COPIED:
The other side of Lockdown in Nigeria.
...You live in a multi-bedroom home with over one hundred meters square of walled compound around you. Your front door opens into a large living room that has everything in the world to make you never want to leave home.
A massive television set equipped with satellite units that give you access to hundreds of channels of leisure and entertainment, a powerful home theatre you hardly even see...
Your kitchen is fitted with huge freezers and fridges all stocked with more than six months supply of food and drinks of various kinds. Plus you have access to mobile delivery outfits to deliver other delicacies to you within minutes.
So, why wouldn't you have the confidence, the audacity and the impudence to go and sit in a radio station and vehemently object to the lifting of the lockdown?
Why would you not have the temerity to call me recalcitrant and a hard-eared decadent hooligan because I ventured out of the lockdown once or twice?
Do you know what home is to me? Do you have the slightest idea how it feels to stay locked up within those four bare walls of space smaller than a fifth of your car garage? With a single window that opens over a putrid and stagnant neighbourhood drain?
How do I survive an indefinite lockdown if I do not wake up at dawn and get off that threadbare raffia mat, the only furniture in the mosquito-infested furnace of a room and rush to push my truck so I can make something to prop up my mortal remains?
If your call for another lockdown succeeds, you would have to count me out. I am not under any obligation to die of starvation and misery just so you can continue living in your selfish and wanton luxury. That virus you dread so much is nothing to me compared to the death I go through every day just to go on living. Those policemen and soldiers you unleashed would not do half the harm you have already done with your decades of segregation and misrule.
So if you want me to save your life by wearing masks and using sanitizers and washing my hands and staying 'home' and keeping to all those other so-called protocols of yours then you must in turn save mine by standing down on your abject and inhuman refusal to realise that I also have the rights to some comfort and joy. You must be prepared to hear and acknowledge my groaning and my moaning when you step on my scalp with the soles of your hard-heeled shoes. And you must recognize the fact that the stench of your own "shit", as unpleasant as it smells to you, smells far worse when you flush it down into my neighborhood.
Don't just go and sit in those media houses and throw your weight about ordering for a re-imposition of the lockdown and think it's going to be as simple as that. Not this time, not with this situation that gives me a strong stake in the matter.
And remember that I really have nothing to lose, unlike you. So do a very sober introspection and start doing what you have to do to make me see the need to want to live and let you live.
Unless you'd rather we died together."
No comments:
Post a Comment