By Busuyi Mekusi

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Human and animal senses are some of the natural endowments that help them relate with their environments. The senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch send different perceptions of external elements in order for the being to respond in certain ways. Sight and taste could be senses of horror, given the central roles they play in gauging manifestations from outside. One recognisable fact to the senses is the presence of both evil and good in every given trajectory.
The natural environments also parade fruits and vegetables that are nutritional supplements to basic carbohydrates, reputed for giving both energy and ‘anxiety’. Just like the metaphors of human existence, fruits and vegetables could be sweet, mild, sour and bitter. Bitter taste and better touch remain regular oxymoron, as the greed of death goads towards sweetness.
True to the age-long platitude, the taste/proof of the pudding, just like poison, is in the eating. The present socio-economic and political conditions in Nigeria portend life as a bitter-sweet phenomenon, in the order of bitter-leaf. Amidst the impoverishment of lowly Nigerians, we must be reminded of Kofi Annan’s warning that “extreme poverty anywhere is a threat to human security everywhere”.
Postcolonies, including Nigeria, have become cocoons of hate. The colonial torch, with which so many landmarks, including River Niger, were said to have been misleadingly ‘discovered’, saw to the balkanisation of old geographical territories like what Emure-Ile ‘Bush Meat Sellers’ do to unfortunate endangered animal species. Just like the anguish of theatres of war and Golgotha, these colonies have remained perpetually embattled, due to the forceful co-existence achieved through amalgamation, characteristic of the bundling of Ijare Kolanuts. The implication of this forced-marriage is that strange bed-fellows are brought together, with indispensable variegation of quests and destinations. As these old colonies grapple with the contradictions of existence, the Third World nations or the peripheries, as now categorised, survive on the leashing from outside. The IMF and World Bank are the new ”Super-Visors’ that feed the vulnerable nations with poison, as pudding. Undoubtedly, in Eli Khamarov’s words, “poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit”.
The West and her agents, such as IMF and World Bank, use the stick and carrot model to woo and wallop Nigeria and her mates, with wailing and groaning that could be heard. The last heard about this was the Chinese loan conditions that purportedly infringed on the sovereignty of some African countries. Developed nations do not only interfere in the economies of old colonies, but they overreach themselves in politically encouraging and promoting the emergence of bad leaders that are their stooges, but thorns to their people. Such leaders get ‘exterminated’ when they transcend their subservient configuration, as encased by al-Gaddafi.
The case of external endorsement by foreign powers played out when Goodluck Jonathan was to assume office as president when Yar’adua was incommunicado, and he had to travel to France for ‘accentuation’. To worsen these negatively skewed relationships, these foreign interlopers-turned donors and lenders, would emplace condescending prescriptions before they release Aid, stolen monies and loans. It is awful that a country that was liable by accepting and housing stolen funds would turn around to give ridiculous conditions before they would repatriate such funds.
Nations as kleptomaniacs! The IMF and World Bank keep parading economic inoculations such as; entrepreneurial-driven university education, privatisation of education, withdrawal of social supports, deregulation of the petroleum industry, power, electricity, etc., leaving on Nigerians’ taste-bud the proof of poison, as against pudding.
The Buhari government keeps reinforcing how good-intentioned its economic policies are, in the face of limited resources that do not support the sustenance of subsidies. It must be reiterated that the present fragile national and global economies make it inevitable for decisive and apparently painful decisions to be taken. This is more so as the economies of most nations have started shrinking, with the possibility of Nigeria economy sliding to another recession in the fourth quarter. One grouse of Nigerians against the PMB-led government is the politics of denial and excoriation that it played to stage the people against the regime of Jonathan. Nigerian electorates are not just gullible but easily blinded by unrealistic deceptive electoral promises. One would have expected that the government would engage the people extensively on the issues before dishing this bitter pudding.
Worse still, Lai Mohammed made fruitless attempts to compare the new price regimes with fuel prices and electricity tariffs in West and Central African sub-regions, without giving consideration to the value of the naira, per capital income and purchasing power parity.
With Nigeria’s toga of the poverty capital of the world, it is needless to argue that the implementation of these policies would engender more disillusionment among the people, as unpaid salaries and pensions have undermined the economic capacity of individuals, coupled with the almost irreversible depreciation of the naira. A highly wasteful and corrupt political class keeps assaulting the sensibilities of the masses, as demonstrated by the recent idiotic display of material consumerism of Dino Melaye. Confucius is right, after all, that “in a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of.
In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of”. Similarly, President Buhari must absolve himself of the promised $50 million Transportation University to be built freely by China in Daura, unless he wants his own ‘corrupt share’ of national distribution, in the league of the controversial Obasanjo Presidential Library. Nigeria’s relationships with the IMF, World Bank and other ‘slave masters’ are negatively skewed, leaving us with irresponsibility within, and culpability without.
With successive misrule, endemic corruption, battered economy and collapsed industries, Nigeria has since become dumping ground, with the drifts precipitating constant brain drains. Nigeria’s tomorrow is in the hands of China!
The untold truth is the unity of purpose among oppressors, across divides, and beyond skin pigmentations. In Nigeria, the Civil Society Organisations are lethargic, while labour aristocracy has sustained primitive accumulation among those who should mobilise the mass against the bleeding shaving of their heads, with many of them merely haggling, ‘barking’ and ‘cursing’ on social media. Julia Cameron is right that “technology teaches passivity. Absorbed in our devices – at any rate – we are absorbed in someone’s else perspective”.
The proletariats must unite and take their destiny in their hands, as power resides with them, taking impetus from Idemudia and others in Festus Iyayi’s Violence and the iconoclastic revengeful but redemptive beggar and his brigades in Ousmane Sembѐne’s Xala. Rather than sentence poor Nigerians to ‘hell’, the IMF and World Bank should support the need for national expropriation and restitution by thieving oppressive political and corrupt elites. Worse still, the oppressed might seek a separate space, for their peace and safety, similar to the all-women Umoja village in Kenya and all-white Orania community in South Africa. It must be noted that life is worthless, if lived in pains and frustrations, even as the exploitative political class is reminded of the counsel of Abhijit Naskar of the need to “tread very carefully where injustice is concerned, because it takes very little for the oppressed to become the new oppressors”.