This week, for reasons of health challenges, I present from the archives, the following piece, published in the defunct Abuja weekly, Newspage, on page 30, of May 9, 2008. It is a long story. But please read to the end.
You will find that we lived long, spent much time, money; talked and written much. But we changed not. Maybe we changed. But only a little.
Enjoy:
Our Culture of Hunger
Hunger, by a practical Nigerian sense, is not the absence of food or lack of it. It is the cultural perceptions or misperceptions of the imperative of food and its provision for the hungry. I listened to the ear-tearing cries of hunger across the land since the hard times struck us this year, and found that we were just crying, from the shores of Nigeria, for no good reasons.
It is part of the world economic failure, or, as experts and economists and economic custodians want us to believe, an economic finetune. Many nationals are undergoing worst times than the Egyptians, whose impatience and culture sent them to street protests. We have not taken to that and as I try to show here, by the grace of God, we will never.
For us, the current trend is better understood as consequence of bad economic policy, courtesy of deliberate government ignorance, because it is lacking in the mid of plenty. Whatever it is, we are here for it. And there is no help now for anyone at the moment until those who have been slated to suffer in this quagmire finish up to the pointline. But in crying, we are doing the unnecessary, because, remember, this is Nigeria.
The nation’ status on the world’s map is not poor-like even if our reality is. A people who are sixth producing of the second best form of oil in the world are not, by assumption, poor, and should not even do the least of protest of hunger. Here is why we should not cry.
Our hunger, back to the starting point, is not lack of food or money to buy it. It is our refusing to eat food freely served on the table for the simple reason that, if you like, we do not value food as a panacea for hunger and immunity of health. We only eat anything. But what we value is not food. We value materials.
So when people cry of hunger in Nigeria it is not that food is scarce or unaffordable. Rice, at its most exorbitant price, has been bought at ten thousand naira or more to inform the current scarcity in the markets; to the point government is planning importation to remedy the deficit.
And up to now, rice has not lost its status as the people’s staple. Those who love to eat rice and those who hate it have not changed their attitudes to it. I have not. Until we change our taste and food-perception of rice, it remains a common staple within the reach of those who were used to buying it.
We are hungry because, as a result of the economic downturn, the cost of a bag of rice is straining our pockets and gulping much of what we saved or should save for buying materials. Buying food at such price is blocking our ambition to save. We would not have cried of hunger if it is materials that strain the incomes for food.
This is because we love to show more than to eat. Those who like materials more than the quality of what they eat tell the old idea that what you eat is coated by the stomach and is not seen by others to reflect your image and project it in good light even if you are on the road to hell.
But good living is always judged first by the texture of the skin and the look on the face both owe to what you eat. Most people commit more resources to what they show: starched clothes, fancy cars and handsets than to what they eat, because they are the showy, not the eating type.
When we don’t buy materials we save to eternity. In most cases we do not live to see the tolls of our financial buildups. And some other time, even the inheritors we save for just in case we fall and die, do not get to withdraw or trace what is saved for them. Sometimes we save for no cause and for no reason, and we suffer for it with saving-long hunger.
And the many banks are opening more swelling accounts and more
branches than any time, flourishing and diversifying businesses and investments. There are arguably more customers for banks than any time, because banking sails with the fluff of modernity. The banks have also provided different facilities to lure more customers.
Poverty is not new to us. It has been part of us for a long time. A friend joked that poverty has naturalized as a citizen in our mid and has been an active one. Its newness is in the current din about it among a people who have known hunger for much of their life as individuals and a nation, but who have done little to tackle it.
Nations have long chosen between producing and importing to determine their management of hunger. In our case we have taken the decision to buy instead of produce too recklessly that we buy oil even as we decided to drill it out of our abundant production. Some other nations, America and Israel, who worked to outsmart hunger through farming, decided long ago not to drill their oil out of their reserve wells beneath their soil.
But when we so decided and got the result we are now protesting, it is only fair to self that you give food the maximum input to feed self and those whose mouths are in your hand.
If you invite hunger and give it a place in your nation or home, it becomes a way of life, a culture and must work to handle it instead of complaining. Wealth, by a lay definition, is the ability to feed well, not the penchance to wield materials.
Although our crude output has dropped for some reasons over a couple of years, the soaring oil price in the international market has made up for the deficits we have run this far. So we are expected to, apologies to serious economics, have twice our previous income, in national and international reserve. We can take the money to buy enough food for everyone, including hangers-on.
We have got a rich land expanse and good soils, enough for every standard of cultivation, enough for every one willing to bend to the ground, to produce the variety of food we need to feed our people. Instead, we dropped the hoes and move to the city to pursue cheap, easy oil money.
The farms have been deserted for enough time to erode the texture of the soils which, by now, have lost their values. This is partly why, if you care to know, we cannot farm without the exorbitance of precious fertilizer.
The last farmer I met last cried before the first rain dropped: “what do we do when a bag of fertilizer is fifty thousand naira”? Fertilizer at this price is turn
ing out to take after the prestige of oil. When that happens very soon, I don’t know what we will turn to again.
And we have got money to spend and buy things of want and needs, despite the cry at May Day for increase in pay due to inflation. The NLC must know that instead of fighting the roots of inflation, it is tackling it from the head and it is wrong to do that. When inflation is lowest, you can live well with the lowest income.
