Taking Shit
In Nigeria, the first ideological training you receive, from birth, is on patience and looking away. And in the process you equally learn to be subservient; to government, to service providers, to religious daddies, to your elders and people who have more money than you. It is on this basis that you grow up and become who you are: A master in apathetic disposition.
It is why when people who are supposed to render you flawless services give you shit services you thank God. Yes, because at least you got something when others got nothing. The transport company gives you crappy seat for a fifteen-hour trip and tells you “May God let us get there safely” you smile and take the bus ticket, anyways, mind you, you are paying through your nose for the ticket.
The bank you keep your money with has deducted your money several times. Yesterday, you had one thousand in your account. This morning you woke up to a fifty naira debit alert for a transaction they did not provide details of. You have #950 now. God help you, the bank won’t open until Wednesday. You are stranded. But you hope and are patient that God has plans for you and your finance.
Everything Good Will Come.
This is how you carry on with life. Things that a single email or phone call or excuse me, please, I can’t take this can change, you let it slide. Why, because being a good Nigerian citizen means when you are pushed to the wall you break down the wall and move on with your life.
IBEDC has been supplying my area 7-hours of light; sometimes 5. My area people said it is okay, they are trying. I pay around three thousand naira per month for light from my very slim allowances. The few times I skip the bill their men come at me baying for blood, cutting me off the grid and sprinkling saliva on the expensive A87s that one great guy got me. I bring out my calculator and start putting things in context for these scumbags: 16 hours out of 24 is a long time to not have light. They snicker and say come and tell that to our oga in our office. My neighbours come out and start to beg on my behalf. So, they reply, this boy is rude, let him beg us himself. Oya, come and beg them, apologise, say you are sorry, my older neighbour drags me forwards.
I am not a boy again. I like to tell people that. Because I received this full Nigerian training of patience and false humility from birth I always refrain from saying my age. Instead, I tell them, does my beard look so raw as that of that sixteen-year-old in your compound?
Everyone in this country is trying to rip you off of something. The people you are suffering together with see you and say, boy, you’re looking so fresh, share this money with us. You respond that you are equally managing with them, they say no, that you are better of, after all, you are not married, so no expenses. A battle of who suffer pass begins.
The Okadaman says, ah, you no did not behave like a man at all. You behaved like a woman. It is because he called a fare and I saw the bullshit in it and I said to him, no, no, no, no, I can’t pay this much, especially when I’m not sitting alone. Because of this, he is trying to blackmail me emotionally. I tell him I don’t care because, see, whether you think that I act like a woman or not, it does not bother me, see, in the end I am human. And he begins to tell me again that I look at him one kind because he is riding okada, that he graduated and served in the NYSC and he did N-Power.
We are all sick in this country. We just do not know yet. Or we know, but that patience and un-looking we have learnt has us thinking everything is all right.
Hegemony theory. If I had told my lecturer then that hegemony theory was our parents giving us giant mounds of eba with enough ewedu, little stew and no meat, only God knows what will become of me today. Our parents already prepared us for an adult life of incompleteness and quarter chances. Najeeb tweeted one day that N-Power is for us, quotidian people, CBN and DPR and all those cash cows are for their children.
Complaining would not change anything. Well, maybe not. But if you shout at the top of your voices, like in 2012, everyone would hear you. One of my associates say during the era of “your hero” you were picking money on the floor. He is smart. Because during the era of his own Baba we hardly find a piece of paper on the floor. We cannot keep pretending that everything is all right when obviously they are not.
In the African literary circles, the cool is to tell stories that are gentrifying and utopic in nature; stories that challenges the Conrad tales and perceptions of white people about Africa. In other words, they call that thing poverty porn. What we write are often shaped by our experiences. On Kpakungu Expressway, some boys are bearing plastic plates tied with rope around their neck as they wait for ignorant travellers to drop their food so they can in turn pick it up and run away with it.
Complaining means that you are viewed differently. You are not one of us again. You have become one of them. Whatever happens to you, you are on your own. The people they say you are part of, they look at you and say, no, he is not part of us. He has never been part of us. It is like the story of a bat: The bat thinks itself a bird, but when birds do meeting, they ignore the bat, they say because he has wings does not mean he is bird: Then he joins up with the rats, those ones too say, Kai, he is not us, have you ever seen any of our specie that flies? The bat, sad, walks or rather flies away with its head up-side-down, the clarity of its being neither-here, nor-there bearing upon him like a madman’s load.
#Nigeria #stories #everydaypeople #moment #humility #Africa #worries #services
