LANGUAGE OF POVERTY 2
By Babatunde Jose
“He has been delinked from linguistic communion. His lingo is inarticulate rage which he spews out in sharp, stuttering, and spluttering cadences of equal opportunity violence.” Tatalo Alamu
Tatalo Alamu’s description of the language of the Nigerian poor is very apt and illustrative. Yes, poverty has its own language. It is a language of want, deprivation, illiteracy, destruction, looting, burning and sometimes outright killing when enraged.
Poverty offers no apology for its state of being. Poverty has no clothes and is not ashamed of its nakedness. Poverty has no race, ethnicity, nationality, or territorial boundary and is free to roam wherever, it finds itself. Sometimes poverty lives in awful proximity to the affluent.
When provoked, poverty takes no hostage. Sometimes, the language of poverty is vengeance and payback for its exclusion from the good things of life being enjoyed by its affluent neighbors. Poverty is slow to anger, but when pushed to the wall, it strikes back with retaliation and fury.
Poverty has an exceptionally long memory as it keeps an inventory of its tormentors and those it perceives as having a hand in its degradation and impoverishment. This partially explains why poverty can be selective in the looting and burning of properties of its perceived enemies or tormentors; sometimes it makes no distinction and anything on its path becomes game.
Finally, poverty sees itself as the unfortunate consequence of socio-economic injustice: Where Justice is the root of all social peace and or unrest, depending on its presence or absence. Thus, uprising and carnage are collateral consequences of injustice and will arise when the poor are pushed to the limit of socio-economic elasticity. That is when the social rubber-band snaps. Like we have said before, when the poor have nothing to eat again, they will start ‘eating the rich’.
What Tatalo termed ‘Homo Nigerianus’ is euphemism for the downtrodden poor, the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the flotsam and jetsam, and the discarded dredge of society. In time to come, they will be the nemesis of not only the rich but that of the fast vanishing middle-class.
On the day when poverty fights back, it will be the day the proverbial Devil will come out to ‘drink water’. Unfortunately, water will not be enough to satiate its thirst but blood. That is why there must be Justice in the land.
The spate of corruption in the land is one of the greatest indices of injustice and a prime cause of poverty in a country blessed with abundance of natural resources.
The historical trajectory of post-colonial Nigerian predicament is hinged on the emergence of various corrupt leaders (civilian and military). In spite of the abundant natural and human resources, the so-called Nigerian leaders have not only found it difficult to institute or run the semblance of a modern state but have also failed to build the country as a nation.
Corruption is not a recent phenomenon that pervades the Nigerian state. Since the creation of modern public administration in the country, there have been cases of official misuse of resources for personal enrichment.
Late sage, Obafemi Awolowo raised a salient issue when he said, ‘since independence, our governments have been a matter of few holding the cow for the strongest and most cunning to milk, under those circumstances everybody runs over everybody to make good at the expense of others’. (Awolowo, 1979).
At every level, we are urged to be fair and just. Justice is an integral part of faith and upholding the principle of justice is not confined to the courtroom environment, or to a set of formal injunctions, but commands a high priority in the order of moral and spiritual values. See Quran 4:135 and 5:8.
Islam has been preaching this for over 1400 years. Justice is the real goal of religion. It was the mission of all Prophets and the message of all Scriptures. See Quran 57:250.
However, when those who are entrusted with authority over others regress into unjust and inequitable behavior, they becomes ready candidates for the punishment of God.
One of the solutions to solving this problem is to enhance human capital, like education and health. In other words, the theory is that improving the components of human capital will reduce poverty and change income distribution for better.
Poverty is not only a disease but a state of spiritual rejection, a condition of deprivation, poverty, a state of economic marginalization and denial of fundamental human rights of fulfilment of basic needs and freedom. Poverty is a political and economic crime that sentences the individual into a social and spiritual prison, making that person cursed as in Joshua 9:23 “Now therefore you are cursed, and some of you shall never be anything but servants, hewers of wood and drawers of water “.
People in a state of poverty are politically voiceless; they are emasculated financially and have no business in the political domain; they are constantly preoccupied with eking a living from the dustbin of society. And they are at the mercy of ‘rulers’ who are supposed to protect their interest and ameliorate their living conditions. It is as if they were born to suffer.
The poor live in unhygienic and insecure environments with limited access to medical facilities, electricity, water, and other basic services. They are not concerned about carbon footprint and climate change since they are also the world’s problem. For a people who cannot afford the spiraling cost of cooking gas and kerosine, what business have they with carbon emission? The hungry see all these as the preoccupation of the rich. As they say, what business has the taxi driver got with flying boat?
Malnutrition is one of the greatest conditions of the poor. It also engenders disease and death. The malnourished is prone to all kinds of health challenges, hence most of the past interventions have had to do with enhancing food production and food security. But so far this has failed woefully, and you and I know the main reason: Corruption!
Meanwhile the rich get richer even as poverty and inequality deepen. Nick Dearden, director of the advocacy group Global Justice Now, said “It’s no wonder that rich individuals in Africa are getting richer, because we’re seeing a form of ‘development’ … which hugely benefits the wealthy but makes the lives of the poor even harder.”
He went further to say: “From Nigeria to Mozambique you can see poverty rising at the same time as rapid growth. What does this mean? The growth is being gobbled up by the super-rich and transnational capital. And that means ordinary people, by comparison, find their lives even more impoverished.
Without doubt, the unpardonable failure of the political leadership class managing the affairs and wealth of the country had inevitably brought severe misery to many voiceless and helpless Nigerians.
Only wholesale reforms in attitude and structure can change the situation and find solutions to the suffocating problems of the country which include a heavily indebted and collapsing economy, a degenerate state of education, failed security system and an increasing sense of hopelessness among Nigerians. But can we expect change from the present crop of leadership?
Our greater challenge is tackling the greed, prodigal and poverty-inducing misrule in the country by the political elite who hold the country hostage. So, Nigerians need to organize and mobilize to chase out those causing us pain and suffering.
Barka Juma’at and a happy weekend.
By Babatunde Jose
