Ahmad
The last time I went on vacation was in 2007. Owing to a combination of circumstances. I was unable to enjoy a holiday last year, and as 2009 burns out so unstoppably, I was becoming rather apprehensive that I might not get a deserved break again this year. But then, two weeks ago, I was given a permission to enjoy the deferred holidy from last year. But it has not been a period of vacation for me; on the contrary, this has been a very painful period, because my mother’s health has deteriorated in the past one month so frighteningly, that I have gone through some of the saddest days of my life, as I have watched her go through the pains associated with the failure of her kidneys and then the expensive procedure of dialysis. What has deepened the torture for us is the fact that most of this period, she has not been exactly conscious for us to even gauge what she is going thorugh!.
In moments of severe distress as we have confronted as a family, my mind has turned round thought about mortality and the processes of coming into being, living a life suffused with pain and hopelessness as we harvest in Nigeria, and the inevitability of exiting the world. I have travelled back and forth to Ilorin on the really horrible roads of our country; they are in such poor shape and with equally crazy drivers who use them, that we are just lucky to arrive safely; and as Hillary Clinton reminded two weeks ago, they are an indictment of Nigeria’s ruling elite and just how criminal it has been especially in the past ten years. The cost of securing health care has become so prohibitive that it is no surprise that hospitals have become a place to just go and die. My experience with my mother’s health has strengthened my conviction hat we cannot say we have a country, for as long as the Nigerian people have no access to comprehensive health care. Far too many people die because they and their families cannot afford to pay for life-saving drugs or procedures. Last year, I paid for a woman at the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital who was detained in hospital, because she couldn’t afford the sum of fiteen thousand naira. It is such a scandal really!
I have written here severally that we live in the Hobbesian jungle where existence is nasty, brutish and short. The crisis of existence is underlined by the fact that 92% of the Nigerian people live on less than $1 per day, in the midst of the incredible wealth which a very tiny minority has stolen from Nigeria in the past thirty years; the World Bank said $300 billion was for all intents and purposes stolen in that period. And to bring the statistics closer home, in the past thirteen years, which takes in the ten years of civilian government, poverty levels have worsened dramatically in our country from 46% to 76%! The crisis is complete and one looks for an area of national life that has escaped the ruinous incompetence and sickening corruption of the jokers who pretend as rulers and there is none; health care; education; roads and railways; electricity; provision of a social net for the poor and the vulnerable; infrastructural renewal; creation of jobs! Nigeria is dying by instalments and those who rule delude themselves about their acumen; or maybe they know, that they are making amess of our ives but are too lost in the deals they make each passing day, to offload national wealth into their own private pockets. It is clear that they have destroyed the public space for the Nigerian people in the pursuit of their own private conforts.
But then, the chickens of the irresponsibility we are describing are returning home to roost, becase more than at any time in our national life, we have not witnessed the levels of insecurity as they manifest today armed banditry; kidnap of the rich and notable and the sense that all is not well even for those who have created the conditions that help insecurity to be so pervasive. But it is only just beginning, because we are approaching a deepening anarchy which the apparatus of state will be unable to dam; believe me there is approaching a deluge of frightening intensity, as the desperation of the citizenry approaches its zenith, in the womb of the uncaring society which the Nigerina ruling class chose to foist on us, over the past twenty-five years or so! As I have returned home to Ilorin regularly, I have confirmed the depth of desperationamongst people, which reflects the same situation around the country. in response, people have become more fatalistic, clinging to religion for succor, while some take routes of criminality against other citizens or the state.
So within the privacy of my pains, I can share the humanity of the Nigerian people and plug into the public apprehensions about the state of the country which, properly husbanded, could have guaranteed the best possible opportunities for its people to live a decen existence from cradle to grave. But in the hands of its ruling class, the Nigerian people live on the margins, harvesting hopelessness, as the ruling class steals the resources that could have guaranteed us a decen existence inwhat ordinarily is a remarkable country,w ith incredible possibilities and beauty. If a private moment of pain can help us understand the depth of the public apprehensions of the mass of our people, what I have experience with my mother’s health, in recent weeks brings that out very poignantly. In all of our pain, we have also harvested the incredible generosity of people from all kinds of background. There is so much good in people which help to soothe pains we harvest from living in the wombs of an uncaring country.