This current struggle for wage increase does not carry the substance of strategies against deliberate policy for the devaluation of the naira or the competing market forces against its depreciation.
The local markets are open on normal hours for all access with goods stocked as the cries of hunger lingered. Buyers are trooping every day to buy one thing or the other. The markets are not deserted even if people just go there to see goods and return home without buying, brandishing empty leather bags. That is both possible and impossible. People go to the market for the good reason of buying and selling goods.
All over the country, shops are springing up; build in different sizes and at different places; at different stages of completion. We calculatedly now have more shops all over the country than all the trees in the land put together. The flourish of shops pictures us as rich people who buy more than sell.
This is why the smartest in our mid outbid us into business while we languish in the confines of salary indebtedness. Business, because we are the buying type, pays more easily. And business people have read our mad rush to buys and are exploiting it fast. In this country we buy even when we do not have money.
This exploited culture of business has the provision of a cruel facility which ties you up to monthly pay. This reminds me of Suleiman, the cloth seller on credit in my university. His customers have a way of sneaking out or hiding from him when the month is here, and considering the log on salary, paying Sule is suicidal.
The credit facility spares you the trouble of market hold up if you are the busy type but it also lures you in to taking the unnecessary. It puts you under a credit bond I n which the creditor is the month-long patience and you are the day-long restless at pay point, that is if you escaped Sule too much that he runs into you in one of the nooks until you can’t explain any more than to dip into the pocket and dash out.
The other year a colleague locked himself in the office for a whole day when this man refused to leave the premises. Each time he comes up to knock the door for the tenth times, something tells him someone leaves here but there is nothing he can do.
With all our economic trouble and hunger, we are silent. Silence is a form of acceptance. It means that we endorse the current situation and the system. It means we are happy, even if our faces do not radiate happiness, in living in this country we overburden too much with the quest for every service and get less each time we ask.
Sometimes I used to think that our governments think we are contented and we really need nothing of all that we ask for; that all the noises about needs are made by the elite. The elite, the meaning has now changed in Nigeria, are those who go to organize riot and mobs to stage a case, say for the Niger Delta, in order to get handsome money from government. They are all over but they do not answer their elusive title.
The noises we hear in the public sphere or the media about our economic suffering are not genuine. They are made by the very people named above, who exploit us to this poverty in the mid of riches. They try to cry on our behalf in order to make a case out of no situation and make their money easily.
It has been the tradition of our underdevelopment all the years. In Nigeria, noise making is a source of income. When you shout you self out, some guilty person in public office will shake and call you to appease.
I do not know if the current cries of hunger are not sang by people concerned with importation and exportation, not of oil now but rice, who would want to creatively badden the situation to make a worse case out of normal life in order to maximize profit. What they import is usually twice cheaper in neighbouring Benin. And it is, by their religion, I mean the religion of business, ‘pure profit’.
Profiting is the cheapest source of income for most people. One of the difficult things in life I find is delegated buy. Give the closest and trusted person to you to buy you something. They will give you twice or more the price of anything you need.
This is, perhaps, the probable reason you are crying of national inflation from the bed of domestic inflation of extra pricing. This is becoming acceptable in many homes and families. Our blind inability to question some of these things is tolling on us and is burdening the pillars of the culture we proclaim.
We are not poor and not hungry also because our lifestyles have not changed. We have not stopped the petty celebrations, including survival parties for the last disagreement we had with our boss. We have rolled our drums for the slightest opportunity to show the world how rich we are, or how rich our nation is.
In hunger, we have not parked the cars in priority to food so that the road congestions can reduce for a while. Even when it was at its best of crises and worst price, we bought fuel every day for the cars and generating sets and we have not changed or reduced the diets because prices are soaring.
We have not stopped recharging the phones even when the service providers are exploiting our inflation-ridden incomes for worst services and
are defying a court order to compensate us. The services are deteriorating by day and we are not complaining or taking any action.
We have not reduced extra expenses outside the family, taking time out with friends, clubbing, sometimes at costly personal and family expense. The schools have not closed because our kids have stopped attending for lack of transport of non-pay of fees.
Marriages have not broken down because carrying the household is beyond men’s economic capacity to carry any longer. We have not read in any of the weekend features that any couple has lost its bearings because of hunger. And people have not stopped marrying. Marriages or their ceremonies have not dropped for the same reason.
This is not a call for that to happen. No. It is just one of the probable indices that may point to aspects of life which can point to the wrong with a people because of economic incapacity. Our living, not life, at least indicates that we are either comfortable or are capable of taking life as Nigerians.
We should not cry of hunger. We need to add to our courage of life found no where else in the world: the courage to carry on with any situation and live peacefully because, if anything, our peace is our food.
The truth is we have made enough cries about this predicament more than the actual measure of our real life troubles. When we have to genuinely cry, we will, without the benefit of crocodile tears. Do not pray to see that day of genuine cry.
Meanwhile, weep not child. Mama’s rich and got food.
Hassan Alhaji Hassan can be contacted on 08032829772/08050551220 (text only with full names and address)a[email protected]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect WikkiTimes’ editorial stance.
