SLUM-DWELLING IN MINNA

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·         I have this big empathy thing in me and, to be honest, I am getting exasperated that abject and preventable poverty is all around me in my fortieth year of residence here in Minna, the capital of Niger State. My father, a serving soldiering and honest Nigerian, was transferred out of the safe cocoon of the army barracks at Warri where mom had great head-start and a big relative advantage in the consumer-goods-grocery trade to the checquered army barracks of Minna in 1983 and the family joined him in September 1984. Minna has not changed much in 40 years but the town counts moneyed folks as its citizens in a higher proportion to nearly all the southern half of Nigeria’s capital towns except perhaps Lagos.

But Minna is punctuated here and there by sprawling slums and disappearing vegetation that makes you wonder, “What’s going on?” The rich aren’t keen on getting out of the peripherals of slum-dwellings to create upmarket segments-of-town because that would mean “abandoning” the “poor and wretched brothers” who must come to “congregational prayers.”

There is this injunction about romaticising poverty and not doing a farthing to eliminate poverty for, “What is religion if there is no poverty?” The greater ambience of town has been eroded of saplings and germane shrubs and treelets because religion prescribes that the man who knows “business” would cut down trees to be sold for faggots. After all, didn’t “blessing” come from a barren, treeless clime? Why bother about sustainable development when you can do weaponised migration and out-birth the “cursed souls?” Ouch, I just got me migraine.

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·         Sunday Adole Jonah,

·         Department of Physics, Federal University of Technology, Minna, Niger State