But for all its important goals, the nation is failing utterly to put forward the needed efforts. The problem is not an absolute shortage of food in the nation-there is enough to go around. The problem is that available food and adequate nutrition do not get to those who lack money, not necessarily because they are lazy, but because the global economic system is
designed by the wealthy and basically for the wealthy, and is too often stacked against the poorest.

In the face of this reproof, our leaders and politics continue to debate rather than act and the governments continue to
manoeuvre, each for its advantage. Meanwhile, the nation’s poor continue to have and live on empty stomachs; and this, in reality, will continue. This vast swath of humanity will face increasing hunger unless government policies are changed and focus on hunger and successful local efforts are multiplied. And who needs to make better
policies and more successful local efforts? The very government that
promised to improve a lot of our people.

The poverty, lack, and premature deaths on the nation’s cuffs today is a mirror that reflected us in x-ray form to reveal emotions and motives that we scarcely know. Like a whisper in the breeze, a man is born, he works, and he dies. Then there is nothing. You wonder if it is truly true that one day, some time ago, a group of men gathered to set down the principles of something they called democracy under which all men would be created equal. In the race, in opportunity. Goals have become the travails and challenges of democracy. Because it is always easier to state the ideal than to achieve it. But then, all said and done, the achievement becomes the struggle, and the struggle is ours, we are the people who must accept the challenge of democracy and make it work.

I struggled up through a maze of pain at the horrendous horde of horror on TV; of houses and persons floating. Lost dreams and faiths that are vanishing. Who is going to stand up for us, us, who are frothed with indignation, but couldn’t express it, as the blanket of pessimism about our future seems to cover everywhere; even as we are saddled with leaders that couldn’t breeze through the obligations and commitments that go with their status.

The leaders have increasingly exposed the nation to a therapy; therapies that calmed our limbs but not our pulses, pulses which seem to grow in loudness as they grew in speed. Therapy that cannot help, but might hurt people leaving our cheeks burning from embarrassment and anger. It’s been a constant tale of a blatant breach of trust, a rape of honour, dignity, and decency from the leaders, in the process, our world has confused the container with the contents and is unable to recognize the contents in its substantive form. Sadly, the world and the people cannot protect themselves, even as politicians keep bleeding the nation dry and
deliberately reduced the quality of life.

We have all been pauperized and the general feeling is pathetic and so poor. What do we have left, a nation, whose politicians arrest every fibre of the people’s patience, consider the people as miniature adults and are constantly asking them to tighten their belts and straighten deck chairs on a sinking ship crippled by a storm. Our democracies appear to be blurring our leader’s vision. Power blocks their vision and causes them to often vacillate, and as a result, sap the people’s energies, as they are asked to work for the benefit of a few people in government. An idea that has constantly been a barrier to creativity, and that has consistently rendered the people less powerful and politicians more powerful, the resultant effect is that it stalls the nation’s group and collective attainment.

In our blighted climes, rather than making democracy a coefficient of abundance, equity, and liberty, it is fast becoming a meaningless metaphor, meaningless in the heart, mind, and life of the individual. It is making a terrible mess of a people submitting to the state, as our leaders are presently preoccupied and crippled while emphasizing what they did wrong rather than what they think they’d done right and are thereby unable to enter the fullness of their avocation.

This is to remind our leaders, that, they must change, their thinking even as they must note that achieving peace and a buoyant economy are achievable destinations, but the leaders and politicians must know where it is.

#JimiBickersteth

Jimi Bickersteth is a blogger and writer.
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