There is no doubting the fact that more and more Nigerians in the present dispensation are slipping fast into the poverty net for poor economic management by leaders of the past.
Poverty in every language or religion is an abomination because it crushes the human spirit effectively, and a talk about patriotism on an empty stomach with a bleak future staring becomes difficult if not impossible. That forms part of the reason of the rising security challenges and immorality amongst the youth having lost hope in any perceived or trumpeted better future.
Poor people erroneously believe and feel powerless to change their circumstances even through the ballot box. Often, they are powerless to change their circumstances because they do not have the tools, courage and wherewithal to succeed politically as they erroneously rate their capacity.
Generational poverty as can be clearly seen in some federal constituencies and senatorial zones of Bauchi State if not for the prompt attention and succor offered by the governor, those areas could have not been better than cemeteries. Those areas are the worst ever in human history to my knowledge, most especially when one resides in other climes surrounded and dotted by images of success with happy and contended people. These images crush the spirit while not having access to what one needs to improve life as success.
A man in an exotic automobile acquired from proceed of fraud and other questionable sources, shamelessly accompanied by coterie of security guards splashes pedestrians with mud while waiting for commercial motorcycle by the roadside due to the absence of reliable public transport.
Education is the usual way out of poverty from assessments, but if a poor citizen, even when educated, brings his broken spirit along with him as the case with most of the youth, they are often less successful than others who had humble beginnings even with less academic laurels and shielded from the spirit-crushing nature of abject poverty.
Several federal constituencies and senatorial zones in Bauchi State remain sad examples of areas where pauperization is vigorously pursued as a public and political policy, since policy itself best defined, according to Thomas Dyle, as what government chooses to do or not to do, the government pays only lip service to poverty alleviation and has deliberately chosen the path of profligacy, which reinforces poverty throughout the land. For example, in our country Nigeria, government officials and political office holders are in competition to own automobile farms’ to cruise on the roads than put a push to recondition the bad roads or construct new ones.
In major federal constituencies in Bauchi State, there is no single five-kilometer road constructed by any representative, senator from even the trumpeted constituency projects and funded by the federal government other than those initiated and executed by former Speaker House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara in his federal constituency. The bulk of infrastructural development is left to the state governor without any support from those national lawmakers.
Even the existing roads needing desperate attention within the federal constituencies and senatorial zones, are left to rot without an eyebrow raised by anyone other than the governor. Most of those expected to shout and be listened to, are on the payroll of the exploiters, consciously or unconsciously. It is a typical case of stomach infrastructure at work against general development.
Most of the roads are death traps trapping the very people that elected their exploiters to power. The roads are extra dangerous but no one gives a hoot and a cross section of the same suffering people are comfortable with the pathetic situation and even celebrating their exploiters as accomplished performers and ready-mades for re-election at the expense of general development.
It is the case of a state that suffers relegation in all spheres of quality representation and development despite the yearly inserted constituency projects in the federal budget that can neither be located nor seen but claimed to have been executed in connivance with thieving contractors and paid. Their locations may be in the outer space but not anywhere in Bauchi State.
No one cares to challenge the denial, and not for the fear of juvenile and pedestrian attacks from malnourished stationed attack dogs that scramble for crumbs but for fear of ‘offending’ the interest of certain, beneficiaries of the scam that deserve respect within the communities.
In our Nigeria of today, public servants are paid much less than a living wage, forcing most of them to cut corners and engage in open, brazen corrupt practices to survive the hard times. If in doubt, how do public servants offset the school fees of their children in private schools within and abroad? How do they offset their medical bills of themselves and those of their family members in choice private hospitals within and abroad? How do they own property in choice cities in Nigeria and abroad? What miracle did they apply to own exotic cars and jeeps while maintaining a coterie of aides and hangers-on?
Another example of this means-end inversion are police officers who are often implicated in crimes they are poorly paid, ill-equipped and ill-trained to prevent armed robbery, kidnapping for ransom, cyber fraud, treasury looting including diversion of constituency projects etc.
Poverty is a direct correlate of many negative psychological factors that constitute inertia of social forces that reinforce themselves. The chief among them is dehumanizing. Poverty reduces human being to his lowest ebbs and forces acceptance of fate of the same kind as what one wishes only his enemy.
Its first victim is the depersonalized man whose self esteem and confidence are crushed and without which man is but a shadow of himself.
Poverty is so strong that once it attacks and destroys self-esteem, it asserts itself over the victim’s life and gradually eats him up until nothing is left as is the ongoing case in many federal constituencies courtesy of clueless and inept representation by those elected.
Even the physical self is eaten up by poverty, leaving often only a mass of bones covered with discolored rough skin. Poverty is therefore the worst calamity that can befall a man and that is why the entire life struggles are but to escape it, and the majority, never succeed without intervention. This is where and why government usually steps in: to assist citizens, especially the most disadvantaged ones to rise above poverty and live a good life while the opposite is the case in practice in several areas of Bauchi State where paltry assistance is only extended to sycophants and clowns as politicians, touts, miscreants or hired hooligans so desperate to be near the corridors of power or those self-appointed leaders without followers. It is only the state government that is burdened with the situation and runs helter-skelter to save the worrisome situation always.
According to John Locke, government is usually there to make greater happiness available to a greater number of the citizens but in Bauchi State most federal constituencies, that is not obtainable. What the federal government periodically offers to parliamentarians as zonal intervention palliative to cushion the hard effects of poverty, are diverted and scantly distributed to selected party loyalists with mortgaged rights loitering around their exploiters for a bowl of porridge.
