OP-ED| On the new poor

 

There’s so much drama taking place in the absurd theaters of our country.
Forget the theater of the red chambers of the National Assembly and the script of jesters, distinguished by their buffooneries than by the calling of their high offices.
If the preposterous claims of the Lagos empress that a jester of threatened to beat her up, forcefully impregnate in her in the process, and the further claim of threat to life, make you shake your head in disgust, well the counterclaims and actions of the jester will forever make you shake your head like the lizard.
Don’t suffer the fate of the poor lizard. Forget the empress and the jester.
There are sad things happening around us that make our hearts bleed those bitter tears the eyes reserve for themselves.
Take a look around you and you will find those who carry the crosses of darkness from their homes to occupy the front row seats of the protest theaters of our country.
Look: someone, tattered, hungry-looking with eyes pressed into their hollow sockets,
is raising her placard aloft. “Leave our empress alone. Go and impregnate your mother”, she cries. That she insults another woman- the mother of the jester- to protect the integrity and honour of the empress is of scarce concern to her, or to folks like her.
She is not worried about the sorrows of the world that have long taken residence in her home. She is not crying from hunger, or from anger at her condition, she is waking up the protest theaters and streets of our country to the dignity, honour and glory of the one she calls her leader, she is singing through the streets, calling attention to the dangers of patriarchy.
Take another look. Look- a little to the left and a little to the right- this way: here’s is your king descending into the arena of conflict. He isn’t carrying the placard like the poor woman of the protest street. He is not crying from hunger, or from anger at his condition, after all the king shall not want, he is pouring curses on the jester.
Someone is keeping vigil in every doorway leading to the kingdom,
someone is threatening the jester with death. “Don’t venture near the kingdom by the lagoon”. Forget those ones fetching sobs from the watery bellies of the two great rivers to cover their mascara faces, those ones painting silhouettes of shame and the canvases of kisses on the landscape of the confluence town. “Leave our son alone. You are not God. Our son cannot bow to you”, they sing.
Someone is on the phone and someone is pleading with me to write about the jesters of the other House- the green chambers -write something, write about honour among thieves.
I have no time for thieves this week. Don’t bother about them for now, folk.
Look beyond the confluence of jesters and thieves who strut the chambers of our collective ownership to stamp their stupidity on our consciousness and rob us of our humanity, and glimpse the new poor among us, who, kindled by innocence and silenced by the voiceless nature of their condition, are never heard. The new poor are those children forced to seek shelter in our streets, compelled by the circumstances of their births to fend for themselves on the dump heaps of our towns and cities, the ubiquitous suburbia sprawling beyond where the eye can see.
The new poor are those children who go to bed hungry and who rise up hungrier to the awakening dawn of hunger.
Children who wake up from the nightmares of scary nights and prowl through the length of dawn and the breadth of dusk scraping hardship from light, hard life from moving traffic and the wastes of the streets, and more hardship from darkness, from incessant pain, are not only wounded by those car owners who eye them in quizzical ways as they scamper back to the hard shoulders of the road, far from the rearview mirrors of moving cars, but are also wounded by the heavy steps of the adulthood
they are forced to long for, where childhood – innocence, dreams, hope- paces around hopeless and hunts for them, and pain stitches over the scars with time and without time.
There where childhood hunts, the times of their poor lives are disrupted by the sirens of chauffeur- driven jesters, by cheerleaders who sing their praises and claps the day to its death until night is reborn, politicians dressed up like kings and queens strut IYANGA TOLOTOLO, empresses dressed in suffocating perfume emerge with stars in their long hairs while poor children are compelled to glimpse them.
Given our type leaders, given the puppets we call leaders, who will protect the new poor from beholding the ugly sight of jesters battling with empresses for the worldliness of the world? Who will prevent our children from learning or touching or seeing the puppetry that has allowed nonsense to go on inside the red and green chambers of our National Assembly for too long? Who will protect their eyes from tears? Will our children meet adulthood? Will hope ever arrive where they wait?
Those jokers who live off our commonwealth, take so much from it, enjoy the wines of our sweats so much, have taken happiness, joy, faith and innocence out of the world of our children. They have taken the real world out of our children, leaving them with a world with no future, a world imperiled by hopelessness, hunger want and fear.
What a shame.
Certainly, these are not good times for our children.
