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.
Jimi Bickersteth is a blogger and writer and can be reached at jimi.bickersteth@yahoo.co.uk
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.
Jimi Bickersteth is a blogger and writer and can be reached at jimi.bickersteth@yahoo.co.uk