Locke was so sure of his analysis that he counseled that any government that fails in this primary responsibility should be overthrown by the people through any available means. Yet, in our clime, the state government is ever there for the benefit of the entire people but a selected few representing the people that have mortgaged their conscience are not.
People in most federal constituencies are just eking out a living whichever way they can, providing virtually all social amenities for themselves including security, electricity, water, education, food, housing, clothing and even access roads in the villages. They are federal constituencies where the provision of a town hall to an impoverished agrarian community is more important than a functional health facility. Where, a police outpost is more of a desirable, than portable water to the needy community that source water for domestic use from stagnant ponds and outdated polluted wells. Where selected unemployed educated youth are turned to motorcycle commercial riders and the poorly educated turned to thuggery and domestic slavery instead of assisted to realize their full potentials.
Leadership in Wase federal constituency is one of the worst ever that one can find in any part of the world. The sharp contrast existing between poverty and opulence is so incredible and crushing.
If you take a trip round the federal constituency, you will be convinced with its status as a glorified village relegated in all spheres of development including human capital. While their leaders swim in all imaginable luxuries (uninterrupted electricity supply, access to the best hospitals, clean and filtered water etc) in far away cities, at home, existing side by side with ghettos without portable water, electricity supply, accessibility to even public health facilities and schools and so on. Where they are fortunate, there may be a dilapidated public school with children milling around stark naked with potbellies filled with deadly worms instead of balanced foods.
Such brutal sights in Wase ghettos and rural dwellings are so appalling and nauseating. Students sit on wood logs, stones and bare floors. School buildings are without roofs, windows without shutters and pupils lack standard text books or even black boards in classes. Of course the unmotivated teachers can’t teach because the environment is not conducive for learning. Yet, it does not bother those in power because they have bought the conscience of those to checkmate them. Those in power can always afford to dispatch their children and wards to choice private schools for studies with either public or stolen funds, so why should they recondition public schools to benefit the children of the poor? Heartless creatures!
Poverty is so stressful and stress is in itself the foundation of all ailments, without exception, starting with malnutrition and ending in cancer or schizophrenia and dying education and values. Prostitution, drug abuse, homosexuality, hooliganism, thuggery and voodism are now booming businesses. No thanks to the increasing crushing poverty in the land.
No matter how much we pretend or pontificate, directly and indirectly, prostitution and other immoralities are products of poverty. Whereas a sprinkling of well-to-do children may be found amongst prostitutes for other extraneous reasons, the whole bulk belongs to the poor homes, where parents can no longer assert themselves in child upbringing and care-giving, which invariably goad such children to the gutters of life.
Homes are breaking up mainly due to high poverty level. Parents now helplessly watch their children engaged in oddities for survival. Survival being more imperative than morals and parents are no longer the parents we were brought up to know and respect.
All these are happening because politicians are in the rat race of stealing the funds in lumps, budgeted for development by government. A common national lawmaker with poor education wants to walk home with N2trillion per annum as allowance and salary for only shouting in the hallow chamber, and still not satisfied or contended, out of greed, he/she joins the contract business with personal registered companies in ministries/departments and agencies of government that he is expected to oversight rather than work on laws to jumpstart development, check executive tyranny and free the people from the shackles of poverty. The greedy and immoral police man, join forces with armed robbers and kidnappers rather than to maintain the law and fight crime.
Teachers sell question papers and sleep with their female students before passing them even if those students cannot write their names correctly. Nigeria is working so hard on its own banana republic but the question is why?
Nigerians are killed daily by their governments in installments as scientists have discovered for years that people living in poverty have poorer health and shorter life spans than the more affluent. They identified several mechanisms that may help explain how low socio-economic status takes its toll on health, psychologically and physiologically. In some of the longitudinal studies on the physiological effects of poverty in children, researchers report that the longer the children survived in poverty, the less efficient their bodies become in handling environmental demands. The implication is that majority of the people now condemned to absolute poverty are ill-equipped to fare well into the future.
These mechanisms may be related to the fact that children who grow up in poverty have a steeper life trajectory of premature health problems than other children, regardless of their socio-economic status in adulthood. What this means is that even if a poor child makes it in future, he or she remains disadvantaged despite the breakthrough. This is an informed position of experts and not my conjectural personal opinion. Such studies show that these muted responses of stress, not only compromise the ability of the poor’s body to respond to such stressors as noise, poor housing and family turmoil but also indicate he/she is suffering from more stress-induced physiological strain on their organs and tissues than wealthy citizens. Wealthy citizens, here means those with legitimate wealth not those with stolen public funds that find it difficult to have comfortable sleep or rest for fear of the obvious in or out of government.
Incoming Government after the exit of the present comedians and jesters must come up with deliberate policies and legislations to end voodoo politics and strengthen the records for posterity and chart a new direction of progress for Nigeria.
If patriotism means dying for one’s federal constituency, state and country, Nigerians are already dying in advance. But this manner of dying is in vain since the people’s death should be to edify the polity and not to pollute it.
Nigeria and Wase federal constituency in particular has a complex war in its hands, fire raging but nobody seems to be running. May God Almighty bless us with men and women that can address those clear leadership deficits, men and women to chart a new course for our fraught country and federal constituency and reduce the artificially, created inevitable consequences bedeviling the good of the people irrespective of any imaginary difference, be it religious, political, tribal or regional. I Come in Peace!
Muhammad is a commentator on national issues.