The nonsense our leaders permit in our public space has permeated our homes, enclosing the joys that make life profound in families, life worth living even in languid times. Across the length and breadth of our country many parents abandon homes to emptiness, leaving empty rooms made of absent fathers and mothers, and children who end up play-acting their roles.
Here is the story of that empty home in Enugu where a seven year old child tried to either tried to play-act the role of the absent father, or the role of the gun-tutting lead character of the western, by pulling the trigger of a gun loaded with bullets on his minder.
The minder was lucky. The bullets missed her by a whisker. A boy who was playing in the open space of a nearby house wasn’t lucky. He didn’t survive his gun wounds.
Guns aren’t play things that should be left carelessly by parents on side drawers.
Children are children and they are bound to explore the world around them, uncover it, prise it open, hammer away at it, pound it with childhood glee, and threaten it with their hands of innocence.
In spite of the pounding and the hammering, the world doesn’t die at the hands of children, the world suffers no injuries- permanent or impermanent.
What the world was once, and is, what the world loses at the hands of children, it regains with ease, without pain, because it exists for them.
The accident in Enugu was bound to happen. The world of everyone- the child-killer, deceased and their parents- connected to the killing was bound to be prised open by grief, and in such a ghastly way. If only we had not turned our homes into the viewing centers for wild and violent movies, the child-killer would have learned the companionship of childhood through playthings, learned to love the world of joy and tell his stories from the things around him- flowers, football, skip ropes, toys and hopscotches- from the cool stuff for around him.
If only the parents had not abandoned the home to emptiness, leaving the minder and her ward of care to fend for themselves, the child-killer would not have boarded the train of death to pull the loaded gun on his minder and killing an innocent child in the nearby house. Sadly, the grieves of the parents won’t go with weeping.
When parents leave children on their own, everything in the world around them opens for them as new experience to be learned, to be gained, and to be acquired in stupid ways. Nothing in the world is sacred to them.
We live in a country with a Police Force that simply do not understand the criminal liability of minors. Why the police arrested and detained the child-killer for almost a month in spite of the clear provisions of our criminal statute beats me.
In his 1990 novel,”Our children are coming”, the respected writer and traditional ruler of Ndike Kingdom, His Royal Highness Chukwuemeka Ike, highlights some of the problems children are confronted with in our country today. He blames the state, parents, teachers and the society-at- large for turning children (and youths) into strangers among us.
‘Our children are coming’ interrogates our society and helps us to understand the world that sears and disrupts lives and the playful imagination of children forced to live the realities of the imperfect world of imperfect adults.
One of such imperfect adults is a certain Pastor Taiwo Francis of the Key of Joy Parish of the Celestial Church of Christ, Ajibawo, Ogun state, who chained his nine years old son, Korede, to a log for two weeks before he was rescued by security operatives.
Taiwo Francis claimed he served the child the severe punishment of being leashed like a dog to its manger without food for stealing a pot of soup.
Ludicrous as the claim of the bestial father sounds, this incident, like other unreported incidents, highlights some of the nonsense that goes on in many homes.
There is so much wealth in our country, yet so much is stolen by our thieving politicians, so much is amassed and hidden beyond the reaches of our searchlights. While a small percent of our population lives with the embarrassment of their stolen riches, the poor of our country are condemned to a life of emptiness and to a life without food, without shelter, without clothing and without pride.
There is no pain sharper than that of hunger. There is no house where hunger puts its roots down like the house of hunger.
Was Taiwo Francis that hungry for the pain of losing a pot of soup to blight his ability to think and understand his condition in a logical way? Couldn’t he have pulled himself together as the roots of hunger pressed against his senses?
That the poor are condemned to their fate does not in any excuse the action of Taiwo Francis. As a “Man of God”, he should have known that the psalmist teaches that
“children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb, a reward. Like the arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them. He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate”.
Or this Christian teaching: “Now they were bringing infants to him that he might touch them. And when the disciples saw it, they rebuked him. But Jesus called them to him, saying: “Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it”.
Taiwo forgot all of this when he wrapped a chain around the neck of poor Korede, turned the key -it’s an irony that this parish is named, “The Key of Joy”- to the padlock that held the loose ends of the chain to the log.
Our children are our hope, they are our future- we owe them tenderness, love
and care- they are the warriors of tomorrow our country can ill afford to treat lightly.
As the Igbo saying goes, “E GBUO DIKE N’OGU UNO, E RUO N’OGU”- kill a warrior during skirmishes at home and you will remember him when fighting enemies”.