Nigeria Slums and the Audacity of Her Leadership -By Hussein Adegoke

I think it is hightime we began to tell some sordid narratives the way they really are.

Poor Nigerians don’t speak about their deplorable situations because they barely understand they are stuck in penury. This is simple: if you have never “tasted” opulence, you would think life ends where it just begins.

The rich/elite who should speak on their behalfs, too—having sighted and understood from statistics that the demography to food progression for the teeming populace of Nigeria spells doom for the country in the imminent year 2050—would always remain reticent. The reason is simple, too. Sooner than you begin to dine in affluence, you would forget your humble beginnings.

I don’t like it that this might become too wordy for comprehension. This is a conversation we all should have; the plebians and the nobles; the rich and the poor. Perhaps, the intricacy of some research studies—that may posits that more than half of Nigeria’s population live on one dollar a day—is why most of us have shut our eyes to our precarious states.

I spoke with a friend earlier today, and the young man couldn’t just understand why some Nigerians would take the recent happenstances in our clime for jocularity. Those who were acting to scripts after embezzling funds meant for our social comfort and the generations to come, and are a collosal embarrassment to posterity, are those you jubilate with hysteria. What calls for what?

You see, some of us who come online and write these stuff, complaining bitterly about our collective patrimony squandered by some few, are of two divisions: there are those who do it for fun (and I wonder what fun lies in anyone’s belongings getting usurped by some cankerworms; was it not just to understand these things you were sent to school?) and of course, there are people who, like me, speak from the cesspits of their minds about our degenerate polity.

Some of us are never as much concerned about our average lives—we can at least afford the three-square-meals quite decently, thank God!—as much as we are about some parents who barely live to survive. They live from hand to mouth. If you don’t understand that so well, I will gladly explain. I speak of a mother who goes out, hawks around in the scorching sun of the mid-day, and comes back home with 200 Naira (yes, two hundred Naira). She has three kids to feed and no help from any husband. There’s none. If she fails to meet this trifling set target, she’s doomed already; her children would go hungry for the night and the morning after. And by the next day, whether the previous travail ended in her favour or not, she’s quick to be back into the scorching sun, and this horrendous cycle continues.

The sadder thing is that it’s not just her. I mean, if statistics says “more than half of us survive on less than two dollars a day”, that’s to say a hundred million people (out of Nigeria’s population of 200 million plus) savour the horrible plight of this woman daily. They are not so hard to find. You see them! I know them. They abound in truck pushers, the Almajiris, the shoe repairers, the Alabarus (load carriers), the meat sellers, the wóróbo—an euphemism for “filth”—sellers and the list is just almost endless.

Let’s even ignore statistics for once. Let’s shut our sights to the deplorable street beggars. What about the melancholic situation accompanying Covid-19? Didn’t you see people cry out for food after being subjected to a lockdown that barely lasted few days? You don’t know this shows that they lack savings, and that there are just about many people who live from “hands to mouth?” I am not sorry to tell you that even till date, there are many lives that aren’t yet balanced as to the consequence of that partial lockdown.

There are many more people at the behest of hunger due to the Covid-19 pandemic. And yet, the best honour we give to them, the greatest legacy you could leave on them, is to laugh at the tantrums thrown by some nonentity who would rival his colleague in affluence, and boast of having lived/living in VI or be exposed to some levels of riches that his mate could only be wistful of. Wait. Is that why he was elected? Is it to boast of having served multiple times and even so, fruitlessly, that he was ushered into office? Graduates are unemployed. Chidren are dying. Women are crying. Boko Haram is “flourishing” (apologies to Sowore). Kidnappers are ravagaing. Yet, the sputters of the one person on whose finger tips lie Nigerians’ employability revealed that he was even more interested in “yabbing another ten times” than he was about addressing his untended portfolio assignments. And sorrily, we too are laughing. We watch helplessly yet as our patrimony is carted away. You would know this nation lost its way the day you decided to look through the genetics and mental formulations of a people that spearhead our leadership.