Nigeria: The absence of commonsense

Long or short distance, life is an emotional roller-coaster journey characterised by doom or boom. Bólèkájà, a Yoruba word for mammy waggon, depicts the rough and tumble nature of road travel in the early days of Nigeria. Translated literally, Bólèkájà means ‘come down and fight’. Bólèkájà is an analogy for life’s combativeness.

Bólèkájà is the old Bedford vehicle built on a lorry chassis, having a wooden cargo area used in transporting people together with animals and farm produce in Nigeria of the 50s, 60s, and early 70s. Why not? Nerves will easily be frayed in dingy lorries where humans, animals, and farm produce contend for air and space with the sun blazing overhead.

When an amateur grandstands in the realm of maestros, the Yoruba say, ‘wón ti kó eran m’érò.’ When passengers and animals are lumped together with farm produce in the same rickety Bólèkájà, the proverb, ‘Èlédè á d’Óyò, áriwo è lá á pò,’ comes to mind—the pig will get to Oyo, but with so much grunting.

Remember the Lagos transportation bus called Mólùé? The Mólùé is the Fela Anikulapo caricatured 44-sitting-99-standing transportation contraption in which you can get love potions to keep your husband or wife or concubines; buy medicines to cure any kind of ailment, including HIV/AIDS; and also buy juju, yes juju, to kill your family’s witches and wizards.

By its sitting arrangement and glass window design, the all-iron Mólùé is an improvement on the wooden Bólèkájà. In the Bólèkájà, passengers sit face-to-face on long wooden benches, and they can’t, in most cases, see their feet as farm produce, animals, and other goods contend for space in the leg area.

If a passenger is alighting at the next bus stop, for instance, and the conductor wants to get out the passenger’s goods, he would need to get outside the lorry first and then identify the passenger’s goods through the opening in the wooden cabin, pulling passengers’ legs out of the way to reach the goods or animals, asking in the process, ‘Ta n lese?’, meaning, ‘Whose leg is this?’. The passenger, who sits above the goods underneath the bench, would, good-naturedly, be saddled with the responsibility of helping to bring out the goods and pass them to the conductor or owner.

But the Bólèkájà is much safer than the current One-Chance bus chauffeured by the Nigerian government. If you don’t know, a One-Chance bus is a typical bus full of robbers who pretend to be passengers, luring unsuspecting passengers. After picking up enough passengers along the way, the robber-passengers bring out guns to rob innocent passengers, occasionally killing some in the process.

One-Chance Bus defines Nigeria’s transactional electoral process, where politicians promise heaven on earth only to loot the treasury after being elected. With socio-economic conditions worsening by the day, teeming Nigerian youth, whom today’s atóókú máku, amònà orún málo Methuselah leaders mockingly call leaders of tomorrow, are left to embark on Japa, Yahoo, ritualism, and prostitution routes.

Dear reader, I’m not pulling your leg; I’m no Bólèkájà conductor. Neither am I pulling punches; PUNCH veterans don’t pull punches. A matter that affects the lives of millions of Nigerian children is no laughing matter. Federal and state governments should declare an emergency on the scourge of children beggars, a long-standing national calamity, most rampant in the North, where children, from the age of two upwards, line up the streets, clutching deformed aluminium bowls to solicit alms daily. Though they have parents, children beggars are left to wander off as soon as their eyes open after birth, like children of snakes, slithering through life with forked tongues and poisoned teeth.

If the nation doesn’t collectively fight the scourge of child beggars by creating education and employment opportunities now, Nigerian society will soon buckle at the knees and beg today’s children, beggars, tomorrow. Made in the North, terrorism will soon be a nationwide staple.

Unlike the Bólèkájà of the early days, Nigeria’s One-Chance democrazy, since 1999 to date, has given priority to goats over passengers. Remember, the Muhammadu Buhari regime proudly prioritised cow life over human life. The Bola Tinubu government is flailing in Nigeria’s economic ocean like an unskilled swimmer battling a rising tide. The clock ticks. The vulture waits.

As I watched a viral video of Kano children lining the streets in their frightening thousands, happily begging for alms, I saw the arms and ammunition that will shoot at Nigerian soldiers on the battlefields soon, detonating bombs, throwing grenades, shooting down military aircraft, and rending lives and property asunder.

If the billions of naira budgeted for security annually at state and federal levels were yielding results, Lakukulala, the name of the new terror gang currently troubling the North-West, wouldn’t have surfaced. Or, is the new terror group’s name not Lakukulala? Oh, yeah, I remember! The name is Lakarawas. This one comes with the plural’s’. Maybe because it’s a combination of terrorists from neighbouring African countries of Niger and Mali. I don’t speak Hausa, please.

The life of a newspaper columnist is not enviable. Abi, what’s enviable in looking ‘at’reported’ events with a view to deconstructing them? It’s like flogging awake a dead horse, like I’m trying to reawaken the dead horse of street begging—as if our deaf and dumb governments don’t know it exists. That’s the fate of the columnist.

The life of a journalist is a struggle. You must meet your deadline; you cannot turn an empty page over to your editor. No journalist ever did that. I won’t be the first. As I ran into the video of Kano children beggars, so did I run into this gripping story of parenting and governance in the faraway USA—all in the course of researching materials for this article.

Here’s the story as told by the New York Post, an American tabloid.

A Georgia mother of four arrested in front of her children after allowing her 10-year-old son to walk home alone last month isn’t going away quietly—and is using her newfound profile to make the case for free-range parents and their kids everywhere.

Brittany Patterson, 41, was taken into custody and slapped with child endangerment-related charges by the Fannin County Sheriff’s Department on Oct. 30. She’s been ruthlessly fighting back ever since, including refusing to accept a plea deal.

Patterson appeared on “Fox & Friends Weekend” with her lawyer to share her harrowing experience—and her next steps in her crusade for free-range parenting.

“It’s definitely been a little traumatizing. My kids have never seen anything like that or been exposed to anything like that, so really their first encounter with police or law enforcement is to see them taking their mother out of their home in handcuffs, which I think was pretty traumatising,” Patterson said.

Patterson’s son Soren, who was 10 years old at the time, had ventured less than a mile away into town a day before Halloween. He did not ask his mother’s permission, but Patterson said she probably would’ve allowed him to go if he had.

Sheriff’s deputies spotted Soren wandering through town close to the North Carolina border and called Patterson to let her know where he was. At the time, Patterson was tied up at the doctor’s office with one of her other sons.

Deputies drove Soren home and returned later that day and arrested Patterson in front of her family.

Law enforcement officials have since suggested that they will drop the charges against Patterson if she agrees to put a GPS tracker on her son’s phone so she can track him. This has not been officially written or verbally offered, Patterson told the talk show, only vaguely hinted at.

“The irony here too is that the next day was Halloween, where kids walk often without their parents door-to-door in the dark and knock on the doors of strangers, and yet [Soren] was in the middle of the day just walking down the street, not a tenth of a mile away,” her lawyer David DeLugas said.

Her arrest sparked a wider conversation about the government’s control over parenting and what exactly a free-range household can look like without authorities stepping in.

The reality is, as parents, we should have that autonomy, whether we want to wrap our kids in bubble wrap or whether we want to give our kids a little more freedom and autonomy,” Patterson said.

 “It should be our decision as parents, and not the decision of some government authority who doesn’t even know our kids or know our family.”

One of the two countries exemplified above has leaders in power; the other has dealers in power.