A COUNTRY BURNT BEYOND RECOGNITION
Nigeria is in labour at the moment. What she is heavy with is anyone’s guess, but the contractions are mounting just as the complications are rising.
According to the police, a fire outbreak at a bar and lounge along Baale Road, Olodi Apapa, Lagos State claimed the lives of four hotel staff who were burnt beyond recognition.
According to the police, the distress call came in on the morning of 13th October 2024. However, when the police responded, they were greeted by the charred remains of four of the hotel staff.
The deaths that make waves in Nigeria are of the famous and fortunate. Usually, just like at birth, those who constitute the great unwashed die with a whimper — nameless, numberless and loveless, with anonymity etched into the epitaph of their time on earth. There is no doubt that for families and friends of the deceased hotel workers this is a tragedy beyond measure. To go in this manner is surely one of life’s more callous acts.
Their painful deaths also highlight the irony of life in Nigeria. People go to look for what to eat and find death instead with danger lurking everywhere. People leave their loved ones in the morning, say goodbyes, while trying desperately to lock out the thoughts that it could be for the last time. And it typically is.
In an unsafe, unsalutary country desperately clinging on to the frayed fringes of its fragile civilization, death is never far away, even for those who think that the fact that they have not lived long enough can elide their proximity to death.
In 2018, in a moment that will go down as a jarring historical mistake, former President Muhammadu Buhari described Nigerian youths as lazy. It was anything but the truth. The truth was rather that the trope about lazy Nigerian youths was the latest straw grasped by a president swamped by the epic struggles of his administration to keep any of his outlandish promises to Nigerians.
Unemployment remains rife in Nigeria. Families have been known to sell of their ancestral lands to send their kids to school with the hope that they will find gainful employment, only to be confronted by the spectre of unemployment.
It is unemployment that is driving many young Nigerians to the precipice, and into the death traps of predators and their hellholes.
In acts of daring desperation, many young Nigerians are being forced to take up jobs that offer zero security and safety, only holding up the fig leaves of meager salaries devalued by soaring inflation. These they do because they have no choice.
Because they can sense their desperation and are acutely aware of the paucity of their options, many slave-drivers, posing as employers, are quick to set up sweat shops, and even quicker to advertise openings. What the desperate jobseekers don’t immediately see are the open highways to hell.
In a country where the law protects only the rich, reserving its strongest reassurances for when the rich eat the poor, there are many who find themselves exposed as they dare to refuse to starve. Many of them find slow and painful deaths.
Nigeria cannot aspire to be a developed country until it begins to take issues of public safety seriously. How many public buildings are fitted with safety equipment like fire extinguishers? How many of these private employers are forced to take measures to preclude occupational hazards for those who work for them? How strong is the enforcement of occupational safety laws in Nigeria? The answers to these questions are out in the open.
Nigeria is venturing into an arena where its civilization is being contested by the crude forces of dysfunction, dereliction and despair.
The country survived a brutal internecine civil war that starved millions of children to death between 1967 and 1970, but it is doubtful how much longer it can survive this war that is breaking out on many levels.
Kene Obiezu,
=keneobiezu@gmail.com
