We want war against poverty

I have just read in this newspaper and other ones that the Buhari regime wants to relaunch his WAI (War Against Indiscipline) Brigade (see, for instance, page 5 of Nigerian Tribune of Tuesday, 09 August, 2016). This WAI Brigade was one of the high achievements of his seventeen months’ reign as a military Head of State and despot of our country in the early 1980s, precisely from 1983/84 to when the gap-toothed General usurped him. If his WAI Brigade was relevant then, it certainly is curiously an un-wanted diversion of our curiously current times.

As bad and as disorderly as our current times are, I will not stick out my tongue and say that ours is a Republic of Indiscipline. What I will say and say again and again is that we are presently living, as we have never lived, in a Republic of Poverty. Simply put, I am saying that this Buhari regime has locked and caged us in a Republic of Poverty. And whatever acts of indiscipline we witness everywhere about us in the land today we must blame on the poverty this regime has unleashed on the land. Thus the war we need, the war we want, the War Brigade we want is the War Against Poverty (WAP) Brigade. All of us must fight this war – beginning from the presidency. In fact, the president must lead this war beginning with his establishing and launching of a war against poverty brigade. But I am merely building castles in Spain. Phew!

All our current damning disgrace derives from poverty. If you have not given thought to the subject, if you are not giving thought to the subject, kindly try to do so now as I have done and as I am still doing. Poverty is the greatest disease, the greatest ailment in our world, in our country. Clearly, it is the greatest, the worst persistent illness to man – in fact, it has ever been. While other climes have made – and are making – concerted efforts to save themselves from poverty, ours is plunging us day by day into the pit and pit of grinding poverty. Indeed, the Republic of Healthy Change we envisaged through this president’s pre-election promise has turned out to be a Republic of Poverty. I may be repeating myself, but you must see and accept my repetition as a repetition intended to be an effluent of the poverty that President Buhari has brought us through his change effluvium. Before his effluvium crushes and sinks us further we must equip ourselves with efflorescence that will stand us in good stead.

You must take what I am saying seriously. You see, our parliamentarians understand what is at stake. It is for this reason that they, primarily at least, are doing all the seemingly dirty things that they are doing in parliament. Those of them who only yesterday were church rats and roaches don’t ever want to remember their yesterday. Their present circumstances of greed and budget-padding must be sustained and be improved upon day by day. They must never know poverty again. And their children and the children of their children must never ever know poverty. Never! They must defend and keep this sacred vow till earth changes its colour, till this planet is no more this planet, till Nigeria becomes Nigeria in a different planet and location.

So we must never blame our thieving parliamentarians and presidencynologists who are engaging their own war against poverty the best way they can. They are fulfilling their own role in history, in our history of resistance against poverty that they must subdue totally and eternally according to their gospel of stomach-padding. This is why one of them has just informed us that budget-padding is not an offence, is not corruption. Maybe I should agree with him and say that budget-padding is a new brand of stomach-infrastructure.

But we know too well that this kind of stomach-padding that has been in existence in all the branches of our governments perhaps before this regime came into being has more than consigned the average – or more than average – Nigerian to the depth of wretchedness that has mocked his wretched flesh. We must not allow this to be or to continue. We must not be too poor to resist the knaves and scoundrels who are too undisciplined to resist their kleptomaniac throats, eyes, ears, tongues, bellies and skins. What do you think?

Of course, we must admit that the kind of poverty currently in the land can induce one to do many unimaginable things – like selling one’s child and relation in order to live or survive or to kill anyone to do rituals for evil money or whatever – but we must brace up to conquer it and its master(s).  All of us, including pensioners that have been devastated by poverty, all of us including all jobless persons who are too devastated by poverty to do this or that, all of us regardless of  our current status, all of us who have been driven to the extremities of the current condition must assert ourselves against crushing Buharism.  Be deceived no more.

In fact, it is time to offer our resistance against further deceptions and their acts. I see that we are on the threshold of another Republic. Indeed, may we in the full light of day enjoy the virtues of change in a Republic of Real Change that drives from our country the vile cruelty of poverty and its harms and crushing pains and inhuman excesses. And we all know the champion(s) of the very cruelty currently plaguing our land. We must live to redeem ourselves and alter our cruel circumstances. We need a new narrative of retrieval.