Please find herein the transcription of a meeting held recently at a discreet location to find out why everybody is angry with everybody. It was presided over by an appointed Family Head, henceforth to be addressed as FH. Here we go.
FH: Let’s start with the civil servants so they can quickly return to their duty posts.
Civil Servants: What duty posts?
FH: You no longer have duty posts?
Civil Servants: Our posts are unpaid for. We work and we do not get paid.
FH: Or you pretend to work? (Laughs)
Civil Servants: Seriously, you think this is a joke? Do you know the implication of working without pay and watching your employers get fat and strut their stuff in your face? Our children are out of school. We are hungry and ill and can’t even afford to uy drugs. What kind of family head are you if you think all that is a joke?
FH: No, I do not think it is a joke . I was just trying to lighten the mood…
Civil Servant: Do you know what it’s like to watch your son suffer for days because you can’t buy his migraine drugs? Do you know what it is like to be hypertensive or diabetic and not be able to buy your routine drugs? Some civil servants even have to resort to traditional birth attendants to deliver their children.
FH: Ah, maybe they should put off making babies until the economy improves, what do you think?
Civil Servants: Are you being real right now? Civil servants should stop impregnating their wives until things get better? Is that what governors and their children are doing? Have you castrated the politicians first before coming here to tell us that? A sensitive family head would be talking about increasing minimum wage and how to force the governors to pay what they owe.
FH: Increasing minimum wage when the one they owe you have not received? Does that even make any sense? I will suggest we focus on how to get regular salaries instead of asking for pay rise.
Civil Servants: You must force them to pay.
FH: That may be a bit difficult because they are constituted authorities
Civil Servants: What did you just say?
FH: Governors are constituted authorities even if you don’t like the sound of the words.
Civil Servants: Constituted authorities my foot. So they were constituted to kill and to castrate civil servants, right? In other words, you will not force them to pay what they owe and increase minimum wage?
FH: You know how it is when a man cannot get it up, it is pointless telling him to sleep with his wife.
Civil Servants: Are you saying the governors are impotent?
FH: Well…
Civil Servants: Well what? They are pretending to be impotent. They are doing things. Just tell them that their ungodly impotence is killing us and that one day monkey go go market, he no go come back? We are done here.
FH: Wait, please let’s iron this out…
Kidnapper: Perhaps you should attend to us next.
FH: Perhaps you should tell me who you represent.
Kidnappers: We are members of KAN.
FH: Christian Association of Nigeria?
Kidnappers: No, K-A-N, Kidnappers Association of Nigeria. We are kidnappers.
FH: W-h-a-a-a-a-t? Suit-wearing kidnappers speaking good English and wearing your vice like a badge of honour too! What has come over our country? You are not even afraid to show your face in public. What if I call the police?
Kidnapper: Go on, get us arrested and let’s see how that solves our family problem. We are just an arm of the national body.
FH: Kidnappers have a national body? I think this family is finished. How did we get here, for Pete’s sake?
Kidnapper: I can help you out with that. For instance in KAN, we have sacked engineers from telecoms, sacked bankers, sacked oil and gas workers, frustrated artisans and graduates from different disciplines who can’t find jobs and so on. We are all united by adversity and fending for ourselves in our own way. Or you expected us to just wither and die when we were sacked? We have old parents, children, families and then we lost our jobs…
FH: And the best you could do is take to crime? You couldn’t find go into trading or do something decent?
Kidnapper: Do you know any other trade where we can make the kind of money we are making? We kidnap a rich guy on Friday and his family pays N20m on Wednesday. We keep him well fed, check his blood pressure and sugar level every day and ensure not a drop of blood is shed. We take our money , he goes back to his family and everybody lives happily ever after. How is that not a good deal? The only thing we do not do is file tax returns.
FH: Osanobua, see how you painted crime in all the colours of the rainbow? You are all criminals.
Kidnapper: No no no. We are only redistributing wealth, taking from those who have and giving those who don’t. do you think those rich people would on their own have paid my children’s school fees when they were thrown out of school just before O’level WASSCE was about to start? Or pay for my deputy’s wife’s surgery when the doctor gave him three days or be ready to buy a coffin? See, in Nigeria, the gap between the rich and the poor is widening and the economists are speaking English and telling us about percentages that only they understand.
FH: Eh, the rich are also crying o.
Kidnapper: Ooook, it is easier to cry in an air-conditioned room than under the bridge with only an old raincoat as bed sheet and cover.
FH: So you have no intention of repenting?
Kidnappers: What are the alternatives, old man, watch the landlord take over both my wife and 14-year-old daughter because I could not offset my rent for two years? Did you not just tell the civil servants that their governors are impotent?
FH: So we should all take to crime because the naira is in a bad shape? We should become a nation of criminals?
Kidnapper: Well, you may start by telling me how to explain to an eight-year-old why he didn’t eat throughout yesterday and he has to watch his peers go to school. Do I tell him graduation is now done when you are eight years old or what?
FH: What is wrong is wrong. You must stop. The government has promised to create jobs and we should be patient.
Kidnapper: Cool, the jobs have already been created in the crime sector.
FH: You Association of Distressed Wives, are planning on going into crime too?
(To be continued).
Credit: Funke Egbemode, Sunday Sun
A great satire. Anarchy can only breed conflict and crisis, which is what unpaid salaries, disregard for educational gestation to breed aware and productively exposed citizenry and adequate health and security provisions can yield. The sad and sodden reflection on poverty and criminality has gone beyond apportioning blameworthiness to a specific sector while the ‘haves’ are in minority and the ‘criminal-minded’ also, are in a minority. The majority continues to wallow in abject poverty. A damning thought that in this day and age workers do not get paid for their services is certainly question-begging and sounds like victimisation of the working class group. So what is to be expected than a spawned generation of desperadoes with a mind-set of doing all things possible; and practicable for survival.
Has the office of national statistics, interior ministry (prisons), justice department (police and courts) made an attempt to collate statistical data on the background of persons known, apprehended, incarcerated, cautioned; etc, found complicit in kidnappings, armed robbery, institutional cultism, scams, rape; etc, to determine the root-cause of criminality in the country? If so, has any move been made to seek consultations (moralists, psychologists, criminologists, sociologists; etc…and Nigeria has loads of them) on how effective to stem the continuing flow of such public ‘disorder’-at least that’s how it can be perceived when next-to-absolutely-nothing has been derived from various interventions?
Those at the helm of public administration (FH) should reflection their pre-leadership experiences to come to a reality that when the ‘working class’ is starved of their due rights, they are leading the ‘broadway’ to anarchy and various human eternal vices. A case similar to this anecdote is Nigeria, the Giant of Africa; OR is IT?
It may soon become a norm to Nigeria, just as corruption has become, with the Majority living in perpetual bondage of the minority. If I think from my professional ‘cap’, Many Nigerians caught up in the ‘minority’ groups definitely suffer from multiple forms of’personality disorder’ including narcissistic syndrome, psycho-social delusion and psychopathy, for which they require ‘beyond- talking therapy’ treatment to heal. The problem is that those national institutions aforementioned are equally populated with the ‘minority’ groups. So where do we find a resolve?