By Abdul Mahmud
A few years ago, my friends, Uche Onyeagucha, Kingsley Ogundu Chinda, Ibrahim Kashim and I sat at the poolside at a friend’s home where we discussed the problems with our country.
It was a sobering moment for us, having just returned to relax our ageing limbs after the pro-oil subsidy marches, occupy Nigeria, suddenly ended without a resolution of the very problem of elite consumption which was and is still at the heart of the problems with our country.
We bemoaned the fate of the labour movement that had so shamelessly sold itself and our people out to our rapacious elites. Uche zeroed in on that young lady, I think her name is Zeenarh, (please, Malik Shabbazz Abdulmalik remind me), who refused to quit the site of our daily marches in Abuja long after protesters and marchers had gone home to roost with their anguish and agonies.
It took Uche and I three hours one late night to convince her to return home. Of course, we were pained by the betrayal of our friends in the labour movement, but more pained that being in our mid-forties we had become pacifiers… considering the fires that belted from our hearts as student leaders in the late 1980’s and 1990’s.
We were pained beyond our individual belief…
During our conversation I provided what I thought was some comfort, an understanding of our condition, and why the sudden break-up of the marches would invariably signal certain ferments that would birth new marches. I explained, drawing from Hardin, how the tragedy of our commons would produce its own grief, that kind of grief that probes at our own individual rationality, resolves the questions that invariably follow every ambiguous loss: why me? How can I find closure to my loss?
I cannot recall who in particular asked why I always theorize very simple things, small happenstances; but I recognized instantly that my reference to Hardin’s tragedy of the commons had posed another problem, one of the problems with our country, really. Our problem isn’t theory; but it is our understanding of theory and how we neglect to apply it to explain reality that is the problem. I explained to my friends that Hardin’s conceptualization of the tragedy of the commons is about the despoliation of common resources in a manner that it does not allow for the regeneration and or reproduction of those resources.
The tragedy of the commons is simply about the conflictual competition of irrationalities. I broke it down in simple term. I ask them to think about our country as a “pot of Afang soup” and how we sit around the pot to scoop what we conceive as our share. Two things invariably happen when we sit around the pot and scoop our shares. One, whoever has the biggest spoon scoops the biggest share. Two, without the pot being replenished with broths, the size of the soup will decrease, to the extent that we won’t have more Afang to scoop.
In light of the revelation made by the Minister of State for Petroleum, I invite you my reader to think of the NNPC as the commons and imagine how the Minister’s revelation highlights the tragedy we are confronted with, today: that in one year and in an era where obsequious fellas called for the suspension of the constitution and the procurement law just to further ease the way dubious contracts are awarded, nine trillion naira was stolen through dubious and opaque contracts in the NNPC. Think about other commons that have not been uncovered.
But there is a sad dimension to the Minister’s revelation that is worrying that many folks on these streets have not discerned or have not espoused to provide clarity to the problems with our country. Here, I refer to the enclosure of the commons. If you appreciate the NNPC as the commons, you will appreciate how it has been enclosed in such a manner that those who are players within it have become outliers, outsiders within, bystanders like the Minister, who cannot glimpse what goes on inside the NNPC, who can only make sense of where they stand outside of it or outside within.
Enclosure of the commons is simply the personalization of the common heritage in our case!
How do we find closure to the grief that almost always attends enclosure? I have a simple way of finding closure and it is by poking laughter at our condition, it is by returning to the dreamland to dream up what life can become in reality, and it is by chatting up the comical in a satirical way. When I wrote about Rolls Royce yesterday, I merely tried to highlight our collective helplessness and to center the depravity of those who have turned our country into an asylum.
Make fun, make light of our condition, is what my friend, Richard Akinnola II, and his gang of friends – attendees of the MO FE TO CHURCH – does daily on Facebook. If he succeeds at what he does so well with his friends, it is because he realizes that somehow somehow we must find a closure to the nonsense going on in our country.
Let me return to sleep and find Joseph, perhaps he will teach me the secret of dreaming and turning dreams to reality.
Make fun. Make light. Just laugh at yourself.
You nor dey crase.
Una do’oh!
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