Bad Luck

We live in an age of anxiety. In the west what causes sleepless nights the most is whether the next generation will be able to enjoy a richer lifestyle than their parents’. There is near-universal worry that the young will not be able to land a job that pays a living wage or even land one at all. And, as if in mockery of the plight of the struggling poor, the gap between them and the really wealthy 1% is widening by the day.

But the difference between someone in the west who pockets a million dollars, for example, and another who gets only twenty or thirty thousand is not the same as the difference between the minimally employed in a poor African country earning just one dollar a day and their more ruthless brethren who plunder a billion or two from the system.

And the poor in Africa are not only just poor. They lack security of life as well. (Among numerous other deficits).This lack of security may be just local, mediated through the actions of neighbourhood thugs. Dangerous enough. But, too often, the actions of their governments at the centre lead to a more wholesale threat to security. Anyway, however you look at it the governments are culpable for the shocking quality of life that people in these countries have to endure. Governments fail to deliver on promises, misgovern and oppress, and when called to account, over-react and do more mischief to those who dare to protest. Some governments even refuse to go even when they have gone well beyond their use-by date. And wherever they are in the election cycle, if that has not already been rubbished, the people may withdraw their consent to be governed by such incompetent, self-serving kleptocrats.

In the circumstances, all sorts of groups emerge from all quarters of the society, demanding their own slice. Fair enough. But when among them, the very worst emerge with their dubious theologies, the threat to the society becomes elemental. This is what is happening in Nigeria right now. A government, in what is arguably the most corrupt nation on earth and where the gulf between the rich and the poor is one of the deepest, presided over by a man whose performance belies his name, has exposed its people to unspeakable threats. Young men and women, old men and children are being terrorized and captured. Schools, churches and other places of worship and instruction are being targeted, set on fire, their occupants immolated. And now, captured schoolgirls are being threatened with being sold in an ironic replay of the wars that fuelled the transatlantic Slave Trade.

And up to recently, there has been dead silence from Nigeria’s Mr President. The only action of note seems to have been one from a member of the kitchen cabinet, “Her Excellency” Madam President herself, whose quota of testosterone seems to be more ample than that of her husband’s. Too bad that she elected to demonstrate her power by ordering the arrest of those protesting against her husband’s incompetence. Amazing.

Nigeria needs better luck than the measure that Jonathan seems capable of delivering.

Tell Fren Tru