Burning issues: Hunger in the land – Part 3

The subject of hunger cannot but enter the lens of this column today – for hunger is a burning issue and subject that is part of Nigeria’s cultural studies currently that experts in the field and discipline cannot but give attention to at this point in time. Indeed, at this point of our democratic dispensation we must be committed to examining all that we possibly can examine about the unusual hunger that is now part of our new culture.

Clearly, if culture is how we respectively live our everyday lives, then it is worth studying or focusing on. How we are surviving in this democracy that has no respect or sympathy for our stomachs is really worth examining and interrogating from the perspective of culture. Culture is how we live and survive. What do we eat to live? What do we eat to survive? What do we feed on to live in harmony with one another?

To ask the last question in another way: How can we be happy if and when we don’t eat or feed well? Or if and when we don’t have the wherewithal to eat, feed and live well and happily, how can we do our duties rightly and patriotically for your country my country our country? These are pertinently essential and essentially pertinent questions within the domain of cultural studies.

To get answers that we may deem accurate to these questions, we may need to think of the relations between food, or, more accurately, between hunger and power. Michel Foucault (1926-1984), the French historian of ideas and philosopher, literary critic, and political activist and teacher who has been acknowledged generally as the foremost scholar to have done the most substantially significant and the most significantly substantial work on the relations between power and culture, would weep for your country my country our country were he to rise from his grave today and visit this land where un-democratic hunger whips us all with the whip of whips. Oh! How power reigns and rules with the whip of power! Oh! How the whip of power has unleashed hunger on the land, this land! Oh! How the whip of hunger manufactured by fellows who are mis-appliers of power and its weapons have un-dignified us all with huge hunger!

I am writing this with painful pain, and tearful tears. I am writing this in a state of joyless joylessness. I am writing this in a state of mournful mournfulness. I am writing this in December – in December-less December, in December of December-ful hunger – created by peculiar political conditions in a country, in a land, called Nigeria where stampedes for food kill, kill, kill and kill, kill, kill the people, boys and girls, men and women, old and un-old, every now and then.

But this December has been a December to be ever remembered for its stampedes of deathful deaths in Ibadan, Abuja, Okija, and elsewhere hurrying nigh. Oh December of Christmas-less Christmas! Deaths, deaths, deaths and deaths, deaths, deaths all in your name and in your season of hunger-ful hunger unknown before now! And a father’s groan: “What do we eat now? My boy is saved. But what will we eat now?” A mother wailed: “Five thousand, five thousand naira line and queue, a mere five thousand, and my girl is dead! My daughter is dead! Killed by five thousand.”

Anyone or any reader who is not profoundly affected by these wailings (and other hunger-induced debris in the land) must have buried in his being the heart of stone regulated by the impure impurity of wickedness. And anyone, any reader, who rejects this view shall invite us to recognise in his or her being the apparently related relations between their muddied and muddled hearts and those of the hypocrites in political power. We will not be surprised if fake words, fake outpourings of sympathy, from our people in political power will not stage an assault on the true feelings of all of us who are hungry, but are still lucky to be alive because we were fortunate to miss the rice, naira and vegetable oil stampedes. From now till heaven knows when the fantastical outpourings of sympathy and sundry sentiments will enter the spaces of our electronic and non-electronic media.

The politics of tragic lies and deceits will invade our unwilling consciousness officially through the popular press. Of course, such active social and political lies would not be unnecessary in the absence of hunger and economic hardship in the land. If food was cheap, if our naira was worth its name and real value, if the price of a litre of fuel was not excessively excessive, the reality of our new normal, or our new normalisation of hardship that would require us to perish before we would live to survive and survive to live, would be a non-reality.

Let me at this point say openly that akara is part of my daily or almost daily fabulous menu. I cherish it every morning and evening. But for quite some-time now this delicacy of mine has not entered my mouth. The recklessly high cost of beans used for its production now debars it from my qualitative menu. In Lagos, Benin, Sapele and Warri which I ransacked at different times in my quest to know precisely how akara producers-cum-sellers sell similar fried moulds of akara, I discovered that the prices for the moulds hover/hovered between one hundred and two hundred for small or average moulds.

Above average and king size moulds hover/hovered between five hundred and one thousand naira. Once upon a time in the not too distant past I could not consume five hundred naira worth of akara at a go. But this is not the case any longer. In Lagos or Benin or Sapele or Warri, to send the right message to my stomach, I need nothing less than four thousand naira worth of akara. I am not a glutton. I am not a heavy eater.

The reality, however, is that eating eight thousand naira worth of akara alone every morning and every evening is injuring my pocket in a fantastically painful manner. If I am complaining as I hereby do, you can imagine how bleakly bleak the situation of our less fortunate compatriots is or can be. They cannot readily eat akara any longer! If you doubt me, go do your own research today, and report your findings tomorrow or next tomorrow.

Nigerians are not living. Nigerians are dying and will continue to die of hunger. Hardly is anyone in the lower ring of our society eating a decent meal. Hardly is anyone in the class of the down-trodden eating a meal of quality, that is, even if they ever have anything to eat every blessed day. Let no one be deceived or be carried away by the utopian economic fantasies of our politicians in power.

On this score I have a number of offerings to render and tender. But I will not go beyond here. Yet I should like to advise, unsolicited, the President and his presidencynologists thus: In the New Year they should compel themselves to enact policies that must provoke the right conversation that must enable even their critics to explore the dialectic of like and dislike, of “attraction and rejection,” in the endeavour to halt and end our current fatalism.

President Ahmed Tinubu, the only PAT in the land must make this his burning issue in the New Year. It is time for him to find time to read and digest Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations from the very beginning to the very end. Doing so shall enervate our President to stop our dystopia.

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.